| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Wed 18 Aug 2004 BackfireCategory : Commentary/backfire.txt Real petitions Apple not to break the iPod. But they got exactly the opposite of what they intended. This is the link before it disappears. Wed 11 Aug 2004 SamizdatCategory : Commentary/samizdat.txt I read William Gibson's Disneyland with the Death Penalty and I feel I have a response to that. But people who come to these pages to get technical information about using Macs for businesses may not be all that interested in what I have to say. So I'm going to put all my Singapore-related posts in a blog called Travelog that I created on beds-central.com, the website that I'm setting up for the traveler's hostel. But I will say something about this blogging system that I'm using. I took this PHP port of Blosxom, which is called PHPosxom, and modified it to make it easy for me to change the look of the pages without touching the PHP code. I'm benefiting from it now because it took me only a while to add a blog to Beds Central that fell in with the look of the rest of the pages on the site. There are already a couple of interesting Singapore-related blogs have been created using it. If you look closely at Otterman Speaks and Habitat News, you will see that they are using a blog engine called Samizdat. Click Samizdat and you'll come back to the page where you can download my version of PHPosxom, which I'm sort of calling Samizdat. My friend Siva is involved in creating both of the afore-mentioned blogs, which are about conservation and wildlife and natural history. He's also found a lot of interesting blogs written by Singaporeans that I wished I had noted. But I'm going to start collecting them now on Travelog. The great thing about a weblog format is that I can take a subject matter, in this case my love for this place that is my home, and take my time to build a whole collection of stories around it, including links to that will show you a Singapore that is worth knowing, rather than the travesty conjured by William Gibson and people of his ilk. I think the weblog format works. More than a year ago, on February 20th, I wrote about why I'm doing this weblog about the Mac, which I'm calling "The Ultimate Business Machine". I wrote about how "I'll put things on the side bar that people can try. Between the commentary here, and the reference/tutorials at the side, I hope to convey a feel for the power that is latent in the machines we have grown to love..." If you've come over and enjoyed reading these pages, then you will agree that the idea works. I'm hoping that it'll do the same for Singapore. It's the least I can do to pay it back. Mon 09 Aug 2004 We are SingaporeCategory : Singapore/singapore.txt It's National Day in Singapore. This marks the 39th time we've celebrated Singapore's birthday. Amidst the rush of red, Singapore's national colour, worn by the schoolkids let out early last Friday to throng the shops and theatres along Orchard Road, I came across two books that typify the conception that people abroad have about Singapore. "Police state", subservient population, dictatorship - these are the usual adjectives. One finds them in abundance in a couple of pages devoted to Singapore in "The Book of Cities". If the people are subservient, I didn't meet them in the army when I was doing National Service. You get the same problems you get everywhere when you're trying to get people to do what they won't naturally want to do. It's much like herding cats. No more and no less. And the squeals of laughter that resounded from the corridors of the top floor of the Heeren, where 77th Street resonates with the pulse of our youth - street-smart clothing and fashion accessories, stashed haphazardly in delightful spaces in a chaotic maze. These are smart, intelligent kids you see. But what you see most are expressions of pure delight, filled with the joy of living. Do I sound like I live in a police state? The more I travel, the more I've come to appreciate the place we call our home. There's this other book I found - Gerrie Lim's "Invisible Trade - High Class Sex for Sale in Singapore". Ahh, Gerrie Lim. I enjoyed his other book, "Inside the Outsider" - a collection of interviews with rock icons like Patti Smith and David Bowie. I found the Patti Smith interview most memorable. Intelligent questions and an easy writing style. His latest book doesn't disappoint. It's well written and I learnt some new things. But what saddens me is the need to turn to people like Paul Theroux to lend credence to the book. Writes Mr Theroux in the blurb, "At last, after thirty years of my avoiding the city-state, this book restores my faith in the Singapore character and gives me reasons to return." I actually read the book to figure out what he means. I just watched the National Day Parade on