| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Mon 07 Jul 2008 Idle DistractionsCategory : Commentary/IdleDistractions.txt I'm supposed to be working on updates to DNS Enabler and WebMon for Leopard, but I'm distracted by the thought of having to update my weblog. So why bother writing a weblog? That's a thought I've had more than once. Would I be more productive if I stop wasting time writing entries into this weblog? I probably would. But anyway, now that I've got going, here's a thought - Apple's WWDC has gotten bigger with each passing year. This year, it was even sold-out, which is supposed to be the first time that had ever happened. And, if you plot the trajectory, that's probably not going to be the last. A particular dream of mine is that we have a conference for Mac developers, that is like WWDC, but where we don't have to fly so far to San Franciso, but that is held each year in a different city in Asia, like the way Siggraph holds its conference in a different city in the US each year. So, since WWDC is so big, maybe we can spin off some of it into an Asian conference. Then we could have it one year in Singapore, then in Hong Kong, and then in Tokyo. And it need not be a major city. You can have it one year in a place like Hangzhou in China, which is actually, potentially, quite marvellous as a convention city, whether anyone else has realised that or not (and which would be quite a lot of fun getting to). So, is there anyone else in the world who has a dream just like this? Tue 01 Jul 2008 Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4Category : Commentary/Leopard10dot5dot4.txt I've updated to Leopard 10.5.4. Mail Server, Web Server, WebDav, POP, IMAP, Fetchmail, Dovecot, FTP, Remote Login, and Firewall services - all seem well. Mon 30 Jun 2008 The China PriceCategory : Commentary/ChinaPrice.txt This is the smog in Nanjing. You can't make out the details of buildings that are less than 400 metres away on foot. Actually, it's the same in Shanghai and Suzhou, but maybe not as bad. The air is especially bad in Nanjing because it's surrounded by mountains. The smog gets trapped in between.
On the bullet train from Suzhou to Nanjing, if you sit on the left side of the cabin, you see the source of all these pollution - smoke billowing out from umpteen furnaces. You see farmland if you sit on the right but I didn't know that till the return trip. It's easy to imagine lungs blackened by continued exposure to the smog. Especially wretched are the fumes coming off the buses when you're stuck with them in traffic. You gulp for air - but what you get is nausea.
So, for the time I was in Nanjing I was thinking, the famous so-called China Price does come at a great price - to the Chinese people. Eventually there will be a payback - tuberculosis, exploding heath-care costs - and China will no longer be able to offer the China Price. And that time may come sooner rather than later. I had picked up Kishore Mahbubani's book, "The New Asian Hemisphere", immediately when I got back home (my hunger for information having grown stronger rather than was satiated from that trip) and this jumped out at me on page 190, in the section on global warming - Even though China ia a major new cause of greenhouse gas emissions, Chinese officials are genuinely worried. The chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Biro, gave a talk in New York in late 2006. He was asked which country, in his view, had the most environmentally conscious government. Most people expected him to mention one or two Scandinavian countries, or perhaps even the UK. Instead, he named China, to the surprise of everyone in the room. [italics added] Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environment Law and Policy at Yale University, says that although the Chinese government has avoided any commitment to limiting CO2 emissions, it has set a target of cutting energy use per unit of GDP by 20 percent by 2010 - an ambitious goal for a country that gets 70 percent of its power by burning coal. "China has adopted fuel-economy standards that will push average car mileage to nearly 40 miles a gallon over the next five years, and much higher than in the US. And it has promised to reduce water pollution by 10 percent by 2020 and increase industrial solid-waste recycling by 60 percent." He says that these "aren't just empty promises. The State Environmental Protection Agency, which recently acknowledged that air- and water-quality levels are worsening, blocked 163 projects worth US$99 billion in 2006." Furthermore, "startup companies are being launched every day to develop pollution-control technologies, improve energy efficiency, and create alternate sources of power. The US$220 million in clean-tech venture capital China received in 2006 puts it ahead of Europe as a venue for new environmental companies." The good news is that in this field, China does not need to reinvent the wheel. It can learn a lesson or two from Japan, which weathered the oil crises of the 1970s and from that difficult experience learned to become one of the world's leading leading countries in energy efficency... I hadn't known all these. So that was interesting. Because, while Shanghai was predictably Shanghai, and Suzhou was depressing, and Nanjing somewhat surly, Hangzhou had a nice, clean, cool, happy feel - like Fisherman's Wharf during WWDC week. And I was told China had more great places just like that. So there's all this potential - if they could just fix this pollution problem. They'll have a place where no Chinese would ever want to leave. What more incentive is there, then, to lick the problem? Sat 28 Jun 2008 China's March to ModernityCategory : Commentary/ChinaMarchToModernity.txt I'm borrowing the phrase "March to Modernity" from Kishore Mahbubani's book, "The New Asian Hemisphere", subtitled "The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East", though whether it is irresistible or not, I don't yet know. Writes Mahbubani (who's been known to question whether Asians can think): "When many Western observers look at China, they cannot see beyond the lack of a democratic political system. They miss the massive democratization of the human spirit that is taking place in China. Hundreds of millions of Chinese who thought they were destined for endless poverty now believe that they can improve their lives through their own efforts. ... The real value of free-market economics is not just in the improvements in economic productivity. It is about how it uplifts the human spirit and liberates the minds of hundreds of millions of people who now feel that they can finally take charge of their destinies. This is why Asia is marching forward." It's been two weeks since since I've been back from China. And I'm still processing the impressions. Before I left, I would have thought I would be excited to write about what I'm going to be seeing. But early on in the trip, I've had the feeling that maybe it would be wise to just keep still and think - because things are going on there now that are going to change the trajectory of the rest of our lives - for me, my family and especially for my kid. So for now, just some photographs from the trip - through Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou via the "bullet train". It had been a great trip.
