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Weblog Archive Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo








Creative Commons License

Copyright © 2003-2012
Bernard Teo
Some Rights Reserved.

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

The Understanding Business

Category : Commentary/TUB.txt

Today's Straits Times Money page has an article about how Singapore hopes to be the front-office for jobs going to back-office outsourcing operations in India and China. That's the role our IT industry hopes to play - if only we have the project managers who are skilled in understanding business requirements, who could design and organise the solutions, and who could then communicate these specifications to lower-cost programmers in India and China.

First, I think there's a problem with this picture. It pre-supposes that this is not a role that India and China would themselves want to play. If you get the customers into the front office, you could then try to sell them a whole host of other complementary solutions. So that's a choke point that both India and China would want to get hold of, as soon as rising wealth, improving infrastructure, and a more worldly-wise population allow them to do so. So whatever advantage Singapore gets hold of here - if it could get it at all - would only be temporary.

Second, and this is an observation, even with such low-cost alternatives available in so much abundance, the critical skill - that of being able to understand, design, and communicate information - is still so hard to find.

It brings me back to the statement (which I always thought I read in Lewis Mumford, but is usually attributed to Marshall McLuhan) that "We shape our tools, and in turn, our tools shape us".

In the case of our IT industry, since our practitioners chose to wield the computing tools at the level of the technician, then it should be no surprise that we end up with IT guys who only know how to "work the steps", if somebody else could first define the problem for them. And, as the article admits, this is the situation we find ourselves, and at great cost, in terms of lost opportunities.

Is there a better way? I think so, yes, and it's what we've been fighting for for more than ten years. It's to get IT people to dis-entangle themselves from first an IBM-centric, and then a Microsoft-centric - (and that should also include Apple-centric, if such a case ever could arise) - worldview and see beyond the technology and understand that we're really working with information rather than with technology.

As Richard Saul Wurman said many years ago, we're really in The Understanding Business. It's from the perspective of helping people understand, organise, and disseminate information that we should align all our other concerns - about computer processors, networks, and databases. These form the tail, and the tail shouldn't wag the dog.

But which PC guy would have heard of Richard Saul Wurman? Or Neville Brody, April Greiman, Allan Haley (typefaces), or Nigel Holmes (pictorial maps) for that matter? You wouldn't have come across them, and their ideas about information design, if you had not been interested in fonts, desktop publishing, and communications.

That's the struggle, to take control of the discourse, so that we get people to talk first about the information we want to provide, and how soon, and why these matter to the organisation, before we talk about conforming to Oracle or Visual Basic, Access, or .Net. Maybe I have a poor constitution, but the sight of dogs, of all shapes and sizes, being wagged vigorously by their tails in countless IT meetings have left me wanting to throw up.

It's been hard to get people away from their fiddling with dip switches, and opening up the computer chassis, and swapping network cards - when these look like so much justifiable work.

It's been hard to argue that we need to get people quickly away from these low level stuff (because we could always buy computer systems that will just work ;-), and get them instead to focus on the level where they're working with the information design. That's much harder work. You have nothing to show that you're working. At least, not until you actually deliver on the idea that works. And you need a lot more awarenes about the outside world, about businesses and what they need to be profitable, about setting priorities, about workflows, and most of all, about people.

But how do you get people to understand these abstract things? It doesn't look like much to do with dollars and cents. But, if we ask the wrong questions, we solve the wrong problems. If we've been building up our ability to work first with the information design, and then to integrate the hardware and software to meet the requirements of that design, being careful to choose the combination that works better for the user than for one's own career, then we would be uniquely placed to play that role of the information architect - by now.

Better still, we may be able to work out how to overcome the labour-cost disadvantages, since countries with those advantages still lack the single critical skill to put the whole thing together.

But our little dog has come back to bite us. And will continue to do so, for a long time more.

Posted at 3:17AM UTC | permalink

Mon 15 Mar 2004

The Myth

Category : Commentary/macsmyth.txt

I'd hate to be known as an Apple groupie. It's possible to love the products built by this company, but to dislike the people inside who should have done a better job getting these products into the hands of more users.

While corporate IT departments have done a very effective job of blocking the entry of new Macs into the enterprise - and eliminating those wherever they are still to be found - Apple itself has been culpable, not least for having sales and marketing people who, one, feel the product sells itself and, two, have nothing but contempt for the so-called Mac fanatics.

Or, is this only confined to Singapore because it's too small a market for Steve Jobs to care about? But whatever the local Mac Users Group feel about Apple, you can be sure it's not warm feelings for the local Apple retail and consumer marketing guys.