television. This is Goh Chok Tong's last day as Prime Minister. The affection that most Singaporeans feel for Mr Goh is genuine and unforced. Who would have known, fourteen years ago when he stepped into Lee Kuan Yew's big shoes, that we're going to miss his thick Hokkien-accented English and straight talk. Talk about faith. I watched the faces of Mr Lee and Mr Goh during the parade. We know, and I think they know, that they've done a great job. Who cares what Paul Theroux thinks. Tue 03 Aug 2004 Oracle 10g on OS XCategory : Technology/Oracle10g.txt We've got Oracle 10g running on OS X. This is the Oracle Database 10g Early Adopters' Release 2 for Mac OS X. It's supposed to need OS X Panther Server but we've managed to install and run it on a normal OS X Panther machine. But the installation process seems to have gotten so much harder. Even I could handle Oracle 9i but, for 10g, we've got to send in the commandos (command-line-philiac people like Chiang Hai Hwee). We're testing it by running Luca (our Accounting application) over it. This is what we've found so far, in comparison to running Luca over MySQL. The first one is minor. There are some incompatible SQL statements, due to the differences in the SQL dialects spoken by Oracle and MySQL. Second. We've got to take note of the following while programming Luca - MySQL search strings are not Case-Sensitive, but Oracle's are, so some searches can be found by MySQL, but not by Oracle. Here's a major showstopper. MySQL handles semaphores (so that we can prevent more than one person updating a database record at the same time) by names, but we had to use table locking in Oracle, which results in deadlocks, even with a single user logged in. We need to review this part. Maybe we're wrong? On top of it, Oracle 10g feels significantly slower than both 9i or MySQL, when tested on the same machine. But then, we don't know much, yet, about tuning this beast. And this, I must stress, is not the final product. It's interesting how MySQL gets more and more attractive all the time. Score one for the Open Source Movement? Comparing Freehand and Illustrator, OS 9 and OS XCategory : Technology/FreehandAndIllustrator.txt I used to be a Freehand user. I knew the program well enough (since the time it was called Aldus Freehand) to teach it, in turn, to artists and designers. But Freehand (since it was acquired by Macromedia) seems to have gone to the dogs. It's still an easy enough application to teach a beginner about vector-based graphics, as opposed to pixel-based tools like Photoshop, but its interface has turned clownish, as if to fit in better with the Windows crowd. Adobe Illustrator, on the other hand, is a bit harder to grasp. I constantly had trouble re-sizing the graphics until I figured I had to throw away what I had learned from Freehand and learn some new things on Illustrator's terms. That accounted for the couple of trips to the on-line manual. But after that, though I still occasionally got frustrated moving an object rather than re-sizing it, I found Illustrator to be much slicker and better designed than Freehand. A lot of designers have refused to move away from OS 9. If you look at the state of Freehand on OS X, you would harken back to the good old days of the slick, efficient, clean, Mac-like tool that Freehand was. But, if you open your eyes and keep an open mind, you may discover a whole new world of productivity, especially when you use the whole Adobe suite - InDesign, Photoshop, GoLive, Illustrator, Image Ready, and Acrobat - in concert. There are of course, still, a few Windows-centric elements in these programs that mar a Mac user's experience, e.g., icons for the sake of having icons, and an increased use of modes. Mac-like applications try to avoid having a user turn on or off modes to effect an operation because that's the easiest way to intrude into the user's awareness and break the flow of his thoughts. (That was what gave me the most trouble learning Illustrator - I had to switch to an edit mode to change a shape, and it's pretty "iffy" whether you've effected the switch or not. Freehand is a lot more fluid in this sense.) But when you're doing a web site, you need to have the tools integrated the way Adobe did with GoLive, Image Ready, Photoshop and Illustrator. You're always able to work with the original artwork and GoLive takes care of creating web-ready graphics and updating all the right places on your site folders. OS 9 hold-outs ought to take a look at what they're missing. There's a whole new way of working. But there's a lot of fear that printers will all break on OS X. I'm not too sure if that is myth or fact. I feel just the opposite - that it'll be easier to find printers that will work with OS X and that they will often cost less because Postscript is not that much of a requirement on OS X anymore. I have