Fri 30 May 2008 Leaving on a jet plane for Shanghai and SuzhouCategory : Commentary/LeavingOnAJetPlane.txt In a couple of hours we will be leaving for the airport. We've decided to just go ahead with our planned trip. We're staying about half the time at Suzhou and the other at Shanghai, with hopefully a visit to Nanjing squeezed in between. My MacBook Pro goes with me so I can still get mail while away. It'll be a good test of the server while we're away for two weeks. Hope it'll be a good break. When I get back, I'll continue work on my feature request lists for all three of my "configurator" apps for the rest of the year, and hope I'll still have time for Luca. Thu 29 May 2008 Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3Category : Commentary/Leopard10dot5dot3.txt I've upgraded my servers to 10.5.3. The mail server, web server, webdav, POP, IMAP, Fetchmail, FTP, and firewall services all seem to be working OK. So I think it's safe to upgrade. Glad it's released today rather than next week. One less thing to worry about if I'm going to be away for two weeks. Wed 28 May 2008 My very own Leopard-based Server with DovecotCategory : Commentary/LeopardiMacServer.txt I've only just found the time to upgrade my own server to Leopard. (Talk about the cobbler's children going without shoes.) It used to be on a Mac Mini running Tiger, which had performed admirably well, chugging away quietly and efficiently for two years without giving any problems. But the workload has increased and the Mac mini had felt increasingly slow under all that weight. My server's now running on an Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz iMac and I'm very happy with it. It's running Dovecot and I'm enjoying being able to organise my IMAP folders into sub-folders, because I've got so many of them, damn folders. I've kept almost every single message that I've received or sent out over the last five years, just so I can build up the background information quickly if anyone ever writes to me for support. So my IMAP store is huge. UW/IMAP was struggling to keep up. Dovecot does feel snappier. I've enabled all the essential services, of course using DNS Enabler, MailServe Pro and WebMon. I did a clean install of Leopard and the services were set up in literally minutes. Most of the time I spent moving mail from UW/IMAP on the Mac Mini to Dovecot on the iMac. So, would I pay for these, my own applications? Definitely :-) I am proud of them. But that's not to say they can't be improved. They can and I will be working on that, after the short break we had planned for in China. But to go or not to go? Earthquakes, flood, hand-foot-mouth disease and other possible epidemics. How things had changed in just one month. Anyway, I've prepared the servers. I've a backup for everything - for the server, broadband line, etc - so my friend Hai Hwee can switch over if anything happens to the server while we're away for two weeks. The good thing about buying the tickets directly from Singapore Airlines is that you have up to almost the last day to change your mind and you can exchange the tickets for vouchers that are valid for one year. Shanghai, Suzhou and Nanjing beckon. Or do they? Will need to decide soon. Thu 08 May 2008 MailServe Pro for Leopard Manual takes shapeCategory : Commentary/MSPforLeopardManual.txt I've spent a lot of time the last few days thinking about this - how to develop the MailServe instruction manual so that even a novice could set up a mail server and take advantage of every feature, with zero handholding from me. It used to be murder, supporting things like Sendmail Enabler and Postfix Enabler for Jaguar and then Panther, four years or more ago. So, it's an interesting problem - is it possible, through the design of the software's user interface, and the design of the accompanying instruction manual, to make something so complicated do-able by even an idiot (metaphorically speaking :-). And I'm not talking about clicking a button and turning on Postfix or Dovecot or LDAP. That's not a problem now. I've got that part pinned down pat by all the know-how built up over the last four years. I'm talking about all the attendant issues that I've had to help a user grapple with - domain names and how do they work anyway?, why can't I reach my server from my own network?, why can't my PHP script send mail past the Smart Host? I've solved these each time, user-by-user. And I've helped people understand how mail servers work, building their knowledge layer-by-layer. But I've had to repeat the answers every time. I could have had a forum, but you'd still have to dig through it. Is there some way to build these answers, solutions and ideas into the narrative structure of the instruction manual? The web page - with its hypertext links, accompanying graphics, and even animations (if I were so inclined to expend energy doing that) - offers a rich medium on which to organise the information to meet that pedagogical need. So, I have the information and I have the medium - it'll be a creative act to shape that medium to display that information