Jesse Sng, a long time Mac user and developer, submitted a post to the local Mac users' mailing list, entitled "Selling Macs - The Myth" - and it expresses basically what I feel myself, so I'll put a link to his message. It is a carefully thought out analysis of why Apple has failed to grow its market share, at least here in Singapore.

"Often, Apple and Mac users would talk about superiority and totally miss the point because the customer is not looking for superiority but rather he is buying into an entire community or ecosystem. So selling him the idea that he is joining a fringe minority isn't going to help."

Come on, Apple. Why don't you staff the ranks of your sales and marketing team with people who are truly convinced about your products, rather than with people who think that the Mac is an easy sell, and well, there's always the dumb Mac user who is willing to pay for anything (and cheer anything) Apple puts out?

These are two things holding back the size of the Mac user base - Microsoft-centric IT departments that are hostile to the Mac, and complacent Apple people who take a cynical, exploitative view of the hard-core Mac user, rather than involving them in a healthy, expanding ecosystem. Or maybe this concept is too hard to understand?

As I have tried to describe in these writings, I believe that the Mac's small market share is in no way due to technical issues, like the "computer architecture" that Apple chose to adopt. The problems are, instead, "people" issues, and should be addressed as such.

Actually, "people" problems are both harder and easier to solve. Easier, because they are not intractable, unlike structural problems from choosing a fatal, dead-end technological route. But they are harder to solve simply beause they deal with people, and whether or not they have tried to align their objectives with the needs of their organisations.

I have yet to hear of an Apple marketing guy turning up at a Mac meetup. Perhaps he could learn a bit about how ordinary users are teaching others, even hitherto hard-core PC users, about why the price of a Mac is worth paying for. Perhaps he could learn that there are lot more ways to grow the Mac user base. And isn't this all that matters? But perhaps not. There are always other agendas.

Posted at 6:29AM UTC | permalink

Sun 14 Mar 2004

Family

Category : Commentary/family.txt

My wife took this picture of me and our kid, Brendan, on the right, before we went out to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, below.

Today, we had one of those really fine days.

Posted at 2:59PM UTC | permalink

Sat 13 Mar 2004

Black Elk Speaks

Category : Commentary/blackelk.txt

Look,
I fill this
sacred pipe
with bark from
the red willow. But,
before we smoke, let us see,
how it is made, and what it means.
This eagle's feather represents the thoughts
of Man, and how they should rise high, like the eagle.

I don't where I first discovered it, but I've always liked this poetic rendition of the words of Black Elk (Chapter 1 of Black Elk Speaks).

"How it is made, and what it means." I thought about this while re-reading my last post - about how we don't think enough about the meaning of the tools we are using.

I'm thinking about events of ten years ago, about an organisation I had worked for, and the proposal paper that was written to standardise the organisation on Windows, which ultimately sounded the death knell for Mac, in this and in so many other organisations. I was thinking about how that paper was written on a Mac, and how it got through a few management levels, many of whom were also using the Mac to read, edit, and approve it.

When the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, we have a clinical term for it - schizophrenia.

I don't really know who - except for a few people I know - really reads this weblog. But I write to untangle my own thoughts, and to see where I ought to be going.

I'm writing about how we don't reconcile what we are saying, and what we think we believe in, with what we're really doing. The management books are full of "delighting the customer", creating "stark raving fans", "building things to last", doing things "the right way", thinking "creatively", thinking "out of the box", "teaching elephants to dance", "passion for excellence", and "taking the path less traveled".

But the gurus don't seem to be able to recognise what they are writing in praise of, even when it hits them on the head.

Somewhere, along the line, we've got to reconcile all these. And think things through, if we are not to be humbug.

The problem with espousing these ideals and thinking out loud is that people may come along and try to make you live up to those ideals, to serve their own ends. For example, when they want help with their Mac. Or want support, free or otherwise, to the ends of the earth, for the things I've put up? Hey, after all the things you said in your 'blog. That's the danger. But we've got to move on. Like how the Vietnam War vets took to saying, "it don't mean nothin".

Writing is a good way to clarify one's thoughts, and to take part in shaping the emerging worldview (the Weltanschauung). And when it stops being fun, it should stop.

