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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Mon 02 Jan 2006

The Good Books Guide

Category : Commentary/GoodBooksGuide.txt

Look, you can get all these books from our Library. It's been a lazy December but I did get a lot of reading done. The great thing about using the Library is that you can try out lots of different stuff - God knows I've got tons of great-looking but utterly useless books strewn all over the house. (Guess what a second-hand book store would pay for them now? 30 cents each, I just asked).

This is how I found "The Cloud Sketcher" by Richard Rayner. Architecture, jazz, New York in the early 1900s, Finland, and a skyscraper - the cloud sketcher. It looked interesting and I enjoyed it. Quite like Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. Only in Ayn Rand, the characters are concepts (like creativity, power, individualism, even love), not people. Here the people are a little more accessible. Imagine you're little Esko, disfigured by the fire that took your mother, uncomfortable in a suit, an outsider at a local dance, and somehow a pretty girl is making her way towards you, she's got a little mirror in her hand, which she uses to ward off the other boys like a gypsy, and she's asked you to dance, beautiful Esko. And you're smitten. Fate brings her back to your life when you're older and you know that there's such a thing as a soul mate.

Esko grows up to be an architect and he builds his skyscraper for Katerina. Rayner's evocation of the early years of the 20th century - where cars, elevators, street lamps, electricity, ocean liners and airplanes are novelties, as well as the invention of the steel that allowed skyscrapers to be built - reminds me how much of human technological progress had been compressd within the last hundred years. And it made me pick up another book - about oil.

Oil was what made all these things possible. In many ways, world history in the last 150 years was the history of oil. Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" is how history should be written - clever, entertaining and illuminating. Exxon, BP, Shell/Royal Dutch, Rockefeller, the Shah of Persia, Iraq and Kuwait, Tony Blair and the George Bushes. You can see how the actions of today are made inevitable by decisions in the past. And just as the basis for our digital technology could be traced to the exigencies of World War 2, automobiles and mechanised transport could be traced to the necessities of World War 1. ("The British Expeditionary Force that went to France in August 1914 had just 827 motor cars and a mere 15 motorcycles. By the last months of the war, British Army vehicles included 56,000 trucks, 23,000 motorcars, and 34,000 motorcycles.") I understand things a lot better now.

Posted at 1:56PM UTC | permalink

Sun 01 Jan 2006

MailServe 2.0.1

Category : Technology/MailServe201.txt

I've updated MailServe to 2.0.1. This is from the Release Notes :

The Fetchmail launch daemon was re-spawning itself when launched on the faster machines due to some timing issues. This has been fixed in this release. (Thanks, Klaus Nielsen, for helping out and pointing the way to the solution. Really appreciate it). Also, Fetchmail could not deliver mail to machines that have been set up to receive mail for more than one domain. This has also been fixed.

It's been a busy day. By the way, Happy New Year, everyone.

Posted at 5:38PM UTC | permalink

Thu 29 Dec 2005

MailServe Released

Category : Technology/MailServe2Released.txt

I've released MailServe 2.0. It costs $19.99 but Postfix Enabler users will be able to upgrade for $9.99.

I've been feeling rather unwell since coming back from Bangkok, so it was all I could do to get the final testing done and the documentation updated. But I'm glad that's all done.

It's something about Christmas. I've been sick I think eight out of the last ten Christmases. But November, December and January are, for me, the best months for living in Singapore. I start to feel the cool breeze in November, and the light on the leaves sparkles when we're not wet with rain. I don't think anyone else that I've talked to feels quite the same way but I look forward to December. I relax, savour the days, and get knocked down by flu. Maybe that's my body's way of keeping score - making sure I'll catch up on all the rest that I need. Lazy days and December. But it doesn't last. The heat, humidity, and awful glare of the equatorial sun will all come back once Chinese New Year is over.