so that it can be acquired as know-how, internalsed as knowledge, and expended as a new capability by another person. This is the first page of the new manual. It's like performance art, a work-in-progress. Can the objectives be met? How will it look at the end? I don't mind doing it to find out. Mon 28 Apr 2008 MailServe Pro, ready for businessCategory : Commentary/MailServeProReadyForBusiness.txt So, we are selling MailServe Pro now. We're asking people to pay first and use their serial number/email address combination to download the zipped application. It's a new workflow - you can't directly download the application. I now know for sure that the workflow works and can concentrate on improving the documentation and working on further enhancements. I think this will go some way to towards limiting piracy. I didn't want to build in "shrinkage" through piracy to the selling price, thereby making legitimate customers pay for the sins of non-paying users. And I didn't want to make the code overly complex just to do serial number checking - the scheme we use is not too difficult to break, but more elaborate schemes can have un-intended side-effects that derail users during the running of the program. So we thought about this for quite a while and decided to try this out. Pay-then-download may not be hard too hard for people who're using MailServe for Leopard now, and who've dealt with me personally before, to accept. I don't mind if this limits the number of potential users but that subset is the one I build these enhancements for. As for those who subscribe to the theory that it's better to have pirates than not to have them because they spread the news about the application far and wide, there's still MailServe for Leopard, and all the rest of the stuff that still works the old way, that they can pirate. So, it's good thing to have this balance, to see which way is better. The next thing to do is to figure out how to sign the application, so the pirates can't just break it once and distribute that broken copy. And anyway, the things I do are quite low-level stuff that I take responsibility for. Do people really want to use something that's been patched and broken into and take a chance with whatever else was changed on that copy of MailServe? I don't really think so. It's better to be sure and pull down the application from my site. MailServe Pro for Leopard with DovecotCategory : Commentary/MailServePro4Release.txt I've released my version of MailServe for Leopard with support for Dovecot (it's the version 4.0 release of MailServe).
It's a stealth release because I'd prefer to support one person at a time, rather than a whole horde, in case there are teething problems that I hadn't anticipated, though I've already taken care to seed this for a few people to try for a few months now. Also, I'm interested in seeing how information diffuses through the web. How does news spread and how long does it take? For example, I'm now tracking the downloads of LDAP Enabler, to see which sites pick it up and make referrals and why. Over the course of a year or two or three, if it does succeeed in picking up users without any [overt] advertisement on my part, then the reasons why it succeeds would become very instructive. What are the improvements I have to make, and the features I have to add (and the manuals I have to make), to make a piece of software popular? I'm interested in seeing if I can introduce and make popular a range of software without having to advertise them in places like Version Tracker or MacUpdate. My idea is that, if I can have a core group of software that people come on over to pick up, then can I use that traffic to make them interested in picking up other new pieces of software that I also then make available at the site? The idea is simple, but if it works, then it becomes self-generating and self-reinforcing, because if those additional software are any good, then it drives further traffic on its own and may even introduce new people to the original goods. Then when we have sufficient pieces of good software, we can do things like promotional bundles. This is why doing these things is fun. It's like a microcosm - a corporation in miniature. I'm affected by things like exchange rates. I do promotional materials. And I, of course, also build the damned stuff (with the help of Hai Hwee) and do all the artwork. So it's art and science and business, united. One will, one resolve, one cause :-) 15 US dollars is now a lot like 11 in terms of Singapore dollars and this slide has occurred only over the last year or two. So, I now know what it feels like to be wiped out by an adverse movement in the rates. I never thought I'd hate to see a strengthening of the Singapore dollar and there's no end in sight. I'm now working on a revamp of the MailServe documentation. If I can find a better and more workable format, I'll revamp the documentaion for all the other software. I'm also trying out a new workflow - to see if it's possible to ask people to pay for a serial number for MailServe Pro and then use that serial number