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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Tue 22 Feb 2005

Server Down

Category : Commentary/serverAccessDown22Feb05.txt

Our server was not accessible for four hours just now because of some problems at Singnet. Seems like broadband access was down all over Singapore, if you're on Singnet. Looks OK now. In case, you're wondering.

Posted at 12:55PM UTC | permalink

Sun 20 Feb 2005

Infinite Loop

Category : Commentary/infiniteloop.txt

I've just finished reading Michael Malone's "Infinite Loop". I'm wondering about how people like Malone and Jim Carlton could write their books with so much bile.

"For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new." - Niccolo Machiavelli - (that was the passage that came to mind) - from The Prince.

Actually, if you've ever run your own company, you might take a little more sympathetic view of much of the same events described by Malone in his book.

In the twenty years that went by, most of the companies Malone extolled for their virtues, as much for their contrast to Apple - DEC, Compaq, even IBM's PC business - they're all dead and gone. Or languishing (HP, Sun). And we're still using Macs.

Here's a guy who seems to have a desperate need to be the one who declares the winners and the losers. Like God. Like I could imagine, on Judgment Day, Malone snucking a seat next to God so he could make the pronouncements - hero here, shit-head there.

It's an interesting read (for other reasons), so long as I don't have to pay for it and send money his way (I borrowed it from our wonderful library).

The lesson for the entrepreneur or the innovator - build it and they won't necessarily be allowed to come. Watch for the gatekeepers and opinion formers. (I'm tempted to add, parasites all.) Make sure you have a lot more iron in the soul. It's going to be a long haul.

Posted at 11:53AM UTC | permalink

Will we get an Apple Store?

Category : Commentary/applestorequestion.txt

Will we see an Apple Store (a physical one, that is) in Singapore? I was at that AppleCentre at Wheelock, above the Borders book store, during lunch. It's right next to the sushi joint, where my wife likes to take the kid, and I think you can get a feel for how well the Mac market is doing from watching the size of the crowd.

By a lot of accounts, this place isn't synonymous with good or pleasant service, but still, the crowd's pretty big. Huge, actually.

So, I think an Apple Store in Singapore will do very well. Note that this is only conjecture. I don't have too many friends in Apple's sales team and I'm definitely not privy to any plans. But to me, it's a no-brainer. What are they waiting for?

Posted at 10:09AM UTC | permalink

USB Flash Drives & The Little Mac Shop That Could

Category : Technology/USBFlashDrives.txt

I bought a couple of USB Flash Drives yesterday from a Mac shop called SGL Marketing at Sim Lim Square. It's a little, hole-in-the-wall, almost impossible-to-find niche near the overhead bridge between Sim Lim Square and Albert Complex across the road. But Mac users in the know will make our way there because you get the best deals and the most pleasant Mac-like service.

I actually bought one 1 GB drive first but I found it was slow and, at that rate, I'll never be able to fill it up. So S. G. Lee allowed me to swap it (even though I've already tried it) for two 512 MB versions, which turned out to be cheaper, and she surprisingly returned me the difference with a smile. (Now where else would you get that? At that AppleCentre at Wheelock? Don't make me laugh). Don't let that dingy, worn carpeting fool you. They're the real class act.

I'm really behind the curve with USB thumb drives. I realised that it's great for copying over the course materials quickly when people turn up for our courses. I believe that a very high percentage of the attendees actually own iBooks or PowerBooks. So it's possible to see the day when we don't have to set up the lab machines. Everybody will bring their own.

Also, while copying over stuff to the thumb drives, I kept getting errors and I realised that application bundles couldn't be copied over. So something must be wrong. That's when I found that you can re-format the drives to OS X Extended format (they were originally in the old OS 9 Mac-PC Exchange format, I think). After that, things speeded up a lot and the copying errors went away. So the 1 gig drive should have worked well, after all.

Posted at 9:34AM UTC | permalink

Sat 19 Feb 2005

An Update on the Next OS X Java Course

Category : Commentary/Java1and2MarchUpdate.txt

We're supposed to have a Java on OS X course on the 1st and 2nd of March. But this is going to be postponed towards the end of March because Leon Chen (at Apple WWDR) is helping us arrange to do one instead in Kuala Lumpur during the week of the 7th of March.