a Postscript colour laser printer that works with OS X but I often neglect to use the Postscript option because OS X's built-in Quartz-based rasteriser does a good enough job of emulating a Postscript printer, with maybe up to 95% of its quality. I don't have time to research this area much. It only comes up when I try to make good quality prints and I get the standard comments from printing companies that they don't like OS X much (as if they've ever really tried to use it). It's irritating but that, I feel, is something for those working for Apple to solve. For now, I think, the migration to OS X has been well worth it. At least for me. I'm tempted to say, OS 9 is for the Luddites. But that may be too rude. How did the Holy Trinity of Aldus Freehand, Aldus PageMaker and Aldus Persuasion become Macromedia Freehand, Adobe PageMaker and abandoned, respectively? I must have fallen asleep along the way. Sun 01 Aug 2004 A Mac at WorkCategory : Technology/AMacatWork.txt I've highlighted the work we're doing at the traveler's hostel, Beds Central, because, for a long time, we've been looking for a project that'll allow us to express ourselves fully. And this is it. While I'm working on the project, I'll be able to explain how the Mac-based tools we're using allow us to do things a bit differently from the way IT projects are normally carried out. For a start, we get to use both sides of our brain, using the same set of tools on a single computing platform, to solve the widest range of problems, in both starting and running a business. For example, for budget planning we use, like every company on the planet, Microsoft Excel. But, in the case of businesses like hostels and hotels, budget planning goes hand-in-hand with space planning. So, we're rapidly getting out of the purview of most IT managers when we start to pull out Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator, to work on top of architect's drawings, to find out how many beds we can optimally put into the space that we have. It's easy to get the architect to produce copies of the floor plans to a certain scale, then scan these in, and within minutes, we're on a roll. We're able to constantly come back to these drawings, and using layers, we're able to position the air-con ducts, electrical points, lockers, partitions, lighting, etc., and use these as the basis for detailed costings, and to describe the scope of the work more accurately to the contractors. Once the budget is settled, it gets entered into an accounting system. With the company registered and bank accounts opened, it's going to start paying people. So, the accounting system is invaluable for maintaining financial controls and forcing everybody to watch the budget. Of course, there's a need to communicate all these things to so many people and get them organised. But watch how these things are so much easier to set up in our day. We need a web site, a site on the Internet that we can do business from - with a mail server, a web server, and an ability to program things so that you can exchange information with the intended audience, and also an ability to link these transactions to the accounting system, which sits on the server and is accessible to all the right people across the Internet. There's an inversion of some sort here. The technical infrastructure are the easiest to set up - literally within minutes. Once you've got an active broadband line, getting the web and mail servers up, registering a domain name and activating it - all these can be done in one session without getting off the chair. The web content and the programming are on-going stuff - they need to be constantly updated for the life of the business. But the reservation system (protoyped using PHP but written eventually using Java) is largely done. So, the thing that took the longest time to do was actually coming up with the name of the hostel. Even then, we have Google and this gives us tremendous power to do so much research over the web. Coming back to web sites. Most IT people think only about Linux, etc. But how do you make maps on those machines? I mean, I mocked up the site quickly, using maps I "borrowed" from map sites and photos that I scanned in from books. But these won't do, once the site is offically up. I have to quickly replace them with original work. I've been using Adobe Illustrator to make my own maps. It's the first time I've ever used Illustrator but I've only had to refer to the on-line guide twice. Illustrator's integration with GoLive and Photoshop is so wonderful, I save a lot of time by using them together. The Lonely Planet guide-books call their map-makers cartographers. So, now I'm a cartographer, designer, programmer, writer, and anything else. It's all due to these tools. On the Mac. On my iBook. And on Hai Hwee's Titanium. Is there any computing platform