| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about Weblog • Archive • Cutedge by: Bernard Teo
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Fri 24 Jun 2005 Perfect Enough?Category : Commentary/PerfectEnough.txt We know that Mac users love their Macs, while PC users... Well, how much do PC users care about the PC? Perhaps, this is in direct proportion (and response) to the care that had gone into building it.
I've finished reading "Perfect Enough - Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard" but there's this part I'd like to quote. It's the part where the McKinsey experts (!) were taking the HP directors through the merits buying Compaq :
Sam Ginn voiced his doubts about moving deeper into personal computers. "We've never made much money at it," he said. "Our returns are lousy and so are theirs." The McKinsey experts retorted that HP and Compaq had much less at stake than most people realized. Together, the two companies rang up $20 billion a year in revenue selling personal computers. But they didn't make the hardware or software; they didn't even assemble the machines. Intel, Microsoft, and contract manufacturers such as Flextronics handled such chores. The PC business consisted mostly of brand-name sizzle and some legal agreements in a file cabinet (italics added). If the two companies could coax out a few marketing efficiencies and post even a slim profit, that would translate into a decent return on invested capital.
You see those shiny HP and Compaq laptops in the computer superstores. Not a scrap of soul in them. They weren't built primarily to be used by people. They were built "to post a slim profit".
As the afternoon played out, Dick Hackborn became one of the most vocal proponents of the deal. He had been arguing for years that industry standards almost always won out over proprietary architectures in the computer business. As a result, he believed, Hewlett-Packard ought to seize command of the standardized - and increasingly popular - Windows NT server market and rely less on its customized Unix machines. An HP-Compaq combination would finally get the company pointed in the right direction.
Windows is "open" and Unix is proprietary. Why are big corporate guys so smart? DEC, Tandem, Compaq, even the IBM PC - they're all gone. And we're still using Macs. For whom does the death knell toll? Mon 20 Jun 2005 Fetchmail and other thingsCategory : Technology/fetchmailGUI.txt I've created an interface to configure Fetchmail. It's going to be part of an "enhanced/improved" version of Postfix Enabler that I'm working on. It's also part of this whole idea that we could use the Mac to build a business on. For example, carrying forward the idea about "working without a safety net" (see previous post), imagine you're on your own now and you've decided that, instead of spending a couple of years applying for job after job, you would stop to think - about "what economic value could you contribute to the marketplace" and "what tools do you need to get on track again"? Over and above the technical details about doing "sudo" and launching Unix services, this is what I've always felt - that I should be spending a lot more time thinking about the real-world issues, like what assets do I have that people would be willing to pay to use, and how each could be made into a stream of income. That's why I built these tools - so that I won't have to spend any more time than I need to get these services turned on to help me be in business. So what do we need? For a start, I think, a mail server. Firstly, it's convenient to have this totally under your control and it's really the foundation for a lot of future automation. Then there's the web server, but you need to be able to turn on a few services to reap its full power (e.g., WebDav for sharing calendars, PHP for running a weblog), and, even more importantly, to be able to know what people are reading when they stop by your site. Do they stay, or do they move on? And, finally, you may or may not need a DNS server configurator yet, but it's important to have that handy when you need it. So there's this whole Internet-in-a-box idea. You could use an XServe and OS X Server. Or you could use an ordinary Mac and concentrate not on every conceivable Internet service, but only on those very focused activities that could help you get a business going. So, I'm working on this "iBox" idea that could help people run a business on a Mac. There's going to be a lot more changes to all the stuff that I'm working on by the time I'm done. For example, this is what the Fetchmail interface looks like now. But I'll need to move a lot of things around by the time I'm done. (So, I'm just sending this to a couple of people to try out, for a start. But I'm reviving a bulletin-board/forum idea that I had for the site so that people can chime in on what they want to see being built.)