We'll get confirmation of that next week. If you're waiting for the OS X Java Course in Singapore, I'll try to find out what would be the re-arranged date as soon as I can.

I'm ready with our material for Objective-C and Cocoa, a course we'll be doing for a group at Apple next week, 23rd to 25th February.

Hai Hwee's done with her SQLite Cocoa framework, which allows me to embed a SQLite database into our Objective-C applications and training material. It'll save us a lot of time preparing the machines for a course without having to take care of the MySQL installation.

Now, to get a SQLite JDBC connector done for Java, also. We're trying to encourage everyone to come for our courses with their own PowerBooks. This will only be workable if we can cut down on the number of things we need to have loaded on their machines to the least possible. We're getting there.

Posted at 5:07PM UTC | permalink

AppleScript Studio Course (17th & 18th Feb 2005)

Category : Technology/AS1718Feb2005.txt

We did the AppleScript Studio Course on 17th and 18th February at Apple Singapore. It gets easier to teach, each time, as I figure out how to streamline the material to get the ideas flowing into the people's heads at an easy pace.

The first problem doing these courses is that the attendees come with varying levels of familiarity with the course topic. So the first part of the day, it takes a lot of energy to reach into their minds to try to pull everybody along at the same pace.

Then there's the problem of figuring out what we really want to achieve with doing the course. Of course we want to teach people how to make use of AppleScript Studio. But how? It's only after doing it two or three times that the way ahead starts to clear up.

This is what I mean. We could teach Xcode, and then the AppleScript language, and then the way to control Cocoa objects using AppleScript, and we could do all these pedantically, step by step, one after another, systematically, exhaustively. But you could do all these on your own without attending a course. In a two-day course, this method takes too long. And it's boring.

What I think we could do is to teach people how to learn how to learn - quickly - to introduce a system so that they can figure out the key concepts, which forms a framework to which they can add new knowledge, on-demand, at their own time, which supports an engine that can get productive work done, almost as soon as they're out of the course.

In the AppleScript Studio case, I try to take advantage of AppleScript's English-like syntax to help people read AppleScript code, to catch the flavour of the language so that they can understand what's going on, as soon as they can, so that they can start doing fun things with the language, and not get too hung up with the details, because you can always search the reference guides later.

AppleScript Studio is fun. And it's not a toy. It is a seriously malleable material to build a lot of useful tools with. What I am finding is that it's possible to use this platform introduce ideas about good design, to show how you can use the object-oriented nature of the language to bring a structure to your program, to program defensively, and to design sub-routines and functions with real conceptual power, rather than just be formed simply because the program got too long.

AppleScript Studio and Objective-C with Cocoa - these development environments make building GUI-based applications easier than ever before, which should make them, at least, easier also to teach. What we could do is to use the space that's opening up to help people think more creatively about design, so that they do things better rather just doing things with the tool.

A lot of people have come to the courses to evaluate what they could do with the tools on OS X. All we could do is to continue to try to teach it well, so that they may be inspired to do things they couldn't have done before. It'll be interesting, down the road, to see what turns up.

Posted at 4:42PM UTC | permalink

Thu 10 Feb 2005

A New Year

Category : Technology/PayPalPaymentTechnology.txt

It's Chinese New Year in Singapore, the beginning of the Chinese lunar year, but I'm working through it, preparing for a series of course that we'll be doing from next week. At times like this, my house is a sanctuary, untouched by the hubbub that is going on around it.

It's also the beginning of something, I'm not sure what, but I'm sure it will amount to something significant. I've just received notification from PayPal that we're able to receive credit card payments from people without their having to sign up as PayPal members.

That is a big deal to us. We've been waiting for months for this to happen outside of the US. (Hai Hwee just sent me this link - looks like we were not alone in agitating for its release).

We talk about being on-line, 24x7, high-tech and high-touch, but wait till you try to get a merchant account to do on-line credit card processing. That's somehow still handled by the analogue world of form-fillers, everything in triplicate and high annual, monthly and set-up fees. And we look across back to our PayPal set-up. That was so easy and money comes in to our Singapore-based DBS account at the end of the chain.

Before today, people who want to pay us, on-line via credit card, have to sign up first as a PayPal member. Now, even that step is optional.