more productive? Macs for business? Are people still laughing at such a notion? Wed 28 Jul 2004 Some UpdatesCategory : Technology/LucaReleased.txt Luca - Hai Hwee has released a full working version of the Luca Accounting System for Mac OS X, with no time limit. You can find it here. Enjoy! Mac@Work Live - this is the birth of Mac@Work Live - a space housing a permanent collection of live demos of all the technologies that make Mac OS X a great platform to run a business on. This is also where we're going to do Mac OS X developer training and seminars in conjunction with the Apple World Wide Developer Relations group here. Beds Central - And, this is the name of the traveler's hostel that we're helping to set up, using all the technologies that I've talked about in Mac@Work. It's called Beds Central and it's in a very interesting part of Singapore, housed as it is in a truly authentic historical building at the edge of Chinatown. I've just settled on the web site's look and I think I'm going to enjoy building on it to tell the story of Chinatown and it's role in the history of Singapore. Of course, there are other things still to do, like making it a really fun, clean, safe, and well-run place for travelers to want to stay in. But the journey has started and, hopefully, the journey will turn out to be, at least, well worth taking. It's been a real busy week and there's so much to do and so little time. Life is meant to be lived to the full. Thu 22 Jul 2004 Waterworks for the MindCategory : Technology/waterworks.txt As if to underline the idea that we can learn almost anything we want off the world wide web, I saw this entry in the web server log : GET /weblog/index.php?entry=/Commentary/GoodbyeSanFrancisco.txt Referer : http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient& Even without following the link, the guy who made that query would have found the answer he was looking for : 18 hours - that's about how long it takes to fly from San Francisco to Singapore - because Google displays this in the result line : "But, first, there's a long 18-hour flight to endure tomorrow". You can try it yourself. Now, as if to prepare for this moment, I had just noticed a very old mouldy dust-stained book, as I was going through my bookshelf, just before reading these server logs. So I went back to look it up because it is pertinent to the discussion. That book is Literary Machines by Theodor Holm Nelson, first written in 1980. And, if that name doesn't ring a bell, try Ted Nelson. Way before the Internet and way before Tim Berners Lee, Ted Nelson was already writing about hypertext, hypermedia and hyperworlds, about what has since evolved into the semantic web, though not quite exactly as he had envisioned it. But this is my favourite passage from the book : "SYSTEMS HUMANISTS "As you may have suspected, I see another point of view. As far as I am concerned both the Technoids and the Fluffies are in their own little corners. In the broader view, the goals of tomorrow's text systems will be the long ones of civilization-- education, understanding, human happiness, the preservation of humane traditions - but we must use today's and tomorrow's technologies. We who believe this are systems humanists, striving to further the ideals of the humanist perspective by the best available means. This means finding the ways that human literature, art and thought-- including science, of course-- may best be facilitated, preserved, and disseminated. "Consider the analogy of water. Civilization as we now know it is based in part on running water-- supplying it, distributing it, and turning it off and on where you need it. That overall system had to be thought out. Similarly, someone now must design waterworks for the mind. "The literature we envision, described in this book, is meant to be a utility, a commodity, a waterworks for the mind; your computer screen will be the spigot (italics added)-- or shower nozzle-- that dispenses what you need when you turn the handle. But that system must be based on the fluidity of thought-- not just its crystallized and static form, which, like water's, is hard and cold and goes nowhere." -- Ted Nelson, Literary Machines
Wed 21 Jul 2004 Contributors to Postfix EnablerCategory : Commentary/PFEContribs.txt I've not updated the list of people who've paid for Postfix Enabler for some time. Here's to : Jason Bode, Warren Jacques, Saikee Wong, Dirk Kring, Rajiv Wickremesinghe, John Farrell, James Schaaf, Jerry Bannon, Masatoshi Tsunoda, Kevin Moloney, Erik Klein, Paul Earle, Andrew McLaughlin, and Glenn Sugden. I get a kick out of seeing the PayPal notifications coming in, with all these names. It's like the United Nations. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Tue 20 Jul 2004 Mac@Work LiveCategory : Technology/MacAtWorkLive.txt Leon Chen of Apple's World Wide Developer Relations sent over these iMacs and a few other G4s. These iMacs are very nice because they're all G4s, have enough memory and hard disk space, and already have airport cards - they're all ready to do training on.
