Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Tue 17 Jan 2006

From Yoder the Sheepherder

Category : Commentary/Yoder.txt

I don't usually put up the nice things we get in the mail. But this one's real nice. It captures the essence of what we've been trying to do with our Macs :

On 11 Jan 2006, at 9:56 AM, Yoder the Sheepherder wrote:

Many thanks for your Postfix Enabler.

I've been running my own mail and web servers for a few years now on Linux machines running Sendmail and Cyrus or Sendmail and Dovecot, but recently I began trying different combinations to get a feel for them and most recently was running Postfix and Dovecot on Fedora. My machine went belly up with hardware failures and all I had left was an old G-3 iMacDV 400 we bought new about 6 years ago. I was in a bind, with a full schedule and simply no time to put into building a Mac server from scratch. I frantically began Googling anything I could find on building mail servers on OSX and stumbled on a message board entry that offhandedly mentioned your product and had a link to your site. Initially, I didn't want to take a chance on your Postfix Enabler:

First, because I wanted to do it myself.
And, second, because I didn't think it would work.

A day later, I paid for and downloaded your product, and in less than 5 minutes I was up and running. Now all that's left is me kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You have saved me untold hours and I'm very grateful. Postfix Enabler is a great application and well worth the $10.

I'm now looking at your DNS Enabler and am fairly certain I'll be getting that soon as well.

Macs have been our desktop machines for years, but from now on they are my servers as well.

Sincerely,
Steve Tripp
Waseca, MN, USA

Posted at 5:06PM UTC | permalink

MailServe Gets a New Icon

Category : Technology/MailServe203.txt

MailServe improves on Postfix Enabler by adding Fetchmail and Virtual Alias Domains support, IPv6 over SSL for POP and IMAP, Real-time BlackLists, alternate port numbers for SMTP, mail queue management, and allows a list of Smart Hosts to be stored, among other features.

MailServe runs only on Mac OS X Tiger.

Posted at 10:51AM UTC | permalink

Mon 16 Jan 2006

WebMon 2.0.4

Category : Technology/WebMon204.txt

WebMon is the application I use everyday, several times a day, to check my web server log, no matter where I am. It's the first thing I do, right after reading my mail, even while I was away in Bangkok (and I was surprised and happy that even loading 6000 records, which is about 12 hours of web activity in my case, didn't take too long).

It allows me to see how the web server is being accessed, which pages are being read, which applications have been downloaded. And if we have a payment coming in from PayPal, it allows me to see how our latest customer had come in to the web site - was it via a Google search or through the Macintosh Product Guide or via Version Tracker - and to track his or her progress through the site.

It's about keeping my eyes on the business.

Of course, it also has a few other features, like it helps me turn on WebDav (to allow us to share our calendars and workplans), SSL, and PHP, etc, in five minutes whenever we have to set up a new server, and that's long after I've forgotten how to do it all on the command line.

But the thing about WebMon is that it's also my experiment in using the power of Cocoa Bindings in Mac OS X. I've really tried to push the technology quite a fair bit in WebMon -- to store arrays of information about the server or servers that I'm monitoring in the WebMon preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences.

I'm amazed at the amount of things we're able to do in Cocoa Bindings, without writing any code, and the depth to the ideas we can represent : e.g., to store arrays of dictionaries (in my case, about the servers I'm monitoring) which can contain other arrays and other dictionaries. And to do that with very little coding, using a very efficient, compact notation, with the ability to write it out to persistent storage in the preferences file.

It's like, wow, Cocoa Bindings is seriously useful, and we can get a lot more things done, a lot faster, coding like this. Cocoa is Apple's true crown jewels.

But, with the power and convenience comes a little loss of control. There are things that go on in the Bindings that you've got to trust that Apple does correctly. When they don't, you could spend a whole weekend just tracing the bug.

Like I just did.

I was wondering why WebMon didn't work properly in Panther, notably in 10.3.9. I traced it, at last, to a quirk in the Cocoa Bindings/User Defaults interaction in Panther, together with one other quirk that surfaced in 10.3.9. It was hard to trace because it wasn't a programming or logic bug on my part, and it worked perfectly in Tiger. It took a long time to pin-point the exact point in the code where things went into the Twilight Zone and then to find the answer somewhere in this Tech Note, thanks to Google.

But the point is that Cocoa Bindings is super-powerful. But be prepared to have the rug pulled from under your feet now and then. At least until Apple polishes it with each subsequent release.