While on the topic of building systems, I don't think I would have spent as much time building all these applications if Cocoa hadn't been so much fun to use. For example I don't think I'd bother writing Mac applications if we're still on OS 9's programming APIs. I've had the five or so volumes of Inside Macintosh but I've never managed to build more than a couple of applications (in C) in a decade of use and, even then, these were of limited usefulness. (I've always had to use things like 4th Dimension or FileMaker Pro, instead). If you look at the interface above, I used Cocoa Bindings to create and populate that table and it was very fast. The only problem is that there seems to be a bug in Cocoa Bindings when it's handling a table column with a NSSecureTextField cell (the "password" column, above). It doesn't update correctly when a user edits the column. I've got a couple of other places in Postfix Enabler that handles passwords and I've always been concerned that these passwords were left in the clear. So I very much want to find a way around this. (While Googling for it, I found just one other guy who had reported this problem, but I'm sure it's a Cocoa Bindings bug because the NSSecureTextField cell works OK on a table that's been created the "traditional" way, without Cocoa Bindings). I've actually spent more time trying to make the password column work than I took to create the whole Fetchmail interface and I'm still looking for a solution. So it's still quite a bit of work. There's this "patcher" for Postfix Enabler 1.1.6 floating around that will let you use it without a serial number. Plus, I know of at least one working serial number, also floating around the web. I don't understand it. It's only 10 bucks. I thought we all believed in capitalism :-) Only God knows why the world works this way. Sun 19 Jun 2005 Working Without a Safety NetCategory : Commentary/safetynet.txt Or is it, working without chains? We visited this cute little place called The Animal Resort somewhere in the north of Singapore, not too far from our home. The great thing about this life we've slipped into is that we can take time off whenever we want, and go wherever we want, without any guilt.
Living without a safety net, I've learnt that I need to watch my health like a hawk. Any mishap in the form of a debilitating illness will throw even our most carefully wrought plans into disarray. I'm a borderline diabetic, having inherited this condition from my father and his parents before him. (My father had Alzheimer's - will I have it, too?) I've been watching my diet. Working from home, I get to eat good healthy food, bland though it may be. To think that I live barely 200 metres from a gastronomic paradise. But food I can resist. I've lost half of the ten kilograms that I'm supposed to lose. And I'll get the other half gone if I can make myself go running every day. If I go 200 metres in the opposite direction, I hit a trail into the Nature Reserve bounding MacRitchie Reservoir. I did a run the other Friday morning at about ten and passed quite a few people who looked like they didn't have to go to work. They looked pretty happy to me. I was looking at the latest issue of Fortune over the weekend - about people in their forties or fifties who've lost their jobs and not likely to find another one soon. I read about a guy who's been told by a recruiter that "he's got a lot of maturity". This is a terrible time, if you're not prepared. I think the forties is both the worst and yet the most likely time a person would lose a job. My cousin at Sun tells me that every time he survives a cut and moves up the hierarchy, there are seven less people around him who've been culled. Eventually, it'll be his turn. It's been eleven years now since I've had to learn to work without a safety net. It's not that I'm totally comfortable all the time. But I've at least made peace with the idea and learnt not to panic. There are levers and gears you can use to keep yourself afloat. And I've come to realise that the only person who can guarantee yourself a safety net, after all, is ... yourself. Fri 10 Jun 2005 WebServer Monitor 1.0.7 ReleasedCategory : Technology/WebServerMonitor107.txt I've released WebServer Monitor version 1.0.7. I've needed a way to quickly filter the log records by a visitor's IP address so that I can see how he has traversed through the web site. In order to do this, I've added a Navigation menu so that if you do a Command-Option-C, you can copy the log record's IP address to the Search Field, at which point the log records instantly shrink to show only those from the same IP address. If you've sorted the columns by time, you can see how the visitor has come into the site, what pages he has looked at, for how long each page, and when did he leave. Other items in the Navigation menu clears the Search Field (Command-Option-X), scrolls