Posted at 4:21PM UTC | permalink

Tue 13 Dec 2005

To Bangkok, Thailand

Category : Commentary/toBangkok.txt

I'm going to join my family for three days in Bangkok. There should be a wireless Internet connection at the hotel that we're staying in. Hope I can keep in touch with those that need to reach me, then.

It was so quiet at home the last few days that I managed to finish the MailServe documentation, at last. It still needs more polish. But it'll do for now.

Posted at 1:23AM UTC | permalink

Tue 06 Dec 2005

This is us

Category : Commentary/us.txt

This is a picture of all of us here - from left, my long-time collaborator and friend Hai Hwee, my kid Brendan, and my wife, Bee Khim. We were going to sneak over to Johor, at the southern end of our neighbour Malaysia, for the day. That's always going to be fun and don't we look like it?

Next week, Brendan and Bee Khim are going to spend a week in Thailand but I'm only going to join them for the last three days, in Bangkok - in case I can't find a good Internet connection and the support for Postfix Enabler, WebMon, DNS Enabler and all, starts to languish.

So, I'm a long way from having this business run like a well-oiled machine, able to run for much of the time on its own without me. One day, I hope to get this figured out.

Actually, Cutedge was the name we used when Bee Khim, Hai Hwee, and I were writing software for insurance companies for most of the last twelve years, together with a couple of other people. We've spent the last two years "recuperating" (I've almost managed to never touch a PC or cross an IT manager's path in two years and I think it shows - I feel fresher and happier). But business seems to be re-awakening in the region. Who knows where the journey will lead? The Journey is the Reward, remember?

Posted at 4:17PM UTC | permalink

Wed 30 Nov 2005

MySQL 5.0

Category : Commentary/mysql5.txt

MySQL 5.0 is here. Stored procedures, triggers, views, etc. Support for views - that was the last thing we were waiting for to replace Oracle entirely in our applications. Oracle should be afraid - very afraid.

Posted at 2:37AM UTC | permalink

Tue 29 Nov 2005

Softpedia

Category : Commentary/softpedia.txt

Softpedia is featuring all of my products in its collection. How did we get in there? We've been awarded its "100% Clean - No Spyware, No Adware, No Viruses" badge. Don't want to look too unappreciative. Hey, thanks guys.

Posted at 2:10PM UTC | permalink

The MailServe Page

Category : Technology/MailServePage.txt

I've created a more permanent place to house the MailServe project. MailServe is the successor to Postfix Enabler. I thought it needs a name change because it's doing a lot more than just enabling Postfix.

The trial version now expires on 30th December 2005. I think this will give me enough time to add a couple more things and test it more thoroughly (as well as to bulk up its documentation).

To try out MailServe, just use your current Postfix Enabler serial number.

Posted at 1:42PM UTC | permalink

Mon 28 Nov 2005

Requiem for Georgie Best

Category : Commentary/requiem.txt

Dig the grave and let me lie
Glad did I live and gladly die

Remembering George Best. It was 1968, I think, or early 1969. I watched, on the black and white TV, Manchester United vs Benfica, and what looked like one of the Beatles, beating two defenders, rounding the 'keeper, and side-footing the ball into the empty net.

Amazing. The crowd went wild. My father said, "that's Georgie Best". I was hooked. That famous picture, of Best in the number 7 shirt, wheeling away, right arm raised to salute the crowd, was ingrained in my memory. Football became my favourite sport, and United my favourite team.

I shared the same birthday as George Best, May 22nd. I remember writing, as a kid, to a UK football magazine about that, and about my love for Man U - and got one pound £ in the mail as prize. (Could that have seeded a lifelong interest in making money from ideas?) Whatever, it's true - I love Man United as much as I love my Mac. My wife often says, she thinks she comes third, or even fourth, after that, behind the kid - especially on Saturday evenings when I go missing when United are playing.

So, goodbye, Georgie. Thanks for the memories. You are the Best.

