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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Fri 18 Apr 2008

LDAP Enabler, in the larger scheme of things

Category : Commentary/LDAPEnablerAgain.txt

Quite few years back, when I was working with an insurance company on their underwriting, claims and accounting systems, I've observed that the same piece of contact information can be found in each of the three sub-systems and they're often not synchronised.

And even when we've finally managed to keep them synchronised in one central system, they're not available to the email systems, and so each underwriting, claims and accounting officer would have their own rolodex, diary, Palm Pilot, laptop, phonebook, etc. And I've been wanting to find a way to obliterate all these redundancies, ever since.

So with LDAP Enabler, I have finally a tool that could potentially do all that.

I could enter contact information into the LDAP repository, and have it appear on everyone's Mac, MacBook, or iPhone, which they can then use to email, call, fax, send a piece of snail mail, or pay a visit to the contact.

And lets say I'm in the accounting department and I happen to find that a client or vendor has changed place of operations or contact numbers (often the accounting people are the first persons to know such things), and I can update my system, which transparently is pulling data out from the LDAP server, and so my update consequently propagates to every salesperson's iPhone.

Or someone new joins the company, so you create an employee record into the LDAP database, and this new guy subsequently gets email access, and access to the databases, etc, with just that single password.

It's these kinds of integration that I'd like to explore next, with MailServe and with Luca.

While I talk about departments here and departments there, I actually believe that the future is increasingly one of much smaller, two to five-person companies. It's so hard to find good people to hire that I'd much rather work with just my wife, and my friend Hai Hwee, and that's it, the three of us, and I'm much happier for it. With that, you'll want things to just work with the minimum of effort - what I call No Sweat Computing - and hope to run rings round the bigger competitors.

While I'm sitting here writing this in a McDonald's, I take great comfort that my system continues to receive people, lay out my wares, make a sales pitch on my behalf, process the transactions, and most importantly, receive the money and tell me the good news.

So I'll always recommend that it is worthwhile spending time thinking about ways to build good systems. It's the difference between being happy or being harried.

And that's why I'll never understand, what's there not to like about the Mac Way?

Posted at 1:21AM UTC | permalink

LDAP Enabler is a real application now - it has an icon

Category : Technology/LDAPEnablerIcon.txt

I was wracking my brains about finding an appropriate icon for LDAP Enabler. It needs to convey the idea that it's a tool for setting up information about people (of course, you can set it up to store information about things, like resources and conference rooms, etc) but most people would use it naturally to store information about people.

And this information is hierarchically organised. This idea about hierarchy in the LDAP setup is so fundamental - you can't search for things if you mess up the hierarchy.

(I've released a new version of LDAP Enabler - 1.0 beta 2 - that disables the domain name field while the LDAP Server is running because this messes up the Search Base and, consequently, the root level of the hierarchy. You can only change the domain name when you stop the LDAP Server. But then you can't find the contacts that you're already entered because they are still stuck to the previous search base. This may be a source of some confusion but it shows just how tied to the notion of hierarchy is LDAP. It's not anything like a relational database.)

Anyway, I needed an icon to show that the application is (mainly) about storing information about people - lots of people - and the people are hierarchically organised, and the information is bounded by a domain.

I tried various permutations of the NSEveryone icon used in the OS X Directory utility, plus the Address Book icon, but they all seemed so cliched.

Then I remembered that I'm a member of that race that still uses the longest surviving ideographic written language on earth (not that I had retained much facility with that language, to my eternal shame, so thoroughly had I been immersed in Western education and ways of thinking). How would the Chinese write this if they have to invent a new word that would depict said notion?

It could be something like this :

So this is LDAP Enabler's icon. It's, of course, not any "real" word in Chinese. It's just my invention, but it's struck me just how close these ideographic representations are to icons. They both need to pack a lot of punch in terms of informational content, in such a small space. I've never thought of things this way before.

Posted at 1:21AM UTC | permalink

LDAP Enabler

Category : Technology/LDAPEnablerAnnouncement.txt

I've been working on way to activate and configure the built-in LDAP server on Leopard with just one click. Once enabled, you can use the LDAP server to store contacts information that will show up on any Mac (and iPhone), and keep them all updated from one central point.

(You can download it from here to try. It'll only work on Leopard).

It's still a work in progress. But this version is at least doing something really useful in conjunction with the OS X Address Book now.

Posted at 1:21AM UTC | permalink

Sat 22 Mar 2008

iPhone for the Enterprise

Category : Commentary/iPhoneForTheEnterprise.txt

Out of curiosity, I was wondering if I could embed our SQL frameworks into an iPhone application and use that to access a SQLite database, or a MySQL or PostgreSQL database anywhere on the Internet.

I'm glad to say it all worked beautifully. Here's a demo iPhone app accessing our (live, production) MySQL database across the Internet, basically re-using the SQL frameworks (shown in the red box below) that we had built for Luca:

What it means is that we can do version of Luca for the iPhone, if that makes sense. Or any number of database-centred, enterprise-friendly applications.

Just imagine the possibilities...

Posted at 3:27PM UTC | permalink

Fri 21 Mar 2008

Beijing

Category : Commentary/BeijingWebGallery.txt

I've uploaded the pictures I took of our Beijing trip to my web gallery on Mac.com (which turned out to be incredibly easy to do).

This is one view of the moat that surrounds the Forbidden City, at the eastern gate. To the left is the high red wall of the Forbidden City. To the right is a hutong with buildings that one can fall in love with. Though the sky was eternally grey, it's funny - we all felt sad to be leaving Beijing and coming back to sunny Singapore. I'm still sorting out my feelings. But I would want to go back again soon.