to download the application. The idea is that people who've used MailServe for Leopard successfully, and who are now interested in using Dovecot, will trust us enough to be persuaded to go with our new workflow. We'll know if it works, for better or worse. But that's another good thing about running a business like this. You can try things and learn. Wed 23 Apr 2008 Going to ShanghaiCategory : Commentary/Shanghai2.txt We're going to Shanghai, Suzhou and (hopefully) Nanjing, at the end of May and for the first two weeks of June. That's the same time as WWDC but China won out. Our earlier trip, last month, to Beijing had left a deep impression and I wanted to go back for a deeper experience. This is going to be our second trip to Shanghai. It's a great place for shopping, e.g., for leather goods like shoes, and also for jackets. But, more than that, these trips had set me thinking and wanting to know more, about the history of China, and about the Chinese diaspora, and about how people like us ended up in Singapore. Our Public Library in Singapore has a great collection of books about China. These are the ones I've found and enjoyed : I read Lynn Pan's "Sons of the Yellow Emperor - A History of the Chinese Diaspora", which was useful for placing a historical context around where I am and where I could have been. But I very much doubt I could have survived a Cultural Revolution, or a Qing emperor like Yong Zheng. Reading Jonathan Spence's "Treason by the Book", about a failed plot to foment an uprising against the Qing, I was struck by how much I identified with the scholars/mandarins who were dumb enough not to keep their mouth shut and got executed by the Yong Zheng emperor. Perhaps that explains why my forefathers had to run away to the Nanyang. Then there's Jonathan Spence's "Mao" and Ross Terrill's "Mao", which make painful reading, to escape which I read "River Town" by Peter Hessler, and his later book, "Oracle Bones", and a similar book, "China Road" by Rob Gifford. But they've all left me strangely dissatisfied. I felt that there was something missing. Reading all these books from the Western perspective, one could forgiven for thinking that China is run by goons and thugs, as the CNN guy would have it. But that doesn't gell with what I'm seeing or experiencing, and it was only after reading Han Suyin's book about Zhou Enlai, who was China's prime minister for twenty-seven years, - "Eldest Son" - that I realised that large swathes of history, drama, and even wisdom and heroism can be found in the China story. "Goons and thugs" don't explain China's meteoric rise in the last twenty years. From what foundation was this built on? I think the real story has yet to be told, at least in English. To maintain a balance, one needs to read books about China written by the Chinese. And that's where I now look with envy at the collection available for my wife in the Chinese section of our Public Library, simply because she can read the language. One day I want to be able to read those books, too, rather than the English translations, as for example, Gao Wenqian's "Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary". So, between Ross Terrill's account and Han Suyin's, where lies the truth. As Zhou Enlai may have seen it: the truth, my friend, lies somewhere in-between. I had read Han Suyin's trilogy about China - The Crippled Tree, A Mortal Flower, and Birdless Summer - when I was seventeen or eighteen. So it's been my pleasure to recall that time while I'm writing this now. Such is how one's world view is shaped - layer by layer - like an onion. And sometimes you weep. Luca is going to be Leopard-onlyCategory : Commentary/Luca2dot6dot5.txt I've found a problem with the last Luca release, version 2.6.4, which was crashing when run on OS X Tiger machines. It's not a logic error in the code. It's a problem with the latest iPhone-compatible Cocoa SDK (software development kit) that I am using. I was telling the person who first reported the crashes that I don't believe it - Luca never crashes. So, it's been a bit of a disappointment, this drop-off in quality. Got to maintain the standard. It seems like I can't now make this work on both Tiger and Leopard. If I try to keep the code that worked on Tiger, I can't compile it for Leopard. But if I replace the deprecated API calls with the ones that Leopard requires, the application will compile, run well on Leopard, but crash on Tiger. It's like between a rock and a hard place. Luca is my last app that I've managed to make it work on both Leopard and Tiger, with one single code base. I may not be able to hold it together much longer. I plan to update Luca with all the nice new Leopard-only Cocoa features. And that will mean the end of the Tiger version because these stuff won't run on Tiger. I've fixed the crashes on Tiger. But this latest 2.6.5 release of Luca will probably be the last version that will run on Tiger. Version 2.7.x onwards will be Leopard-only. Read more ... |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
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