| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Tue 19 Jun 2007 Learn. Code. Repent.Category : Commentary/LearnCodeRepent.txt I know this guy. His name is Joe Goh. He developed FunkeeStory, an SMS/MMS backup/viewer for the Treo, which I don't use. But I'd seen his work. He's a craftsman. Quality befitting a Mac. He wrote this switcher story about his trials and tribulations as an indie Mac developer. It's funny (in a laugh-till-it-hurts-real-bad way), and it's true. The story is told in Keynote. Who have thought to use Keynote in this clever, time-saving way? Here's a direct link to the pdf download. Over to you, Joe. There's this one particular slide headlined, "Learn. Code. Repeat." Funny, I read the line, the first time, as "Learn. Code. Repent." Must be something subliminal. Mon 18 Jun 2007 The Accounting Game : Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade StandCategory : Commentary/TheAccountingGame.txt I was updating our feedback page (you know, the one containing The Mail We Love to Get) so that it'll also include the messages we've been getting about Luca, when I came across this reference to "The Accounting Game : Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand". I have a reference to "Essentials of Accounting" by Robert N Anthony on the Luca page because that was the book that had finally helped me understand accounting enough to create an accounting application that an accountant would accept. One of the ways I had meant Luca to be used is as an accounting system you could use interactively when you're reading the Robert Anthony book, entering the book examples into the system, and seeing the different views that result from the data - Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, etc. But Paula Hay, who's been trying out Luca, has offered another book that looks really interesting : "I do have another book I am using in just that way. It's called 'the Accounting Game' and it is based on a narrative of a little kid setting up a lemonade stand. It's put together almost like a comic book, perfect for super-newbies like me: http://tinyurl.com/yeqcb4" Looks like a book I absolutely must read, next, judging from the Amazon reviews. Luca and MavenCategory : Technology/LucaAndMaven.txt Luca is just a minor bug fix. (Thanks to Sam Pipe for spotting and reporting it). But Maven has just gotten more useful and, maybe, a lot more usable. Maven is like CocoaMySQL, except that it works with the three popular SQL database types - MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite3, and it tries to provide a common interface for a user to work across all three. I've added the ability to create and delete databases, and to switch between databases. With this in place, I'm finally able to do what I've been wanting to do for a long time - to drag and drop tables and field structures between databases, and across database of different types. It's quite fun to be able to do this now. I'm going to see if this is going to help me build deeper database functionality into Luca a lot faster from now on. With this version, I've added the ability to create and drop indexes. including primary, unique and non-unique keys. Things to do next - Drag and drop contents (not just the structure) between databases of different types. Need also to handle the setting and editing of Null, Non-Null values, default values, compound keys and other constraints. Thu 24 May 2007 Mail Servers and DNSCategory : Technology/MailServersAndDNS.txt James Keating wrote me a question : Can we run two (or more) mail servers for a single domain? The answer is not a simple yes. Neither is it a no. And this had set me thinking. I reproduce my answer below in the hope that this can help other people understand mail servers better, as well as their relationship with the domain name system. Usually you run one mail server for a single domain. You can have other mail servers for that domain, but these are used as backups that will get the mail when the primary mail server is down. Start with the simplest case, where you have one mail server for the domain and this mail server sits on the machine you reach by typing its domain name. For example, ksd140.org sits on 207.63.165.6 and the mail server is also on that machine, on IP address 207.63.165.6. In this case, you don't even need to create an MX record. Second case, where the mail server sits on a different machine from the machine known as ksd140.org. For example, the mail server sits on a machine with an IP address of 207.63.105.131, reachable via a host name called mail.ksd140.org. Then you need to have an MX record in the Domain Name System to declare that mail.ksd140.org is performing the function of the mail server for the domain, ksd140.org. In DNS Enabler, this is specified as Hostname IP Alias or, simply, Hostname IP Alias because, if you leave out the domain name after the square brackets, DNS Enabler assumes that you're referring to the primary domain, ksd140.org. This is what happens when someone sends a message to james@ksd140.org. The originating mail server will check if there is an MX record for the domain, ksd140.org. If there is, it will follow that record and know that it has to send the message to the machine, mail.ksd140.org, which is acting as the mail server for that domain. If there isn't an MX record, it will send the message directly to the machine, ksd140.org. Third case, where you can have more than one mail server acting as mail servers for that domain, but these are secondary mail servers acting as backups for the primary mail