Disqus - Latest Comments for scotty

Re: Europe Gets ASUS R50a UMPC

scotty — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:04:19 -0000

Well. There's always a product for those in the "exclusive club", who are willing to pay ridiculous price for it. Like, you have Beemers and you have Toyota. Both have 4 wheels and can seat 5, and can take you from A to B in about the same time (limited by traffic usually)...

Re: Dell Unveils Inspiron Mini 12

scotty — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:19:16 -0000

Nice. Except for $500-$600 USD, it would be more than $1,000+ AUD when it arrives here later this year, which far exceeds the typical price range of a netbook...

Re: Internet Explorer Memory usage

scotty — Tue, 03 May 2005 09:18:34 -0000

Sometimes having a choice to have the new window running in the same or different processes is actually a "good thing".

If you click on the Internet Explorer icon, it actually launches a new instance. Moreover, each IE instance manages its own pool of session cookies, which is *extremely* useful in web application development, where you might want to log into the same app as different users as the same time to test interactivity. You can't easily do that with Firefox, as all windows share the same cookie jar. But with IE, as it gives you this option to create two windows as different instances with differnet cookie jar, that creates a whole lot of possibilities.

And of course, if you want to preserve memory, Ctrl-N will do.

Re: What is this building?

scotty — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:17:48 -0000

That will be Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

It's nice to have a Hong Kong wife who identified that for me :) However, she cannot seem to find where she used to live from the crowded city.

Re: drive.com.au blog

scotty — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:59:39 -0000

Oh. Was I the first one who subscribed Drive.com.au blog on Bloglines? :)

Well done Glenn! We need a good Australian specific auto blog...

Re: Agile and SQL links

scotty — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 17:56:47 -0000

It is much easier to rename a column when all you got is one production site, a testing site and a few development sites. In our case, changing a column would require

- Change a column in the table definition file
- Write an upgrade script and test it against trunk + 2 branches
- Rebuild the 2 release branches
- Test the new builds
- Get permission from clients who need the change about upgrading
- Push out the change across 60+ servers in the evenings
- Send the patches + upgrade instructions to clients who are not hosted with us
- Wait for the support calls in the morning when clients found some incompatibility :)

Around a week of work, and we are already trying to be as agile as possible :(

Moreover, I found when the development only involves micro-iterations, people are less likely to work on re-factoring and re-architecturing the code, which are usually necessary when you are looking at 5+ years into the project...

Re: “I am heavy weapons guy” - Bring on Team Fortress 2!

scotty — Sat, 19 May 2007 05:59:30 -0000

Oh man. I spent way too many hours with the original Team Fortress (the extension pack of Quake World) when I was studying at uni. Then quite a while ago (7+ years?) there were rumours of Team Fortress 2 with a demo video of one guy feeding the machine gun, but that was never released.

Great to see a come back. Hopefully this time it is for real.

Re: Journey to Become Pro Blogger

scotty — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 21:18:17 -0000

LCF - I applause you for your decision to take the leap.

I've been blogging for more than 4 years now, and am also attracted by the aspect of "working at home". Not game enough to turn pro yet, as I cannot risk stability in my current circumstances. I might give a go if I somehow get retrenched from my day job though :)

All the best.

Re: Apple Switch Wannabe

scotty — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 08:50:38 -0000

mypapit,

Mac OS X comes with the Mac you buy, so it is effectively part of the deal. And you do not need to buy costly commercial software afterwards. It runs many xBSD and Linux apps, console or X11. It is just a matter of recompile - check out Fink, Darwinport or Gentoo for Mac. There are also lots of open source Cocoa/Carbon apps. I bought my iBook 2 1/2 years ago, and I still have not had a need to spend more money on commercial software.

Re: 100 Gmail Invites

scotty — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 09:26:22 -0000

Damn. I don't need any more Gmail invites. I think I need more friends that I can invite :)

Re: LinIChen Taiwan Celebrity Blog

scotty — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 10:01:22 -0000

部落格 is the Taiwanese translation of "blog", and it sounds very "community-like". Like many other terminologies, it is again inconsistent with the mainland Chinese translation 博客 or 網志... I won't say which one is "better", as I am a Taiwanese myself so the opinion would be very much biased :)

And about celebrity's blogs -- as though there's not enough paparazzi in Taiwan! What you write today will be in tomorrow's gossip news column. If I am a celebrity in Taiwan, and want to have some kind of private life, I won't touch "blog" with a ten foot pole.

Re: Yahoo! Cheap Domain Name Registration, Again

scotty — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 01:39:55 -0000

Unfortunately you will find disgruntled stories on *every* domain registrar out there, because (1) human makes mistakes (2) computers make more mistakes (3) satisfied customers are the loudest.

I only have one domain on Yahoo/Melbourne IT, but so far I am pretty happy about it.

Re: Malaysia to Switch to Bio-Diesel

scotty — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 02:47:00 -0000

In fact, Diesel produces 30% more power than normal fuel.

It is more like 30% of "torque" (measured by Nm) than "power" (measured by kilowatts) for diesel engines, and that is exactly the reason diesel engines are good for towing and heavily loaded vehicles.

Diesel engines are actually very efficient -- looking at all those turbo diesel European cars. Torque kicks in at very low RPM so they are easy to drive, and can be very economical for highway drivings -- even beats hybrid in some cases.

They are getting more popular here in Australia, and if I am doing more long distance driving, I'll definitely consider a turbo-diesel for my next car.

Re: First Prototype of $100 Laptop

scotty — Sat, 27 May 2006 18:28:58 -0000

The $100 computer is "crank powered", ie it comes with a hand crank that you can use to charge the internal battery. It was in the original design, but seems to be missing from the just released prototype

Re: WordPress 2.0.6, Ideas and Kvetch

scotty — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 06:30:02 -0000

Last? 2.0.7RC1 has just been posted because of an SQL injection issue. 2.1 is targeted 22 Jan -- so we'll see whether there's going to be a 2.0.7 before 2.1.

Re: Is this allowed at MyBlogLog?

scotty — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:19:24 -0000

I have seen plenty of "regular" websites on MyBlogLog. I guess they have since changed the "Add Blog" button to "Add Blog/Site" :)