back to the currently selected log record (Command-T), and launches the referrer's web page (Command-R), which can also be done by double-clicking on the log record. There's also the new "Check for Updates" menu item under the Help Menu that will bring you back to the WebServer Monitor web page, if I have a new release ready. Actually, I'm thinking I could use the WebServer Monitor to be an Apache configurator, e.g., to set up WebDav, PHP, etc. Together with a log analysis tool, that's probably going to be the next improvements. DNS Enabler 1.1.3 ReleasedCategory : Technology/DNSEnabler113.txt The domain name server now listens correctly to all its network interfaces on re-boot, and this seems to work reliably (about a minute after reboot). You can find DNS Enabler here. The important thing is that the mail server gets its domain name correct when it refers to its name server, so that it can broadcast this correctly to other mail servers, rather than the xxx.local that it would otherwise report. This increases the chances that its mail will get delivered. (Except for those picky mail servers that check further about whether its IP address is coming from a dynamically allocated block - something that I feel is beyond the call of duty). Anyway, it's still an interim solution. It's neat because I avoided changing the system-supplied Launch Daemon plist, but it's at the expense of making the server check a lot more frequently for changes to its network interface. But, at least the system is now working like a name server should. There is a Check for Updates menu item in the Help menu so that you'll get to know if there's a new version out. And this will be added to all the other stuff we're doing, like Postfix Enabler, WebServer Monitor. And Luca. "He who's not busy being born, is busy dying"Category : Commentary/busybeingborn.txt "He who's not busy being born, is busy dying". That's Bob Dylan, and I wrote about this sometime back in connection with a book I was reading then, "The Creative Economy - How People Make Money from Ideas" by John Howkins. I picked up Andy Grove's book, "Only the Paranoid Survive" from my book shelf, turned to the back cover and, whaddaya know, there's a blurb from Steve Jobs. (This book came out, let me see, in 1996.) "This book is about one super-important concept. You must learn about Strategic Inflection Points, because sooner or later you are going to live through one." - Steve Jobs, CEO, Pixar Animation Studios. So, what is this Strategic Inflection Point of which he speaks? From the jacket notes : "Grove's contribution to business thinking concerns a new way of measuring the nightmare moment every leader dreads - the moment when massive change occurs and all bets are off (italics added). The success you had the day before is gone, destroyed by unforeseen changes that hit like a stage-six rapid. Grove calls such moments Strategic Inflection Points, and he has lived through several. When SIPs hit, all rules of business shift fast, furiously, and forever. SIPs can be set off by anything: mega-competition, an arcane change in regulations, or a seemingly modest change in technology. "Yet in a watchful leader's hand, SIPs can be an ace. Managed right, a company can turn a SIP into a positive force to win in the marketplace and emerge stronger than ever." Apple is heading into one such tornado. And Steve Jobs looks like he's prepared. Wed 08 Jun 2005 Never a Dull MomentCategory : Commentary/Macintels.txt Macintels! This reminds me why I'm a Mac user. We never have a dull moment. I'm actually looking forward to it. Ralph of ApfelgerŸchte asked me what I think. This is what I wrote : "I think it's a good move because it's good that Apple has two chip suppliers, or even three, and the OS is processor-independent, so why not take advantage of it anyway. And I believe that it'll turn out to be transparent, at the end, to the end users because Apple's strength is, of course, that it has always taken responsibility for building the whole box and defining the user experience, and it'll be just another Mac even if it has Intel Inside, and we wouldn't even know unless we go and take a look. Of course, I'm speaking as a Cocoa programmer and I see mostly good and I'm looking forward to it." While Apple's switching processor may not make much of difference to either IBM or Freescale (but they couldn't scale!), as they have been quick to report, or even to Intel, as some analysts have suggested because of "the tiny sliver of marketshare that Apple has", I'm thinking beyond the numbers. Of the Intel that believes "only the paranoid survive". On the one end, we have a chip-maker that's proud of its ability to constantly innovate its way out of dead-ends (remember RISC vs CISC?). And on the other, we have a computer maker who'll drink the innovations like water from a fire hose. We live in interesting