Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

The
Ultimate
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Technology, business
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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Fri 02 Apr 2004

Xserve

Category : Technology/Xserve.txt

The Xserve looks deceptively thin and light on Apple's web pages. So it was a surprise how big and heavy the Xserve box is :

The next picture shows the contents, laid out on our floor :

And the Xserve, itself. It's a G4, Dual 1 GHz, with 512 MB of RAM :

I've hooked it up to a PC monitor, borrowed the iMac's keyboard and mouse, plugged in the Ethernet cable, and turned it on. It's like a jet plane taking off. I mean the sound. It's loud. I'm going to have to live with this for the next two weeks. At this point, I don't think I'm going to miss it when it's gone.

The Xserve starts up like any Mac. No, not like any Mac I'm currently using because it's fast. Very fast. How much faster would the new G5 Xserves be, then? It's looking good.

It's currently running 10.2.8. I'm going to erase everything on it and start from scratch with 10.3. Then I realise I don't know where the CD-ROM drive is.

Okay, found it. It's on the top right. Will carry on with the installation as soon as I can find the Panther Server CD's.

Posted at 9:46AM UTC | permalink

Thu 01 Apr 2004

Panther Server on Xserve

Category : Commentary/stuffOnXserveList.txt

We're going to get an Xserve from Leon at Apple tomorrow. It's for the Sun Tech Day. I'm making a list of the things we're trying to get loaded on this machine :

OS X Server 10.3.3 and Java 1.4.2.

Xcode 1.1, Eclipse, NetBeans, JBuilder, and IntelliJ's IDEA to show the array of development tools that OS X can support.

MySQL and Oracle. Plus the CVS system.

Luca, our accounting application, hopefully both as a Cocoa application as well as on the web. And all of our Java demos that we built for the "Java on OS X" course.

Plus, some demos from Leon's iDisk that I hadn't looked at yet.

So if you're in Singapore on the 20th and 21st of April and want to see all these working on an Xserve, come and visit the Apple booth at Sun Tech Day, at The Stamford.

Posted at 7:09AM UTC | permalink

Kamikaze Franchises

Category : Commentary/franchise.txt

It's the gold rush. It's the time to be your own boss. Or so everyone thinks. There are lots of free seminars one can attend about starting your own business. I attended a couple and I'm hooked - I'm going to sit in on a few more. Partly to clear my own head. But mostly to watch this tide run its course.

Lots of people selling franchises. Great business, if you're the franchisor. Not so, if you're the franchisee. Too many people reading Robert Kiyosaki - and quite a few, I believe, are going to lose their shirts.

The question is : what's the difference between a McDonald's and a child care centre or a computer-aided learning centre, when they're all sold as a franchise?

Franchising is the easy way in. You can create your own business, buy over someone else's, or buy a franchise with all the templates, powerpoint slides, and letters to parents laid out for you. If you spent your whole life scoring A's in exams by memorising "model answers", which route would you take?

But McDonald's have squeezed out almost all dependencies on the human element from their workflows and processes. That's the McDonald's way and it's the archetypical franchisable business. But nobody I know has figured out how to replace the quality a human being brings when it comes to taking care of a child, or motivating kids to learn through the joy of discovery. How much money can these businesses make, when the operators have no idea what it takes to create their products, do not understand the products they would be selling, and have left staffing as an afterthought?

I think the key question to ask is : can the business produce a consistently high-quality product, when operated by any normal human being? In other words, have they found the key to making it work like a well-oiled machine, where a specific role can be performed by any mere mortal? Child care and learning centres are still businesses that ought to be run by people with a love for kids and helping them learn and grow. It's not like a method can't be found to systematise the delivery of these services. Somebody just might be able to find the right idea. But the ones doing the selling last night most definitely didn't. Then what are they selling?

So some businesses will work as a franchise and some won't. The key is to figure out the rules of each game. Of course, anybody can attempt to sell any business as a franchise. But, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Because the would-be hunter might just end up as the prey.

Posted at 6:38AM UTC | permalink

Wed 31 Mar 2004

"Tired of working? Be an entrepreneur"

Category : Commentary/tiredofworking.txt

This ad made me laugh so hard. I'm looking at the Business Opportunities section of the Straits Times classifieds.

If you're going to be an entrepreneur just because you're tired of working, you're going to be hit so hard, you wish you hadn't been born.

Welcome to the grind. But, seriously.

Posted at 9:58AM UTC | permalink

Thu 25 Mar 2004

The Good (Computer) Books Guide

Category : Commentary/goodbooks.txt

I'm going over the Panther Server, peeking under the hood, but I keep thinking about a couple of books I've read as I'm doing it. I don't know why but, maybe, I'm thinking about what it takes to put all these technologies together.

Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" was probably the book that started the genre - the one that made reading about computers and computer companies fun. Who remembers Data General, or DG, or Damn Good, as their then Singapore-based GM called his company, when he gave a talk to us students, back in 1983? It's twenty years on. From the mini-computer to the workstation, to the iBook. I've worked on them all.

The other hacker classic is - "Hackers" by Steven Levy. In there, you'll meet Richard Stallman, and recursive acronymns, and GNU's not Unix.

If you haven't read them, then you ought to. If they work for you the way they worked for me, then you might also want to read : "Rebel Code", Glyn Moody, about Linux and the Open Source Revolution; Jeremy Campbell's "Grammatical Man"; Downes and Mui's "Killer App"; and Nicholas Negroponte's "Being Digital".

Also, "Open Sources" - Voices from the Open Source Revolution, which is not that good, because it's really a collection of articles of varying quality, but interesting, all the same.

Posted at 11:30AM UTC | permalink

Sun Tech Day

Category : Commentary/suntechday.txt

There's a Sun Tech Day coming up on 20th and 21st of April 2004. We're going to be helping out Leon Chen and EC Tan at Apple's booth and lab session. Besides Apple, Oracle's also present. So we're going to load Oracle on an Xserve, and figure out what we want to show. Leon says that, at the previous show in Beijing, Apple's booth drew a lot of interest from the Java crowd. I think it's going to be fun. Guess which vendor is not going to be there?

Posted at 10:28AM UTC | permalink

iSight - let me count the ways

Category : Commentary/mindset.txt

The local Mac users are a feisty lot and up in arms over the poor product knowledge shown by the people selling Macs in Singapore, as this post shows. You can search the discussion group archives for a lot more of such comments, some of them quite funny.

But, then, it's not all about complaints. More than occasionally, you get gems, like this from a guy called Timmy in reply to an earlier post about the usefulness (or, rather, lack of) of the iSight :

"Well, the iSight is more than just a webcam. you can use it as a digicam too. let's say you're at a press conference or interview. just mount up your iSight, point it in the right direction, and hey, live video recording! can also use it as a mic to record audio of meetings, useful for minutes taking.

"There are also fun apps like iStopMotion, I'm sure you can use iSight to make such movies. And then there is ToySight, can play games using iSight: it detects the motion of your hands to control the game!"

So, you learn so much more about what you can do with the iSight. Timmy would make a super Mac salesman. I think about some of the bicycle shops we have in Singapore, like Treknology and CycleWorx. Macs should be sold like that - by enthusiasts, to other enthusiasts.

Posted at 10:26AM UTC | permalink

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Category : Commentary/IT.txt

Singapore is trying to get more people out of the public sector and into the private sector as entrepreneurs. But we've been doing this (dare we call ourselves entrepreneurs) for ten years and wondering, lately, if the smart ones are not the ones who stayed put (on their Herman Miller chairs).

But then I read this article by Robert X. Cringely, "A Lose-Lose Situation - Sometimes IT Integration Just Isn't Worth the Trouble", and I'm reminded of just when and why we decided we wanted no part of that scene, anymore.

Apple has a web page about Macs in business and the stories there pretty much describe where we're heading and what we want to help make happen - e.g., "My decision to go with Mac was based on two key criteria - the quality of the user experience, and reliability. The technology had to be transparent, intuitive, easy to use. So my staff and I would be happy and motivated and productive while using it."

But all you have to do is read one article and you'll realise why Macs are such a hard sell with IT departments - "I'd worked with PCs at prior practices, and I knew they required a lot of IT support. And I didn't want to pay somebody a whole bunch of money to set up and administer a PC network, to worry about constant server patches and updates, port configuration and reconfiguration. With the Mac, I basically did it myself. I don't have an IT support contract, because I just don't need one. The beauty of a Mac network is that it pretty much configures itself! And that saves me thousands of dollars a year easily.

"Finally, I wanted my staff to be as comfortable as possible using the technology. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time training. With Mac, I trained my entire office staff myself. It took no time at all, because everything's just so intuitive. Click here, click there, and they were all very confident about using the Mac - even my previously technophobic nurse."

I'm wondering how I'm going to make any money, myself.

But, another story. I went with my friend, Ronnie, of Tarawerkz, a longtime Mac consultant and 4th Dimension developer, to the department in charge of Healthcare Computerisation here - he helped a doctor build a 4D-based patient records management system and now another hospital wants to use it. The catch is : he has to get past the IT Department. So, in the meeting, there are a couple of Information Architects (whatever that means), a Database Administrator, a Security "Expert", and a Network "Expert", and they're all grilling him on porting all these to Oracle (the favoured platform), conformance to their IS architecture, producing specifications, schemas, and data flow diagrams. They're doing what is called "due dilligence".