We're preparing our place to host developer training for Mac OS X, Java, Xserve, and all the other OS X technologies. We've found that the biggest drag about doing training is spending a whole day beforehand preparing all the training workstations, and then packing them back in the boxes at the end of the sessions. So we thought why not do it at our office where we have enough space, is conveniently located downtown, is easily accessible, and where we're also able to host seminars. And, because of the projects and systems we're working on, we're able to set these systems up with good demos, ready to run, showing Oracle, MySQL, mail servers, web servers, Java servers, e-commerce applications, etc, all the things that could convince people that the Mac's a really powerful tool to use in the enterprise. Sort of like Mac@Work Live, because we're really focused on getting the most out of the Mac, at work in the enterprise. So that's another nice project to work on, together with the traveler's hostel project where we're going to use all the technologies that I've written about in these pages. If I could have chosen just two projects to work on at the beginning of the year, these would be it. Mon 19 Jul 2004 Freeing LucaCategory : Technology/FreeingLuca.txt We're thinking of releasing Luca (our accounting application) as a donation-ware, un-crippled download. We're constantly improving Luca. It hasn't got stuff like nice icons for the buttons, but I feel these can wait. I believe that the user interface has to work well first. And I'm constantly pruning away at the interface so that the things that are there are the things that are absolutely necessary to have. Like the Zen way, I'd like Luca to have a very sparse look. But that doesn't mean it isn't deep. You'll know it goes pretty deep when you start using it. Why are we thinking of doing this? I'm thinking that the more people who are using it, the better it will get. And it'll get there faster, too. When I look at Postfix Enabler, and consider the amount of features that it grew to have, I think about how so many people were willing to contribute good constructive suggestions. So, Luca has got the stage where it already works well, but it could do with some polishing by having many people use it. Also, the Mac is still not what most people think about when they think about a machine to run their business on. Perhaps Luca could be an agent to help jump-start the movement back towards using it. I've always believed the Mac to be The Ultimate Business Machine. But you can't run a business without having an accounting system to run it on. Hai Hwee's working on overlaying a point-of-sale/inventory system on top of it. We're finding that there are so many things we could do, just by having an accounting system, and having the ability to integrate all other business processes into it. So we could release Luca just like we did the Enablers, as donation-ware, for as long as we can remain viable as a business concern through our consulting projects, though we won't be able to provide much tech support. Are there anybody using Luca now who feel that they will definitely use it seriously if it doesn't have a time limit? If we dropped that time-limit, would you pay us for what you think it's worth? And I'm also wondering why there are not more people building Cocoa applications using Java? In my opinion, that's the best position to be in. We have some Cocoa using Java course notes that I'd like to find time to build on. There's so much work and so little time. Switching ServersCategory : Technology/switchingServers.txt We've switched back to the server at the office. It takes less than 5 seonds to deactivate DNSUpdate at the iMac and reactivating it at the office server. This switches our IP address record at dyndns.org to point to the office's server machine. Add another minute or so to make sure any new changes to the server during the weekend get updated to the office server and we're back to normal operations. And I'm thinking, again, this is a most powerful way of arranging things. Why don't more IT people get it and stop thinking of the Mac as a non-business machine? I remembered there were some talk at MacSurfer a few days ago about Mac users being smarter than PC users, and I went to look it up - "Overall, the results are pretty clear: Mac users might not actually be smarter than PC users, but they certainly use better English and a larger vocabulary to express more complex thinking." Reach your own conclusion. 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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