| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Mon 03 Jul 2006 Fetchmail and 10.4.7 ProblemCategory : Technology/MailServeBonjourError.txt I'm seeing a problem that has been introduced with the OS X 10.4.7 update that affects Fetchmail. I get a "Workaround Bonjour: Unknown error: 0" when I try to restart Fetchmail. From the MailServe interface, if you try to Restart Fechmail, you will see the progress indicator spinning for a long tme before it stops. If you look into the Console log, you'll see that Bonjour-related error, though how Bonjour got into the picture is beyond me at this point. This affects both PowerPC and Intel Macs. I'm going to trace through this and hope I find a solution. I've just realised that this Bonjour error affects DNS Enabler, too, when I try to restart the BIND server. Fri 30 Jun 2006 Google Checkout vs PayPalCategory : Commentary/GoogleCheckout.txt I've been waiting for this for some time. Google Checkout has just been launched. It's good to have an alternative to PayPal, at last. Here's a link to the Developer's Guide. Oops, but I can't use it yet until they make this available internationally. Probably a matter of time. Thu 29 Jun 2006 Mac OS X 10.4.7Category : Technology/10dot4dot7Problem.txt I updated my Intel iMac and my iBook to 10.4.7 with no problems, via Software Update. But when I upgraded my server, a PPC-based Mac Mini, the installation aborted half-way, leaving me with a Finder that looked like this when the Mac Mini restarted :
Yikes! I downloaded the Combo updater and did the upgrade again this afternoon when things were relatively quiet. This time, though, all went well. All the mail server, DNS, PHP, and MySQL stuff still work. So I think it's OK to upgrade, in case you're wondering. Thu 22 Jun 2006 The Luca Class Model - and what it meansCategory : Technology/LucaClassModel.txt I generated this class model diagram from within Xcode. It shows a portion of the Luca class hierarchy. I was going to draw this manually when I remembered that Xcode has this feature - so, with just one click, it's done :
We've ported Luca, from its beginning as a 4th Dimension (4D)-based application, through PHP, Java, Java-Cocoa, and now to Objective-C, all the while using it to learn about the capabilities of each language. While MailServe and DNS Enabler were technically difficult because of the need to know enough Unix, these were single-window applications, after all. Luca is a better example of a real-world business application. It gives us a chance to see how well an object-oriented language like Objective-C performs when we use it to model real-world business processes. The point is, you can use an object-oriented language like Java or Objective-C without using any of its object-oriented features. Until Luca version 2.1 (that we've just released), Luca was a straight port from its 4D days, and its code was largely procedural, except where we make the Cocoa calls. Luca 2.1 was where we try to take advantage of the underlying object-oriented language. For example, we recognise that a Balance Sheet or Profit/Loss report is a special case of a Trial Balance report, and we factored the code so that we make one a sub-class of the other. What we've found, from re-organising the code this way, was that we can cut down the total number of lines of code in the project by half, through elimininating a lot of repetitive code (by making specialised code inherit the behaviour of more general-purpose code). What this says is that people can, and do, teach the use of Java, etc, in colleges and universities, without exploiting its power as a modelling tool. And even when they do, they miss the point, for want of good examples. How many polytechnics or universities teach the Mac as an example of good object-oriented design? Yet I know, for sure, that we had actually learnt a lot about how to build our own classes from observing how well the Cocoa classes work. The Mac has been largely ignored in the IT (as opposed to art/design) curriculum and the IT industry everywhere remains all the poorer, in terms of imagination, for it. In art and architecture, there had been the Bauhaus school and Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin. In the use of computers, we can do something similar to create a new kind school that combines both art and technology, with a wide reading of the humanities, to build systems that humans would find a joy to use. For example, right now Luca's got a basic utilitarian interface, but I'd like to, some day, build it so it looks as appealing as some of these Dashboard widgets, and yet work as sleek, quickly and accurately as possible. The second point I'd like to make, through the Luca example, is that IT is a very hard activity to manage. How would a mere "human resource" manager know that the number of lines of code that a programmer writes is a very tricky indicator of programmer