Poor guy. There's very little money in it, and all this work before he's even awarded the job. In the middle of helping him explain how 4D could work with Oracle and Microsoft's Active Directory, my mind drifts and I see that all these guys don't need to care how long this takes because they're all on salary. They're walking all over this one guy's work but that guy is the only one in the whole room who's created anything of value - he's after all the guy who's built something that has worked, and that another hospital wants to use.

It's like in American Idol. If being the judge pays so well, and you get to be nasty and condescending, and get paid well too, then why don't everybody be the judge? Everytime this happens, I'm thinking two words - Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Here's to John Galt and Howard Roark.

Posted at 7:05AM UTC | permalink

Mon 22 Mar 2004

The Gift of Travel

Category : Commentary/giftoftravel.txt

Gather round a group of people who've been blessed with the ability to write extremely well and collect their travel experiences. You'll get a book like, "The Gift of Travel" - a collection of quite wonderful travel stories.

You'll read about a couple of long-distance, cross-channel swimmers who saved a pelican who, later, turned up to greet them at the finish line. And a couple of stories about coming to terms with death and loss. And many more.

Reading it was something I looked forward to, at the end of each day, the last week. Finished my meal, get into something comfortable, whip out the slim volume, and I'm immediately transported. Nice short stories. I was really sorry to reach the end.

Posted at 9:11AM UTC | permalink

Fri 19 Mar 2004

SpamAssassin on OS X Server

Category : Technology/pantherserver.txt

I have SpamAssassin and the Anomy (Anti-Virus) Sanitizer running on the OS X Panther Server. There are some differences in how I've set up Postfix on OS X Client and how it works on OS X Server, but the concepts remain the same. I needed to tweak things a little and it works.

So I should be able to show how a message (that looks like it's spam) gets tagged by the SpamAssassin filter. And I've some attachments with known viruses (courtesy of Michel Poulain, who's been catching viruses since he was a kid; thanks, Mike, if you're reading this) that I can send to show how they will get caught by the anti-virus screen.

So, Leon and EC at Apple will now have an anti-spam/anti-virus solution they can package with their Xserves.

The Panther Server is interesting. I can hang on to the TiBook (that I'm running it on) for another week. I'm wondering why Apple didn't put the same care into the Server Administrator control panels that they gave to the iApps. I think there's a way to design the administrator interface to make it appeal to the IT geeks.

Posted at 10:21AM UTC | permalink

Spam Assassin

Category : Technology/spamassassin.txt

It seems like a long time ago since I was fiddling with both Spam Assassin and Mike Poulain's anti-virus filters for Postfix, but I've promised to help Leon Chen (World Wide Developer Relations) and EC Tan (long time Mac guy) at Apple to take a look at installing Spam Assassin for OS X Server.

I've had a trial copy of OS X Server from EC for some time, but I've never had a spare machine to run it. So I'm now running it on a TiBook he loaned me.

I've been finding my way around it. The Postfix part is mostly quite familiar. I still need to figure out how the Cyrus stuff works. As well as Open Directory. The administrator interface looks clumsy and lacks the usual Apple polish. But, I think I'll enjoy poking around it.

It took a whole afternoon to re-trace my steps to figure out how I had managed to get Spam Assassin to work on OS X client - and I had done it just a couple of months ago.

When you find a way to systematise the whole procedure and make it work with just one click, you eliminate a whole lot of work. But not everyone would be pleased to see that work eliminated, and I can actually see the point. It is often the case that you get paid for the perceived difficulty of the job.

With technically dense things like IT, very few people are sharp enough to tell make-work apart from real-work. And even when they could, even fewer are wise enough to think that they should go out of their way to reward an elegantly concise solution. It's not like in soccer, where the highest earners are those who make the difficult things look easy, like Zinedine Zidane or Thierry Henry. Actually, it's quite the opposite, and I'm trying to understand why.

There's a moral dimension to a systems analyst's work, if you're unlucky to be so pre-disposed. It's hard to work this out.

Posted at 10:19AM UTC | permalink

Thu 18 Mar 2004

WWDC, Help for the Visually Impaired, and Other Things

Category : Commentary/wwdcitem.txt

I may be able to go to WWDC this year. It looks like it may be interesting. But I have still four more weeks before I need to decide.

Here's an article that says, Apple is building help for the visually impaired into the next revision of OS X. It's going to be called Spoken Interface. In the time-honoured Apple way, its name alone is enough to tell you what it does. (Compare Rendezvous with Sun's JXTA). Also, in the time-honoured Apple way, it's going to be made available as a framework, so that all Cocoa applications will get access to its functionality with very little extra work.

So that is Apple's way of doing well by doing good.

Apparently Apple does listen to its user base. So, this is my wish. We've had HP people, DEC people, Sun, and now IBM people running Apple Singapore. When are we ever going to have Mac people running Apple Singapore? Maybe some food for thought.

Posted at 2:01PM UTC | permalink