"You can keep your Chopin, Sistene Chapel and Da Vinci sketches. If I want to see a real artist at work, I'll put on a video and watch George Best drop a shoulder as he rounds the Benfica goalkeeper in 1968."
- Harry's Place, Whom the Gods favour

Posted at 10:09AM UTC | permalink

Mon 14 Nov 2005

Comics & The Art of User Interface Design

Category : Commentary/comics.txt

You can find inspiration in the unlikeliest places. I discovered "Understanding Comics - The Invisible Art" by Scott McCloud, while reading Daniel ("Free Agent Nation") Pink's book "A Whole New Mind".

Scott McCloud shows how comics work by deconstructing the medium into its constituent parts, most of which work invisibly in telling a story. For example, there's this concept called "closure", whereby the reader is able to predict what is going to happen, or realised what had happened, simply because we all have a shared understanding of how things work in life.

... like that shower scene in Psycho ... do look up Computers as Theatre.

The artist exploits closure to eliminate things that need not be said, to control the pace of the story, which in turn, controls tension or heightens the drama of the story telling. The story, in fact, happens between the panels of the comic strip, and the reader becomes the co-author of the story by exercising his imagination.

Look at how this works in the Mac's Finder interface. The icons for files, folders and the trash can are metaphors for how things work on a physical desktop. Rolling that thing we call a mouse, our imagination allows us to slip into the metaphor and explore that environment. Closure allows us to predict what will happen when we pick up a file and place it in the trash.

Scott McCloud shows how the pace of a story quickens when the drawings are made less representational and more iconic (i.e., more cartoonish"). He uses the following framework to describe how our mind moves from what is perceived by the eye to its representation as meaning and ideas inside our brains :

Comics work their magic in that area across The Language Border along The Representational Edge, where words and iconic pictures combine to tell a story in the quickest and most economical way.

If you think about it, there's where user interface design occurs, too. We, as information systems designers and consultants, need to understand how to use metaphors and words and icons in combination to shortcut the trip from representation to ideas so that a user can learn to use a system in the shortest possible time and with the least amount of user-interface clutter. We have a lot we can learn from comics.

First, like comic book artists, we need to start with a purpose. We need to decide what the big idea is, i.e., what we want to convey.

These form the contents and we need to decide, next, how we want to present that. That's form. That's the interface design.

Third, we need to understand the idiom, the vocabulary of styles, gestures and other constructs that, for a Cocoa programmer, say, would include things like switches, panels, pop-up menus and radio buttons.

Fourth is structure. We we need to put it all together, deciding "what to include, what to leave out, how to arrange, how to compose the work". That's what we do when we work in Interface Builder.

Fifth is craft - "constructing the work, applying skills, practical knowledge, invention, problem solving, getting the job done" - e.g., what we do in Xcode.

Finally, the surface. Production values, finishing what the user sees.

All art - painting, writing, theatre, film, sculpture or any other art form including user interface design - follow this path, from idea and form to craft and surface. But everything starts from having a clear purpose.

I've always felt that, one day, my interest in art, in the lives and works of the painters - Paul Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Monet, Van Gogh - and the film makers - Fassbinder, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock - will find a link with the work I'm doing in information technology. With McCloud's Picture Plane - "the entire history of the visual arts belongs in this space" - I think I've found the key.

Posted at 1:14PM UTC | permalink

Sat 12 Nov 2005

Prescience?

Category : Commentary/prescience.txt

I was following a particular hit, looking through my server log. It's a search through the weblog for the keyword "Wheelock", and it returned three hits, a couple of which I found interesting given what's happening now.

First, "Will we get an AppleStore?". I said it's a no-brainer (in a phrase that's already dated). Plus, what are they waiting for? Well, we still aren't going to get one, not the ones run by Apple anyway, but we are going to get the largest 3rd-party-run Apple retail centre in this part of Asia, in about a week's time. That store will open at The Orchard Cineleisure, which is probably the best place in Singapore to open such a store, and that's something to look forward to.