The process is almost perfect. If you're not a PayPal member, there's (thankfully) not too much more details to provide, when compared with other systems. There's one problem, though, if you are already a PayPal member - "Just remember the account optional (is) not all it seems to be. It(')s only optional if the credit card and email address being used are not associated to (with) a PayPal account. If one or the other is, then the customer must use their PayPal account. Its a start, but no(t) quite what it seems by the name." - from the PayPal developer site.

If you watch how PayPal's grown and the steps it's taking, you're seeing the beginning of a powerful beast. Watch out WorldPay, Planet Payment, and all of that ilk. Somebody's going to be eating your lunch.

Posted at 7:14AM UTC | permalink

Tue 01 Feb 2005

Course Updates

Category : Commentary/Feb2005CourseUpdates.txt

The registration window for the AppleScript Studio Course on 17th and 18th February has been closed. We're now informing the 20 successful applicants, 14 of whom have confirmed attendance. That leaves six places still to be confirmed. If, by tomorrow evening, there are still places left un-filled, we'll free them for the others in the queue.

What I enjoy most about doing this is watching Hai Hwee's course registration system at work. It's so fun, the interactivity - sending out the invitation, and watching the registrations come in almost immediately, sending out the notifications, and watching the confirmations coming in just as quickly - with all the database updates, web page generation, and e-mail notification done on-the-fly by the intelligence that Hai Hwee had built into the scripts.

That is the ghost in the machine - of the friendly type - intelligent agents that work for us while we sleep. That is what I really want to do for the rest of my life - finding businesses we can run that use our own technology.

While we're on this, there is a Java on Mac OS X Course on the 1st and 2nd of March 2005. Free. Sponsored by Apple World Wide Developer Relations. Somehow, java.net picked up on it. I hadn't mentioned it in the weblog at all. But I might as well do so now. If you're interested in attending, please bookmark that page, and wait for the registration to be opened some time after Chinese New Year, next week.

Actually, February is going to get pretty busy. I'm doing a custom Objective-C and Cocoa Course for a group of people at Apple Singapore on the 23rd to 25th Feb. Out of this, I hope to create something more generalised that can serve as a (hopefully, interesting) introduction to the wonders of doing programming with Objective-C and Cocoa on Mac OS X. Hai Hwee has finished creating her SQLite Cocoa framework, and that's what I'll be able to incorporate into our courses to show database access from Obj-C.

Posted at 2:10PM UTC | permalink

Pursuing the Transcendent

Category : Commentary/seaChange.txt

Two articles. Plus this picture of Creative's Sim Wong Hoo, which brings to mind the term "beleaguered". Do these all add up to a sea change?

The first article was, "The Revenge of the Right Brain", at Wired :

"Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent."

"Pursuing the transcendent". I've often wondered at how I turned out to be a "Mac fanatic" - if we let the blinkered business press have their day by adopting their terminology.

I think the turning point was when I was at our Ministry of Defense. We've just put up a pretty nice Technology Show, and we ran a lot of the presentations using MacroMind Director. Those were the days when the PCs were on character-based DOS and they only had PC Paintbrush, Harvard Graphics, etc. So, it was really liberating, on the Mac, to be able to choose nice typefaces, use pretty scanned-in graphics of high fidelity, and animate sequences with lead-ins and transitions and even music.

A couple of us who worked on the presentations would have been interested in being copywriters or being in advertising, if we didn't also have an interest in the programming side of using computers. If you observed the guys or girls who gravitated to the Mac, then, you would have over-heard conversations about films or books or music or architecture, even among the techies. So there was a context, or shared understanding, that developed around the use of that tool - mainly because you could relate those extra-curricular interests at so many levels in the use of the tool.

Like, I could relate the work of a master like Alfred Hitchcock to the issues I was grappling with in user-interface design. See Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre".

So, it should have been a great thing to have shared this different way of using computers, and we were being complimented by people from other ministries - that we had opened up their eyes to some new possibilities - but we hadn't counted on being put down by people from our own side who were the gate-keepers - the PC admins, coordinators and sysops who made the rules and control the choices. It was all so much razzle-dazzle to them, inconsequential, signifying nothing. Not just nothing, which would have been alright. But the Mac seemed to have triggered a visceral response - which led, a couple of years later, to every single Mac being rooted out from the organisation, most of them still in good working order.