server. For example, if mail2.ksd140.org on IP address 207.63.105.132 is the backup mail server for mail.ksd140.org, for the domain ksd140.org, then we will denote its status as a backup by setting it with a higher MX number : Hostname IP Alias This is what happens when an originating mail server tries to send a message to james@ksd140.org and finds that the primary mail server is down. It will look up the MX records for the domain and see if it can find the next higher-numbered MX record to send the message to. If this is also down, it goes on down the line to the next record until it either succeeds in sending the message or fails entirely. Fourth case. We can have another mail server, not acting as mail server for the domain, but acting on its own right : Hostname IP Alias In this example, this mail server is reachable only by machines on the internal private network, and it can be used as an outgoing smtp server for any mail client on the internal network. However, in this case, if we're using the MailServe setup panel, we must take care to enter wmail.ksd140.org into the Domain Name field, rather than ksd140.org, otherwise the Postfix running on wmail.ksd140.org will mistakenly hang on to all mail destined for users on ksd140.org. There is a fifth case, where wmail.ksd140.org acts as the mail server for another host machine entirely, say, host2.ksd140.org. For completeness, this is how we set up DNS Enabler : Hostname IP Alias and then the Domain Name field in MailServe should be set as host2.ksd140.org, but I think your eyes are all glazed over by now and I'd better stop. All this is to say that our little programs, MailServe and DNS Enabler, can actually do a heck of a lot. Hope all these make sense. Wed 23 May 2007 8000 CustomersCategory : Commentary/8000Customers.txt We've reached 8000 unique customers for our products. That may not seem like much. But it's a milestone nevertheless. If and when we hit 10,000. That will be something.
Sun 06 May 2007 The White Road JourneyCategory : Commentary/WhiteRoadJourney.txt Gary Erickson, in "Raising The Bar - Integrity and Passion in Life and Business", makes a distinction between White-Road bike journeys and Red-Road ones.
"Michelin maps defined roads as red, yellow, or white. Main roads, busy with buses, trucks, and cars, were marked boldly in red. Yellow roads were minor arteries, not as big as red roads but well traveled. The hundreds of roads branching off from the red and yellow roads were marked in white. We started on the red road, moved to the yellow, and by day three our mantra became ride the white road. White roads held adventure as well as the most spectacular views. We met people face-to-face rather than at bus stops or gas stations... "We hadn't set out with a final destination in mind." Years later, Erickson, maker of Clif Bar energy bars for athletes, faced wth having to sell his company or to go on ahead as an independent entrepreneur, drew on his experience on the white-road jouneys to decide that it's the journey that's going to be the greater reward. This book is a great read of those of us who find ourselves lost, from time to time, on our own white road journeys - for you do get lost on those white roads. It's for remembering that being lost is part of the pleasure of the journey when you're not moving to the beat of someone else's drum. Life has a way of opening up interesting new vistas (and I'm not talking of the Microsoft kind), at the next turn, when you least expect it. Two other great books, if you're into such stuff, are Yvon Chouinard's Patagonia - "Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman", and Dean Karnazes's "Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner". Fri 13 Apr 2007 Leopard delayed. And I get a new lease of life.Category : Commentary/leopardDelayed.txt I was beginning to understand that I wasn't going to be able to get new versions of MailServe, DNS Enabler and WebMon out in time if Leopard were to be released in May or June. Quite a few things still don't work, like SMTP authentication using SASLDB and CRAM-MD5, e.g., which I've been struggling with over the last three weeks. The trouble is, it's hard to find any information over the web, due to the non-disclosure agreement. So we have to be circumscribed about it. Let's just say, imagine NetInfo is gone, and so is lookupd. What do we have to do, to do things in an equivalent way? That's the kind of things that need to be solved, before we can even think about putting in new features or taking advantage of the new interface elements in Leopard. So, Leopard being delayed to October is great, at least for me. No excuses, though, if I don't then do a better job by October. SMTP authentication using SASL is something that had broken each time we moved from Jaguar to Panther to Tiger, and now to Leopard. Each time I had found a solution, but not, as it seems, this time. I've been tempted to drop support for it. But I'll keep on trying. Maybe it's just a bug that'll be fixed in a subsequent release. Hopefully. Because I've run out of ideas. On a happier note, I've got an LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) Server running, at last, with help from Scott Riggins, who sent over some instructions, and I've got it running also on Leopard, no less. LDAP will link Address Book and email, and provide a single sign-on to authenticate users with mail, web and database servers. Imagine you get a new staff. You enter his data into the HR system, some of which goes into the LDAP system. He's then able to use his single password