times. Mon 06 Jun 2005 Collect All 3Category : Commentary/CollectAll3.txt I remember being amused by Apple's print advert of the original iMac - the iMac with five colours - and its sub-head, "Collect All 5". So, now, I've got a web page each for Postfix Enabler, DNS Enabler, and WebServer Monitor. Go ahead and collect all three, please. I built all three because I've needed them. WebServer Monitor allowed me to track how people buying Postfix Enabler were traversing through the web site. And that's how we noticed why they weren't seeing the serial number page, even though we've had that page up from day one so they'd get their serial number immediately. It's a short step from knowing why to knowing how to solve it, and I've been able to sleep a lot better now without worrying that someone's paid and not getting their serial number. And it's amazing seeing downloads of DNS Enabler going to places as far away as Peru and New Zealand. (I'd like to go where those bits are going.) DNS Enabler has been invaluable when we're doing our testing, when we need to mock up, say, how one mail server could authenticate and relay mail through another. So they're all available for download and they can be improved no end. I may be able to make DNS Enabler and WebServer Monitor so good that people would be willing to pay for them eventually, but I'm out of this Shareware thing. It's either going to be free or it's going be commercial. In-between is stupid. Believe me, I know. Sat 04 Jun 2005 LifeCategory : Commentary/life.txt I'm re-reading this book from my library - "Unleashing The Killer App" by Larry Downs and Chunka Mui - and, on Chapter 5, I see this quote from Frederick Winslow Taylor : "Life which is one continuous struggle with other men is hardly worth living." It's so true. Thu 02 Jun 2005 DNS Enabler for TigerCategory : Technology/DNSEnablerForTiger.txt I've been working on a DNS Enabler that will work with Tiger, and yet remain compatible with Panther. It's version 1.1 and it's now ready for download. I've written some earlier notes on how to use it, here. And you can download it from here.
Tue 24 May 2005 Postfix Enabler 1.1.6 ReleasedCategory : Technology/PFETiger116Released.txt From the release notes : Version 1.1.6 Release Notes 1.1.6 24th May 2005. Conforms to Tiger's new way of launching system services, using launchd. Use the Red Cross (in the top left hand corner of the Postfix Enabler window) to re-enable the Enable Postfix button. Clicking Enable Postfix now will shift you over to launchd. POP and IMAP services launch more reliably now even on 10.4.1. Will continue to launch services in the "old" way on Panther. This release also fixes the problem where a PowerBook refuses to go to sleep when running Postfix. Also, the serial number field is now more forgiving of leading and trailing spaces. Tiger launches a lot faster than Panther, even on an iMac that I had been testing on. POP and IMAP launch more reliably now after reboot. There was one case when the IMAP service couldn't be contacted from another machine, but the service did get launched on the server, so it could be a network glitch somewhere. Other than that, it was a pleasure to work with the new Launch Daemon mechanism. Mon 23 May 2005 Postfix Enabler works with launchdCategory : Technology/PFEwithLaunchd.txt I've got a new version of Postfix Enabler (version 1.1.6) that conforms to Tiger's new LaunchDaemons mechanism for launching system services. Yet, it's still backwards-compatible with Panther. Launchd is a very nice idea. It's a lot neater to work with (than the old pre-Tiger mechanisms). And I can now throw away that kludge I used to get POP and IMAP running after a reboot in 10.4.1. It's worth it cleaning up the code to work with launchd. The Mac starts up so fast now. That's, I think, one of the objectives of launchd - to simplify and speed up the start up process. And I can stop clashing with that org.postfix.master.plist entry for control over Postfix because I'm using it now myself. This version continues to work with Panther. It does things the old way when it's on Panther. But when it finds itself on Tiger, it will use launchd. But you'll need to use the Red Cross to re-enable the Enable Postfix button, so that you can click on it to get you over to launchd. Also, in this version, there's the fix to the Postfix master.cf file that will allow a PowerBook to go to sleep when it's running Postfix. Plus a few other fixes to cut down on support calls, e.g., the serial number field is now more forgiving if you leave spaces before or after the serial number. And the Enable SSL check-box won't be active until you have created the necessary SSL certificates. I'll be testing it for maybe another day. If anybody needs it, please let me 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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