Anyway, WebMon 2.0.4 is now ready for download. With that, WebMon works again with every version of Panther, as well as with Tiger, of course. (And PS : we're now only one step away from making it a Universal Binary.)

Posted at 3:33PM UTC | permalink

Sun 15 Jan 2006

People are getting it

Category : Commentary/ommalik.txt

"Perhaps the 'commoditized' technology trend is being slowly replaced by 'using commoditized technology to create a compelling user experience' trend?"

Om Malik on Broadband

"... Apple never really had a dominant position in PC business, like it has in the digital music business. But that's not the only reason, why the esteemed professor might be off the mark. iPod, and Apple are part of the post 'rapid commoditization' theory proposed by the esteemed professor [italics added]. iPod is nothing but a shiny packaging for off the shelf chips, and a hard drive. At the very core, not much difference exists between a Creative Zen and an iPod. ... The difference is the software that is being used to create a 'user experience'."

Posted at 5:26AM UTC | permalink

Thu 12 Jan 2006

Luca Goes Universal

Category : Technology/LucaUniversal.txt

Luca Accounting ver 2.0.8 is now a Universal Binary. Ready for download.

Posted at 4:27PM UTC | permalink

Truth Will Out

Category : Commentary/TruthWillOut.txt

"One way or another, in spite of all efforts to conceal it, the truth will come to be known."
- The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.

From the comments page in Blackfriars' rebuttal of Clayton Christensen's "Apple will fail again" interview : Now if we could just convince people to stop repeating that old saw, "Apple lost the computer market to Microsoft because standards eclipsed Apple's proprietary technology." It just ain't so.

The world may be starting to come round to this idea.

In Business Week : "... some management experts say it may be time to rethink that view. Sticking to its proprietary approach [Apple] has succeeded wildly, at least in digital music. Even in computers, Steve Jobs's strategy has its advantages."

For years, management consultants had dispensed advice that resulted in wholesale dumping of perfectly usable Macintoshes on the back of such "proprietary architecture" arguments. I've always felt that one day the truth will out.

But, then, what a waste. And the time we've lost to use computers creatively.

For years, also, my standard way of judging whether a management book is worth reading is to go to the index, look up Apple or Macintosh and read what the author has to say. If it repeats the "old saw", it goes back to the shelf. What else can I learn from so small a mind?

Now, even Microsoft may be forced to consider building their own machines :

"Microsoft will decide to develop its own digital media hardware that's hard-wired to work with its software to provide iPod-like ease-of-use -- much as the software king did in the game console market with the Xbox. So PC makers should get started developing their own proprietary systems."

Bring them on. Lure them to a terrain, not of their own, and watch a bloodbath. That would only be the best revenge.

Posted at 10:59AM UTC | permalink

MailServe Universal

Category : Technology/MailServeUniversal.txt

I've compiled a Universal Binary version of MailServe :

Anybody wants to try this out? Hai Hwee is compiling one right now for Luca, which will need a bit more work because she's got her own SQLite frameworks embedded within it. Will release that when she's done.

Posted at 8:58AM UTC | permalink

Wed 11 Jan 2006

The Pundit's Dilemma

Category : Commentary/PunditsDilemma.txt

The dilemma faced by every management pundit is, how to account for Apple's success in music, digital convergence and personal/home entertainment - pummelling their competitors, Creative (not so creative) et al, into rivers of red ink - when they're basically following the very same philosophy that the pundits have long derided.

You can have it one way or the other. But not both. One must be wrong. So which way is it?

In Clayton Christensen's case, it's to go into denial. "I think it will allow them to survive for a bit longer", says the author of The Innovators' Dilemma (which I happened to think is an important book to read). But what do you make of it when he says that "Apple will soon fail again with their proprietary technology"? As if Microsoft's is not proprietary.

Blackfriars gave a very good retort, e.g. that Microsoft is the true case study for the lessons in The Innovator's Dilemma.

While watching Steve Jobs' demos of the iLife apps in the MacWorld Webcast, I was thinking that these pundits are not so smart, after all - if they can't tell the difference between what is commodity and what is not, what needs to be "commoditized" and which areas are more desirably kept proprietary.

The Intel Core Duos are commodities. So are the disk controllers, flash drives, power supplies, etc.

What is not a commodity is the genius to put everything together so you can set up a web site in five minutes. And bring joy to the life of Grandma across the Internet.