to logon on to the email and database systems, and his contact information appears automatically in everyone's address book. Same goes for a debtor or creditor record, originating in accounting. Centralised control or storage of information, but automatic propagation to wherever it might be useful. I can imagine how that can be made to help small companies, as well as the big ones. It used to be that this kind of power is only available to the companies with the big IT staff. The ones with the big iron. But now it's possible to make this available in a one-click installer/configurator that'll run on any stock, consumer OS X machine, available to all. That's power. The power to subvert the established order. The power, as Apple used to say, to be your best. Wed 14 Mar 2007 Luca 2.5.4Category : Technology/Luca2dot5dot4.txt I've updated Luca to work with the OS X 10.4.9 that was just released today. But, more importantly, this 2.5.4 release of Luca contains a new "Batch Postings" button (see below). One of the problems with transitioning Luca to a "shrink wrapped application", when it used to be a custom-built application that I embed into enterprise systems in my previous life as a custom software vendor, is that I won't be anywhere physically near the system when anything goes wrong with it. And one of the things that could go wrong is that the accounts stop balancing - due to a program bug or a loop-hole in the assumptions we used to model the business rules. Now, in a custom built application, I would usually be able to go over to the customer's site to trouble-shoot and patch the data to make the accounts balance again. But it would be difficult to do this once we scale this to support hundreds or thousands of users all over the world.
So, the Batch Postings button allows the user, once he realises from the Trial Balance that the accounts do not balance, to clear the balances and tally up the postings again from each voucher for that particular month. This should get everything to balance again and propagate the corrected balances forward to the following months. Usually this will be accompanied by a bug fix for the problem that caused the totals to go out of whack in the first place. Between the bug fix release and the "Batch Postings" button, I should be able to let the user go through months of trouble-free usage. Or at least, that's the plan. I used to have a utility that allows the user to check the health of the system and to actually pin-point the exact voucher or transaction that caused the accounts not to balance. That's one more thing to put in before I'd feel that I'd gotten Luca to the point where it could take any abuse that a user could throw at it. Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9Category : Commentary/10dot4dot9.txt I've just updated my live server to Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9. It looks OK to update. MailServe/Postfix Enabler, WebMon and DNS Enabler all continue to work OK. Fri 09 Mar 2007 Taking a break across the CausewayCategory : Commentary/Muar.txt I'm going up to Muar for the weekend. Actually, I'm looking forward to it. It's a two-hour drive across the Causeway. I wonder if I can find Internet access while I'm there. Otherwise I won't be able to get my mail. What's right about being a Mac fanatic?Category : Commentary/MacFanaticsRUs.txt It's strucked me, while working on getting DNS Enabler, WebMon, and MailServe, etc, to work on Leopard, that the Mac user community gets a certain unique benefit, in terms of higher quality of software, when the Mac developers are themselves Mac fanatics. Let me explain. What we like most about Macs is that they just work. And, if you're so devoted to that idea, you come in with a very real appreciation for the pristine state in which the system is delivered. And, if you're a developer, you try very hard not to upset that state. Otherwise the Mac will stop being a Mac. And that's what's happening when I'm trying, say, to get all the MaiServe features to work again on Leopard (some are broken; I'm still figuring why). I try to determine absolutely the least amount of changes that I need to make to the system, to give the user the most in terms of the added capabilities, like POP or IMAP, or support for installing SSL certs without the sweat. And I need to think ahead about how to restore the system to its pristine state, if at all possible, whenever the user chooses to de-install those capabilties. And so, all these are hard to do. But, if you're a Mac fan, you can't see how it could work any other way. Luca 2.5.3 ReleasedCategory : Technology/Luca2dot5dot3.txt Rio from Indonesia has been using Luca and he's hit a problem while trying to close a financial year. I had introduced a bug when I switched from using floating point arithmetic to using the higher precision NSDecimalNumbers. This bug prevents the year-end closing script from completing and it seems to have affected only SQLite users and not MySQL or PostgreSQL. Anyway, I've fixed it in the 2.5.3 release and the year-end closing function will now work across all three database types. You can download Luca 2.5.3 from here. I've managed to build a Leopard-compatible version of Luca. I've been experimenting with Leopard while I fixed that year-end closing bug. The 2.5.x releases mark the point where I transition to Leopard and see what new features in Cocoa I can take advantage of in Luca. There will be a Luca 3.0 when Leopard ships. 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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