It's the response to stupidity and waste and injustice that characterises the actions of someone who's called a "Mac fanatic". If you understand the Great Classical-Romantic Divide, and the difference between left-brained types and right-brained types - all these could be explained. I've spent four years in engineering school, among people whose shirts don't match the pants don't match the socks. I could live in that world, and have friends there, too. But did some of them get laughed at when they went over to check out the girls at the Arts faculty, and felt compelled to take it out on the "flashy, GQ-types" the moment they had control over them due to their better affinity with computational tools? We'll never know.

But what we do know is that, from the start, computers were technically difficult. The people who moved up to positions of power were pre-dominantly left-brained, with degrees in maths, computer science or engineering. It's taken quite a bit of time but things are starting to change.

The problem with the Great Classical-Romantic Divide is one of vision, or the lack thereof. The left-brained types, the people in control of the technical choices - they don't know what they don't know, can't see, and don't care. But there are more people pointing things out their way now.

Like this article today, "Dell - Beware the Beige Box Blahs".

" Rollins (Dell's CEO) dismissed Apple's mega-selling iPod as a "fad," calling it a "one-product wonder," and he pooh-poohed the eye-catching Mac mini as inconsequential.

" Rollins' comments are more than uncharacteristic. They're troubling -- and not just for their snippiness. They raise real questions about how well Dell understands the home market."

That's it, again. Fad. Inconsequential. That was the kind of response we got so many years ago. But now the tide is turning. How much does Dell understand about what the PC market's turning into?

Or Sim Wong Hoo, for that matter? How much does Sim Wong Hoo understand about the war he has declared. He, with his harmonica, is as un-cool as anyone could be from U2 and The Edge. And we're talking about being in the music business - that's where the war is being waged, and he doesn't know.

Not that I'm picking on a fellow countryman. How much does Bill Gates really understand about working with information on a computer, with his "Business at the Speed of Stupid" ideas.

We're really working with information, not computers. Like the way Revlon doesn't really sell cosmetics but hope. It's really about integrating art with technology - "artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent". If we believe that we've got this just one life to live, ought we not to try to live life to the full, in all its multi-facetted glory? Why bother to use just one side of our brain when we could use both? It's about having breadth of vision and a unity of purpose. And remembering to thank our Creator for having made it possible.

At this point, imagine Van Morrison singing "Have I told you lately that I love you". That version gives true meaning to the word "transcendent". Just what do we do without iTunes?

Posted at 2:10PM UTC | permalink

Thu 27 Jan 2005

AppleScript Studio Course (17th, 18th Feb) Update

Category : Technology/ASCourseUpdate.txt

We've about 26 to 28 people registered for the course, as of now. Leon may be closing registration soon, because we're going to do about 20. But we've had people signed up, and later neglected to confirm their attendance. So it's not too late. Places may free up later. So, hurry to sign up before the window closes.

Posted at 5:06AM UTC | permalink

Wed 26 Jan 2005

AppleScript Studio Course @ Apple Singapore

Category : Technology/AppleScriptStudioCourse1718Feb05.txt

Apple World Wide Developer Relations is sponsoring an AppleScript Studio Course on the 17th and 18th of February. It's free.

Just sign up on-line as an Apple developer (also free) before registering for the course.

If you're registering, you're using Hai Hwee's course booking and training administration system - all written in PHP plus MySQL, all on the Mac.

We've got one registration within a minute of Leon Chen sending out the course invitation. That was fast. An update: as I was writing this, another five's come in. Great!

Posted at 7:23AM UTC | permalink

Tue 25 Jan 2005

Application software development on the Mac? Let me count the ways

Category : Technology/softwareDevelopmentPathsOSX.txt

Last week, I was too busy, but not that busy that I'd miss this discussion at silicon.com. "CIO Jury: Apple irrelant to businesses."

"... CIO Jury was invented by silicon.com to take the pulse of the UK's top IT users. We regularly put questions to our pool of key CIOs, IT directors and other heads of IT ..."

Key CIOs? Top IT users? Sure don't look like it. Read the readers' comments. The tide is turning.

One CIO said, "Proprietary hardware and software, overpriced, few applications." Microsoft is proprietary but that doesn't seem to stop them buying Microsoft. "Few applications"? If they only knew.