Next, "Dull as Dell". Well, Dell's looking not too bright these days, but what caught my eye were these paragraphs in the article:

I was at the Sakae Sushi joint next to the AppleCentre at Wheelock. My favourite table is where I can just look across at the action.

It was the iPod Live launch. And I'm thinking of the comment by Richard Lim ("Got Singapore") on Sunday that these hand-held devices are going to get ever more powerful and the next natural progression we're going to see is video.

Now who's going to be able to build that? Not the kids at Sim Lim Square snapping up their own PCs, looking for the cheapest deal. Not even Dell.

I believe that the future favours makers of integrated products. Products that show a tight integration between hardware and software. In all the dark years of Apple's troubles, I still believed they were right. They were criticised for not licensing out their operating system, leaving the field open for Bill Gates and Windows. But what if, having known all that, Apple would still have done what they did. It's in their DNA to build the hardware with the software, as one indivisible whole.

So they did. The video iPod has now come to pass. Should we be surprised? Let's move on and look at the next paragraph,

Now back again to Dell. Just what have they done? They've not made the pie any bigger. Instead, they've just grabbed more and more slices to themselves, bleeding the competition dry in a painful price war. What the PC user loses is the innovation that Andy Grove talked about that would have made more out of the processor.

So what did Andy Grove talk about?

In "Co-opetition" by Brandenburger and Nalebuff, Intel's Andy Grove made a rather surprising comment about the other half of the Wintel duopoly, "Microsoft doesn't share the same sense of urgency [to come up with an improved PC]. The typical PC doesn't push the limits of our processors ... It's simply not as good as it should be, and that's not good for our customers."

So, who then has been pushing the limits, and what could that mean?

But we all know who's always been pushing at the limits of technology. Perhaps it should not be surprising if, one fine day, Mac users are going to be using Intel chips. After all, by several accounts including Andy Grove's, he and Steve Jobs have kept up a rather friendly dialogue all these years. When the migration to OS X is complete, soon, things may get even more interesting.

That sent a chill down my spine. Written on 16th June 2003. Am I clairvoyant, or what?

We're looking ahead to the first MacTels - Macs on Intel chips - probably as early as January.

We're probably going to be able to run Windows at native speed on these machines. They're going to be the only machines that cover all the bases (Mac OS X, Linux and Windows). They're going to be sexy as hell. They're going to be cheaper even than Dells, or in any case, provide unprecedented value for money.

And, when we're done crossing over, we'll get to run Mac OS X on those other ordinary PCs.

No, I'm not dreaming. Or being inconsistent. Because, by that time, things are really going to be different...

Posted at 1:20PM UTC | permalink

The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

Category : Commentary/feklar.txt

While going through my web server logs using WebMon, I "stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla" :

Bind ... Bind is a four-letter acronym that means Voo Doo. The inventor of Bind doesn't understand why we all still use it. It's primitive, and not fun to play with. I wasn't looking forward to it.

The gods smiled upon me. A software company called Cutedge Systems has published the ultimate Bind configuration program, called DNS Enabler. You can do in 10 minutes what took me three weeks to figure out a long time ago. For 15 bucks, my worries went away.

Next for the programs which would need some work.

The most popular Mail Transport Agent (MTA) is SendMail which is not pre-loaded on OS 10.4. But I found another MTA called PostFix is. I didn't know anything about PostFix, so I started Googling for info, and stumbled upon, Cutedge Systems, who also sell PostFix Enabler. For 10 bucks, you can configure PostFix to do anthing you want. Not only that, it will handle the POP3 requirement as well. License price: $10 - SOLD!

I love finding things like these - where Postfix Enabler, WebMon, and DNS Enabler have done some good. Just how many people are now running sites on Mac Minis, where they used to use Linux or Windows? It'll be interesting to know.

Posted at 8:07AM UTC | permalink