| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Fri 21 Mar 2008 BeijingCategory : 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.
Wed 05 Mar 2008 Sleep SaverCategory : 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 A few nights in BeijingCategory : 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. Sat 01 Mar 2008 MailServeProBeta.zipCategory : 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. Sat 23 Feb 2008 MailServe with Dovecot, now also on PPCCategory : 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. Tue 19 Feb 2008 MailServe with DovecotCategory : 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 :
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. Wed 06 Feb 2008 Luca and Maven UpdatedCategory : 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. Tue 05 Feb 2008 PainCategory : Commentary/pain.txt Talking about pain, there's a very good book for aspiring high-tech or IT entrepreneurs to read to get a feel for what they're going to be in for - the book is called, "Founders at Work". Here's an excerpt : At an HBS (Harvard Business School) reunion, we had a roundtable for all of us who had been entrepreneurs, and one of our professors asked, "What didn't HBS teach you about this?" And I said, "Pain."
I only remember one class that came close: the professor walked out of the class with tears in his eyes, having recounted the story of his friend who had started a cable company, and it destroyed his life, destroyed his family, and moved him to a place where his life was a waste of time. That was the only indication I had at HBS about how painful this is. "Go out and be entrepreneurs" - that seems to be the government's message of the day. Mostly, it is people in safe jobs telling others to go out and do their thing. As if you can just turn on the tap. It could be a great life. But it could also go oh so wrong. Imagine spending ten to twenty years pursuing a dream and ending up in a street corner muttering to yourself. There but for the grace of God, go I. Okay, so the country, any country, would need entrepreneurs. But let's not hear it from those who couldn't or wouldn't do it themselves. Listen to those who have. And survived. And it may be that you come to realise that the words of The Desiderata have more meaning, and value, than any number of government handouts, when you're struggling to survive. Mon 04 Feb 2008 MailServe for Leopard 3.0.4Category : Technology/MailServe3dot0dot4.txt As promised, I've released MailServe for Leopard 3.0.4, with the Mail Queue feature from Tiger re-instated.
It should have been easy, right, just getting the features from MailServe for Tiger over to Leopard? It's not so easy. The one thing that MailServe for Leopard has, that the one on Tiger doesn't, is the ability to allow the mail server to be administered from a non-admin account, so long as you can provide an administrator's credentials. I used Apple's security framework to do that. Among its benefits is that, next time, I could plug in an alternative method to do the authentication, e.g., via a smart card or any of the emerging biometric methods, and all other things in the code should still work. And I'm one step closer to being able to support remote administration of the server. Plus, I don't need to store the password. I don't want to have anything to do with people's password. I just pass it on to the authentication mechanism. But one thing that Apple's recommended method of implementing the security framework also does is that it interferes with the workings of Postfix's postsuper command, which is needed to delete messages in a queue. I just can't run the postsuper command now. But I'm loathed to lose all the benefits that I've gained so far. So, what to do? That was why I couldn't do this feature the last time round. I didn't have the time, in all the mad rush to get MailServe for Leopard out to all the guys who needed the mail server running again within a day of Leopard being released. Even now, it took me three, four days to figure out a way. So how did I do it? I answer with a laugh that comes from deep in the belly. A laughter born of pain. To all the people who're "not so jazzed up" about having to pay for MailServe for Leopard again, since there are "no new features", I can now afford a wry smile. If only it were that easy... I can move on to the new features now. Mon 28 Jan 2008 DNS Enabler for Leopard, version 3.0.3Category : Technology/DNSEnablerForLeopard3dot0dot3.txt Leopard uses BIND version 9.4.1-P1, whch is set up by default to disallow recursive queries from outside the subnet that the server is on. So, I've built a new version of DNS Enabler for Leopard, version 3.0.3, that allows the user to change this behaviour (by clicking on the "Allow recursive queries from outside subnet" checkbox, below).
I've also updated all the screen shots on the DNS Enabler for Leopard web page today. For a future version of DNS Enabler, I'd like to work on allowing a variety of BIND options to be set from the interface, like Log Level, etc, and also to see if I can implement views, so that you show the local IP address of a host name to queries coming from the local sub-net, and the public IP address to queries coming from the public network. This is going to be more intricate, so I'll need a bit more time to think about it. For MailServe, I'll need to put back one feature from Tiger that is missing from the Leopard version due to the lack of time - i.e., the ability to flush or delete a message from the mail queue. I hope to do that by the end of the week, and then, after that, to really get going on the Dovecot version. For WebMon for Leopard, I'd like to add the ability to set up Virtual Hosts, while still being able to set up SSL for the main domain. Wonder if that's possible to be done? So, broadly, these are what I would be working on. There's more to come, of course, from my ever-lengthening to-do list (which I would try to publish, one day) but, for now, one step at a time. Tue 22 Jan 2008 10,000 Customers From Around the WorldCategory : Commentary/10000customers.txt We have 10,000 unique customers from all around the world. Somehow I thought that when this day comes I'd be ecstatic, that it'll really mean something to have crossed this mark. Strangely, it's just another day. Maybe it's because I've reviewed the To-Do Lists and I'm feeling grim because there's so much more to do. Ever wondered why artists are such depressed people? It could be the awareness that there is something missing, that the world is still not quite right that propels the search for a solution. It's the agony and the ecstasy - one or the other - there's nothing in-between. 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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