productivity and ability? "The best code is the code you don't have to write", so says Steve Jobs famously while introducing (what became) Cocoa to the Mac world, because each code we write introduces a possibility for error. The best programmer will use the least number of lines of code to do the most number of things, without sacrificing readability or maintainability of the code. Lines of code get whittled away by the quality of the thought. But which manager, weighing the lines of code each programmer produces, will be able to tell the good guy from the bad? There was a story a few weeks back about the Singapore Stock Exchange ditching its new system after spending $2 million on its development. The report mentioned how the developer responsible for it, an Indian company, had somewhat dubious credentials since it only had 250 programmers, unlike the one that replaced it which presumably has thousands. I'd never get any of these jobs because I'd want to do it with 5 good guys if 10 is humanly possible. Mon 19 Jun 2006 About the AEBS Firmware Update 5.7 & iChat AVCategory : Technology/AEBS5dot7.txt The last time I updated my Airport Base Station with the 5.6 firmware update, I promptly lost connection with my ISP. Something went wrong with PPPoE and the Base Station refused to connect with the ISP. I had to revert the firmware back to 5.5.1 to salvage the base station. This time, the 5.7 firmware update went much better. Apple seems to have fixed the PPPoE problem, whatever that was. I've needed to update the base station to test out iChat AV on my iMac, which seems to require a base station with at least a 5.6 firmware update, if you're sitting behind an Airport Base Station. Hai Hwee has a new MacBook, and a black one, too, and I've now someone to talk to over iChat AV. It's working well and this is great (I'd be able to see my wife and kid even when I travel). Even over Airport. Imagine connecting up a few retail outlets with these Intel-based iMacs, and using the built-in camera to double-up also as a bar-code reader. I'd like to figure out how this can be made to work, but I can already see the business processes this can be made to support. As usual, there's so much to do, and so little time ... I had this email last week from Yves Filiatro, whom I was helping with MailServe : Dying by a thousand cutsCategory : Commentary/piracy.txt We've crossed the 5500 figure for the number of registered users of Postfix Enabler, DNS Enabler, et al. But, if you go to Version Tracker or MacUpdate, you'll see download figures at least 10 times that number. That's the point of that article : "Piracy bleeds Mac game makers dry". Piracy bleeds all software developers dry. "The software's overpriced; I want to try it before I buy it (but then never get around to buying it); I can't afford it on a student's income." And so on... I've read that software publishers factor the cost of lost sales due to piracy into the retail cost of their products, in effect punishing the people who pay for software by getting them to bear the cost for those who don't. I've never wanted to do that. I'm working towards the day when we'll lick this problem. Price the software low - but make everyone who use it pay for it. Nothing gets me down more than having someone who pirates the software write in to ask for support. We have an efficient back-end database, so it's very easy for me to tell when someone's had the gall to do that. Chutzpah's not the word. You go through highs and lows. These are the lows. Postscript : But how do you get out of this funk? Salespeople keep themselves pumped up reading Anthony Robbins, and (the early) Zig Ziglar. Me? I dive into books like How I Made It, to remind myself that others may have gone through worse. And let Bruce Springsteen scream my pain away in Thunder Road. Thinking Different about Thinking DifferentCategory : Commentary/aboutThinkingDifferent.txt I was reading this article about "Why Startups Condense in America". Going down the list of reasons : "Another country I could see wanting to have a silicon valley is China. But I doubt they could do it yet either ... Singapore would face a similar problem. Singapore seems very aware of the importance of encouraging startups. But while energetic government intervention may be able to make a port run efficiently, it can't coax startups into existence. A state that bans chewing gum has a long way to go before it could create a San Francisco." See what I mean? About people rejecting perfectly workable solutions to societal problems on the grounds of ideological purity. "Banning chewing gum? What sacrilege." Actually, thinking different for a moment, I've often felt that a student of business could learn a lot from studying two lessons - 1. from Apple (about how to break through against a strong incumbent in the face of overwhelming odds), and 2. from the founding of modern-day Singapore (about how to create something from out of absolutely nothing - no hinterland, no agriculture, no water, on an island the size of a postage stamp). There's a book I have, "Heart Work" (you can't find it on Amazon), that tells the story about how these guys in the economic development board brought business to Singapore over the last 40 years and there were some amazing stories, stories of spunk and resourcefulness, of what Guy Kawasaki would call chutzpah, e.g., "... the story of Philip Yeo selling land to a chemical company CEO while it was still underwater ..." So, there are start-up lessons to be learnt here. The point I am making is that Thinking Different cuts both ways, and we can question the received wisdom, even those of the progressive, liberal persuasion. Sun 18 Jun 2006 SinistraCategory : Commentary/sinistra.txt I've often wondered about the terms "left" and "right", as in "the countercultural left". I happened upon the answer among a pile of newspapers that I've just had the time to catch up on. Janadas Devan, in the Sunday Times, explains : "The political distinction between "left" and "right" arose from the seating arrangement in the French National Assembly during the Revolution. Those for the Revolution sat on the left, and those against, on the right." He was explaining, in an article on The Da Vinci Code, how Dan Brown got it wrong in assuming that radical thought is called "left wing" because the left had always had negative overtones, from the Italian sinistra, meaning sinister. So, there's nothing sinister about having radical left wing ideas. Mon 05 Jun 2006 The Rebel SellCategory : Commentary/TheRebelSell.txt I hadn't done much work lately. But I did do a lot of reading. I found a book The Rebel Sell (also known as Nation of Rebels on Amazon) - "how counterculture became the consumer culture" - which I found fascinating because I always thought of myself as having counter-cultural leanings. But what does that mean? Rebellion, perhaps, authenticity, the search for meaning, the need to question everything, to find the path less travelled - these are some of the things that come to mind. And these drive our choice of music, the films we watch, the clothes we wear - in other words, the things we buy - to simultaneously define who we are and set ourselves apart. I love reading many different kinds of books to find the connections between them. Here's one book where the authors do the same, for example, where they linked Hitler's use of symbols, myths, motifs, art and design in Nazi Germany, with the emergence of broadcast media, advertising, and consumer marketing. There's one point that the authors bring up often, that the countercultural left often reject perfectly workable solutions to societal problems on the grounds of ideological purity. You can see echoes of this whenever people like William Gibson and Paul Theroux call Singapore a "boring antiseptic police state". I live here, so if I honestly think through if I can do a better job than the ones who're running this place, then on an 80/20 rule, I'd say Singapore does OK as far as I'm concerned. So I think the point the authors are making is that the counterculture is the consumer culture, and they show how or why, but as a positive force for societal change, its effects are zilch (and therefore damning for its posturing). Or something like that. Sun 04 Jun 2006 BlockedCategory : Commentary/blocked.txt "Deeds, like grains of sand spilt into the sea, disappear ... leaving only an empty hand" - Han Suyin, from somewhere in her Crippled Tree trilogy. It's been some time since I wrote anything here. But my kid's been sick the last week and that had knocked the stuffing out of me. Fortunately he's better now and I can get back to work. But I'm wondering where the time has gone. In some ways, the Business Machine idea really did work - if you've written to me the last week, I'd still be responding as quickly as I could, as I usually do. And we'd still be selling our software 24/7, since the system does it all on its own. But some of the things I planned to do had ground to a halt, while I wondered when the kid's fever is going to break. So we're not there yet with the idea that the business is going to be able to function even when I'm not. But when I do, I would have realised my idea of the ultimate business machine. Anyway, got to get back to work. Luca's been going quite well and we'll have a new release by next week. This may not mean much, if you're just using WebMon, DNS Enabler, Postfix Enabler, etc, but if I can just do a PayPal-based demo of an on-line store that is hooked up to Luca as an accounting/financial analysis tool at the back-end, then you may see just what I am seeing - that the Mac, with its combination of right and left-brained thinking, could make a fantastically powerful platform to build a vibrant, thriving, fun, yet manageable business