Try making all these work. Instead of just talking about it. It's like herding cats. Things are always breaking into entropy. It takes love, care, passion. And empathy.

Looking at iWeb, it makes so much sense. That's why we cheer Apple on. It's about the triumph of the human spirit. It's the pundits with their cookie-cutter, lemming-like, soul-destroying responses who are the real dime-a-dozen commodities.

Posted at 2:17PM UTC | permalink

Macs on Intel - riding down the cost curve

Category : Commentary/costcurve.txt

"Time is the friend of a good business,
the enemy of the mediocre" - Warren Buffet

The day is finally here. We've got Macs on Intel, a move that strikes at the heart of the Wintel duopoly. The MacBook Pro has got Intel inside but not Intel prices. But the Core Duo chips are still new.

From now on, the more PCs (with Core Duo chips) that are sold, the cheaper the Mac will get. Apple rides down the same cost curve as Dell. It's like "going with the flow", the Aikido philosophy of "protecting oneself against aggressive attacks by blending and neutralizing them". Turn your opponent's strength to your own advantage.

Posted at 1:17PM UTC | permalink

Mac OS X 10.4.4

Category : Technology/10dot4dot4.txt

I've upgraded a couple of systems to 10.4.4, just released today, and tested them. They look OK - SMTP, POP, IMAP, Fetchmail, WebMon and DNS Enabler.

Posted at 8:47AM UTC | permalink

Thu 05 Jan 2006

Another year over, a new one's just begun

Category : Commentary/YearOver.txt

So this is Christmas
and what have we done?

Together with Hai Hwee, we've managed to get five pieces of software done last year - Postfix Enabler for Tiger, DNS Enabler, WebMon, MailServe and Luca Accounting.

I'm trying to create a set of tools that will allow people to run a business on top of the Mac platform - tools that will allow the business to communicate with a potential customer base (through email and a web site), build a community around the use of its products, transact business on-line and in real-time, as well as account for the money flows.

And I'm using this Mac@Work site to demonstrate what I mean.

So what I hope to do in the coming year is to deepen the value of each of the products, cover the gaps between the products (if that is something we can do), and make the pieces easy to snap together and set up quickly - always with the objective of helping people get going using the tools to serve their businesses better.

There are obvious things that can be done - if you're a user of WebMon or MailServe, you probably have a very good idea of what I should be working on to help you manage or exploit the web and mail server better.

But there are other things that can be done - e.g., Luca. I believe that the most important thing about managing one's life is to get a firm grip on where all the money has gone - whether you're an individual managing your personal finance, or a small business owner, or a large corporation.

I think we've got a very good double-entry engine built into Luca. And it's got a nice interface for traversing through all the figures, drilling down into the details and making cross-references, so that you'll get a good picture of where all the money has gone. But it needs a little more work to make it suitable as a personal finance tool for individuals, especially when it comes to data-entry.

Do we need another accounting application for the Mac when there is Quicken and MYOB? I don't know. What I know is that they're not Mac-centric and I'd rather do my own since we can do it, and having control over it, I can tie it in with all the other stuff we're doing, building tools for Mac business users. And managing the business means managing the business's finances.

There is one more thing I'd like to do. Bundle all of Hai Hwee's work interfacing with PayPal into a package people can download and set up so that they can also do business on the web the way we've done. There is quite a bit of negativity surrounding PayPal, about its susceptability to fraud and all that, and that's probably deserved. But in the realm of powerful ideas, I can put forward a case that PayPal is probably the most important test-bed we have right now for deriving A New World Currency. I think, in the scheme of things, PayPal is more important entity than eBay, its parent, and may end up being a whole lot more valuable (if eBay doesn't kill it first through mis-management).

So, I'd like to do a PayPal-based, PHP-based, eCommerce solution. But PayPal has a more interesting web-services-based solution that we haven't been able to access yet because we're outside the US. I think that would make for a neater solution and so we'll wait until there's a better time to work on that.

Posted at 1:34PM UTC | permalink

Mon 02 Jan 2006

MailServe 2.0.2

Category : Technology/MailServe202.txt

I kept getting problems with the mail queue. Then I realised that I couldn't count on the fields in the mail queue log to follow fixed widths on different machines. Sometimes the queue ID of the message takes 10 characters, sometimes 11, and so on. So I had to find another way to parse the fields into table columns. I think I've killed this problem once and for all. 2.0.2 is out.

Posted at 3:20PM UTC | permalink