I've been wrapping my head, these last few weeks, around all the different ways we can build custom applications on the Mac. So I'm going to do a summary, as much for myself, as for anyone who's reading these pages.

Firstly, where Windows has Visual Basic, the Mac has Real Basic. Or AppleScript Studio. Or FileMaker Pro. These are good for custom applications that don't need to be "professionally" done, but that need to be put together in a hurry, and can be "thrown away" without too much bother once they've done the job or served some need. They don't need a deep investment in technical knowledge, and they're often cobbled together by the more knowledgeable (and committed) among the end users, themselves.

Now, when more "serious" programming is required, we can turn to Java - on both platforms. Java is great for building server-based applications that can run on any hardware platform on earth.

On the Mac, there's a twist. You can build native Mac OS X Cocoa applications using Java. And re-use a lot of your code at the data model end of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) continuum.

Java-Cocoa is eminently do-able. We've mapped out a large enough part of the Java-Cocoa API to be able to help people who want to port code they've already written in Java to the Mac so that it gets a Cocoa front-end.

With Java, too, you can get access to any SQL database engine that you want. From Oracle to MySQL to PostgresSQL. Oh, the choices. Thy name is legion.

There is one problem with Java, though. Java applications are easily de-compiled. Unless you first try to "obfuscate" your code, it's really quite possible to recover the source from the compiled byte-code, thus turning away people who'd rather keep their source code hidden. But obfuscation is really so much extra bother. Java is great for server-end stuff, or for in-house system development (as contrasted with shrink-wrapped applications), or for open-source projects. That is still a lot of areas, as far as productive work goes.

Now, shrink-wrap software developers might want to do their software development using Objective-C. (I know, the term shrink-wrap itself is so 20th Century). No doubt that keeps the selling opportunities within the smaller world of Mac users, but there are compensations in the sense that developing Cocoa applications using Objective-C is fun, and you can do quite involved and seemingly difficult things using relatively little code, and you're, on the whole, super-productive, allowing you to build better quality products with a lot less people.

I used to think there was a deficiency in the area of database access when I switched from Java to Objective-C - that meant losing the ability to use the JDBC database-connectivity mechanism and its bountiful harvest.

That was why we've been trying a few approaches over the last few weeks.

One was to use Objective-C and keep all the database access using Java. But that got too messy.

The solution turned out to be quite simple, actually - at least conceptually. A lot of the relational databases we want to use have C API's - MySQL, SQLite, Oracle. Now, following the example of the MySQL Cocoa Project at sourceforge, we now know that it is possible to build a Cocoa framework that is callable by the rest of the Objective-C code, but hides the actual implementation of the database access. In effect, it does what the JDBC layer does for Java applications.

That turned out to be quite exciting. We could use the Open Source sMySQL framework. Or we could build our own, now that we understand the concept.

What we want to do is to build something that will mirror the JDBC calls so that it'll make it easy to port our Luca Accounting System code from Java to Objective-C.

What's more. SQLite is expected to be included in the next revision of our favourite OS. It's currently quite limited in features compared to MySQL but it's usable, and has a pretty liberal usage policy (none of that copyleft viral stuff that comes with GNU licenses). We've tried modifying the Cocoa framework to work with SQLite. The idea works. My friend, Hai Hwee, has also built a little prototype of Luca that works with an embedded SQLite database. That idea also works.

All these is so that we can avoid having to install a database for the users before they can use our applications.

If we're careful with the design, we can take the inspiration from JDBC and build the Cocoa frameworks so that we can access different SQL databases, just by swopping in and out the relevant Cocoa frameworks, without needing to re-write much of the calling Objective-C code. That will be super-powerful.

There's Core Data in Tiger that does something like that. But it's good to know how to do your own thing, just in case that's not good enough for our purposes.

Zooming out from the trees and surveying the forest, I believe in the phenomena whereby, when the time is right, many people around the world suddenly see the same possiblities, almost simultaneously. I can't remember what this phenomena is called. But the Internet surely makes this even likelier to happen.

Whatever it is, I expect to see an explosion of useful database-linked software coming out for the Mac. The ingredients are in place. And when it arrives, those top, top CIO's aren't going to know what hit them. And, perhaps, where their jobs had gone.

Posted at 2:55AM UTC | permalink