on. Tue 23 May 2006 Send Email From AnywhereCategory : Technology/EmailAnywhere.txt It used to be that you could send email from literally anywhere, once you've turned on your own SMTP server. However, some mail servers (at hotmail or AOL, etc.) have increasingly hit back by implementing a filter that rejects mail originating from a dynamic IP address (which is all of us trying to send mail from a broadband line). Tagging someone as a spammer simply because he's trying to send mail from a dynamic address strikes me as being too simplistic. We all have our favourite reasons why we want to be able to send mail out our PowerBooks from wherever we are and whenever we want. Most ISPs have rules that block you from sending mail out their server if you're not on their network. So, if you're roaming around with your PowerBook, you're often out of luck. That's why being able to send mail out our own Postfix-enabled mail server on our PowerBooks became such a god-send ... for a while. Plus, if we're now able to run a full-fledged mail server off a simple broadband line with a dynamic IP address, and since it's cheap, powerful, easy to do, and yet effective, then why shouldn't we be allowed to do it? But now, when we're trying to send mail out of a broadband line (see the two orange arrows, below, denoting the case of a MacBook sending mail out localhost, and the case of a Mac-based mail server on a broadband line), we're likely to get rejected by, say, 30% of the mail servers out there, as denoted by the Dell-type, IT-managed servers in the picture, below :
It's like we've found a way to go two steps forward and now we're being pushed one step back. So what's a nice PowerBook to do? This is the setup I've been using. I've taken care to choose an ISP to run my server on that doesn't block any of the well known ports (25, 110, 143, 993 and 995 for mail and 80, 8080, and 443 for web, plus the other ports for SSH and FTP, etc), and who doesn't have any restriction on using their SMTP server as a smart host. They may require authentication and they may require SSL, but that doesn't matter as long as they allow my mail to be relayed out through it using my own mail server. So this is what happens when I'm roaming around with my PowerBook. I connect back to my server and relay mail through it, which will in turn relay it through my ISP's smtp server (the blue arrows in the picture, above). Because it's relayed through the ISP's server, it looks like a static IP address to the receiving mail servers, and that practically ensures that my mail won't get rejected by mail servers implementing those petty rules. So how does that beat simply going through the ISP server in the first place? Well, my mail server is a full-fledged mail server, so it receives mail and implements both the POP and IMAP services besides sending mail. Secondly, I've set it up to allow my PowerBook (as well as any of the other users I've registered on it) to relay mail through it from anywhere I happen to be - so long as I authenticate with it. And I've set it to listen on two other ports (2525 and 52525), in case I'm on a network whose control-obsessed administrators block port 25, the send-mail port. (Surely, networks are there to be used?). Plus, I've turned on SSL, to encrypt the communication between the mail client and the server, including the password exchange. So this has worked pretty well for me and I continue to run my mail server over a dynamic IP address ... until such time when the admins decide to respond with another block? Of course, you can run the mail server over a static IP address, with its attendant increase in cost, or just give up and sign yourself back onto those ISPs' mail services - both of which work to the ISPs' benefit and may be what they want. Some of these "providers" are now offering a "premium" service, which you need to sign on to ensure guaranteed delivery of every piece of mail. Perhaps people will now leave in droves and set up their own servers? Especially since it's so cheap and easy to do :-) ? If you're running your own server, please don't implement that stupid rule that assumes that everyone who sends mail from a dynamic IP address must be a spammer, or subscribe to RBL real-time black lists that do. Someone absolutely, positively, may need to send mail to you, and sending it via their own PowerBook from a dynamic IP address may be the only way they have left to get it to you. Tue 16 May 2006 10.4.6 and the latest security updatesCategory : Commentary/10dot4dot6PlusSecurityUpdates.txt I've updated our server and all our test machines, both PPCs and our one Intel Mac machine, to Mac OS X 10.4.6 plus all the latest security updates, and all is still well - with SMTP, POP, IMAP, WebDav, SSL, etc... Just thought you might like to know. 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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