Posted at 1:23PM UTC | permalink

Wed 05 Mar 2008

Sleep Saver

Category : Commentary/sleepsaver.txt

This is the kind of mail I love to get :

On Mar 5, 2008, at 11:08 AM, Robin Plamondon about DNS Enabler:

Thanks!!

My DNS service on leopard server crash tonight and I can't restart the service, I don't know why! But with your software in 1 minute all my DNS service was created and work...

Thanks again I can sleep tonight!

Robin

Posted at 1:26PM UTC | permalink

A few nights in Beijing

Category : Commentary/Beijing.txt

I'm leaving Friday evening for a few days' visit to Beijing. My wife thought that I probably wouldn't pass up a chance to see The Forbidden City, and she's right. Any other place, and I would probably find it all too much trouble. I wouldn't miss this, even though it may be too cold up there right now for the liking of this southerner.

We're going to stay at a hotel somewhere in the lower right corner of the picture, below, which is an aerial Google Earth view of the Forbidden City.

I was at the tour agency and I was wondering why a lot of these companies won't let their staff get onto the Internet. I thought that's pretty dumb. Once I saw how I could zoom right down over those terra-cotta roof-tops, and imagined how it would be like walking those streets, I was sold on going to Beijing. Try stopping me from coming.

Posted at 5:13AM UTC | permalink

Sat 01 Mar 2008

MailServeProBeta.zip

Category : Technology/MailServeProBeta.txt

I have a download link for the demo version of MailServe for Leopard with Dovecot. It's at

http://cutedgesystems.com/downloads/MailServeProBeta.zip

It's still a work-in-progress. But the basic features for enabling Dovecot to work with Postfix will work.

It's a Universal Binary, so it'll run on both Intel and PPC Macs. The Dovecot libraries are also all universals. The only requirement is that it must be on Leopard and you need a MailServe for Leopard serial number to try it. It's a 7 MB download. Have fun.

Note : MailServe Pro is just a working name, for the moment. It's less of a mouthful than "MailServe for Leopard with Dovecot".

Nick Bell, a MailServe for Leopard user, says "Wow. Dovecot really does fly. Accessing my home mail server from work is now flawless." And Christian Noack, "My first impression is, that it is much faster than UW/IMAP."

So, it looks like we're on to a good thing.

Posted at 7:32AM UTC | permalink

Sat 23 Feb 2008

MailServe with Dovecot, now also on PPC

Category : Technology/MailServeDovecotPPC.txt

I've built a version of MailServe for Leopard with Dovecot that will also run on PowerPC Macs. We're working on a download link, next, for MailServe for Leopard users to try out.

I have now Postfix Enabler for Tiger and Panther, MailServe for Tiger, MailServe for Leopard, and now MailServe for Leopard with Dovecot (MailServe Pro?).

We're sounding a lot like Sun Microsystems, with its many unfathomable product names (like Upgrade to the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System! Huh?).

We'll need to simplify.

Posted at 9:23AM UTC | permalink

Tue 19 Feb 2008

MailServe with Dovecot

Category : Technology/MailServeWithDovecot.txt

I've got a version of MailServe running on Leopard with support for Dovecot. Currently I've only compiled the Dovecot binaries to run on Intel machines, i.e., I hadn't had time to create Universal Binaries. And I don't have a way to convert the UW/IMAP mailboxes to the format used by Dovecot.

But if anyone would like to try it, just write to me. I don't yet have a download link because I need to make it work on PPC machines, too, and I'd like to offer this trial version first to MailServe for Leopard users.

I haven't thought about how I'm going to sell it. Probably it'll be a paid upgrade to MailServe for Leopard users. But I've got some way to go yet in terms of putting in the features.

For example, I'm going to start on an LDAP Enabler. And when that gets done, the interaction between the mail server and the LDAP server starts to get interesting, by way of Dovecot.

So I hope to get LDAP Enabler done soon and then we'll see how it goes.

P.S. : this is how the Dovecot sub-folder structure look in Mail.app :

Posted at 4:42PM UTC | permalink

Mon 11 Feb 2008

Does anyone still use Sendmail Enabler?

Category : Commentary/SendmailEnablerAnyone.txt

I'm planning to revamp my web pages, after I've done a beta verson of MailServe with Dovecot for Leopard. So I've been wondering if it's time to drop thngs like Sendmail Enabler for Jaguar. But I've just seen this referral passing by my web server logs :

http://tesol.net/scripts/FAQ/faqmaker.cgi?ST=106809076914407&FA=SF

So I guess it's still being used and I'll leave it there for some time more.

Posted at 1:51AM UTC | permalink

Wed 06 Feb 2008

Luca and Maven Updated

Category : Technology/LucaAndMavenUpdates.txt

I've updated Luca and Maven to fix a couple of bugs.

In Luca, I had a problem exporting SQLite3 databases to MySQL5 when the decimal numbers were greater than 10,000,000, or some such large number. I made an error defining the size of my decmal numbers in MySQL5.

This has been fixed in Luca, and also in Maven.

Maven also had a problem deleting a MySQL5 database. It's due to just one line of code where I referred to MySQL5 as MySQL where I had referred to it everywhere else as MySQL5. Such is the lot of a programmer. A miss is as good as a mile, as people used to say, years and years ago.

Thanks to Hai Hwee, who did all the work tracing my bugs, and to Rio from Indonesia, who has unearthed quite a lot of them by now.

Luca is now at 2.6.2 and Maven 0.5.2.

Posted at 1:29PM UTC | permalink