Posted at 1:57PM UTC | permalink

The Alternative Model

Category : Commentary/alternativemodels.txt

Rob Enderle wrote the following reply to a reader of his article about "Apple's Competitive Advantage" :

"Microsoft grasped the core dynamic that was going to define the industry first and Apple never got it. They, like IBM, wanted to do both software and hardware and both firms lost as a result. Apple, who arguably created the first real PC, and IBM who defined the most popular version, are both shadows of what they should be against firms that are more specialized and often far less creative."

Yet, in his article, Enderle had also said, "Apple's designs are, well, elegant. There is no better word for it. Sony and Toshiba can come close at times, but, on average, Apple has the best-designed hardware from an aesthetics point of view of any vendor."

So how could we believe both statements to be true? We could believe that computing devices can be, architecturally, both open and closed at the same time - like the Mac (an attractive, proprietary, custom-built interface wrapped around platform-neutral Open Source parts). We could also believe that Apple's designs are elegant precisely because Apple is able to control the way its hardware and software come together, in a way that Dell can't. But it is not clear why we should believe that an admittedly well-made product is doomed to failure just because it doesn't conform to the ideological model that the analysts have in their heads?

The way Apple chose to do their technology has rewarded them with a famously loyal customer base. And, except for the periods where they had poor management - which could justifiably lead one to believe that the problem was poor execution rather than the wrong concept - Apple has always been profitable.

So, why the air of inevitability, whenever an analyst intones about the might of Microsoft's "model" - of flat, layered architectures controlled by Microsoft?

I believe that Apple's diametrically opposed model - vertical integration of industry-standard platform-neutral software layers (as opposed to Microsoft-centric ones) - is not only as viable as Microsoft's. It is also of more relevance to an age where the ability to produce small, portable, stylish yet useful, information-driven devices is the defining skill for new companies and economies to emulate. Here, the ability to decide what to leave out, is just as important as the decision about what to put in.

That's the importance of watching the war currently being waged over the iPod and the iTunes Music Software. If Apple wins this war, and holds on to its market share, even as it is stubbornly holding on to its notion of building both the hardware and the software, then it will destroy the purity of the model that the analysts have worshipped for ages, which justified the existence of all those mediocre Windows-based PCs.

I believe that neither Apple nor Microsoft has a monopoly on ideas about how we could use computers and other information-based devices. But if Apple's model can succeed, then it will inspire other aspirants to exploit the same idea - take all these Open Source parts and make them work even better than Apple has done. Apple's model leaves room for others to compete. Not so, Microsoft's. Computer architectures are a lot more subtle than the simplistic model people like Rob Enderle and Charles Ferguson have room in their heads for. (Jim Carlton had to use a Mac to write his tome celebrating the fall of Apple. Would he have had the time, focus, and energy to find the right turn of phrase to turn the screws on Apple, if he had been writing all that on a PC? In other words, if he had to be "a rocket scientist of system administration"?)

The question is: whom do we wish to serve? Ironically, cheering on Apple doesn't mean we're Apple-groupies, and cheering on Microsoft doesn't mean we are rooting for the "industry". To me, it is always the other way around, and I hope I've managed to articulate why. We should be rooting for computers that work better, and for better competition (at the very least better than Dell). I think we have a better chance with Apple's model, than with Microsoft's.

Posted at 3:56AM UTC | permalink

Sat 06 Mar 2004

Mac@Work at Apple Singapore

Category : Commentary/trainingpictures.txt

Leon Chen, of World Wide Developer Relations at Apple, put up some pictures of the Java on OS X Course that Hai Hwee and I did at Apple Singapore last week.

He'll probably have put up pictures of the AppleScript Studio Course, too, by next week.

After four days in their company, I've got the images of Frank Lloyd Wright, Gandhi, Picasso, and Einstein burnt into my memory.

Posted at 9:59AM UTC | permalink

Computer Wars

Category : Commentary/ComputerWars.txt

"Apple's iPod has put it in pole position in the MP3 downloads race, but with the entry of aggressive new competition, the running order may be about to change", says Victor Keegan of the Guardian, in an article called "The Great Downloads Wars".

"... Apple has been here before - it dominated the computer market decades ago but later blew it - and the question is whether history will repeat itself in an eerily similar manner."

That history and the theory behind Apple's collapse was discussed in the book "Computer Wars", by Charles Morris and the ever boastful, ever grating, Mac-hating Charles Ferguson ("thank God for the arrogance of Mac users"). In it, you will find the authors advancing the notion that the battles in technology will be over "architectures" - the standards that define computer networks - and, of course, in their book, Microsoft has won the wars, now and for ever more.

You know - the Sony and BetaMax analogy.

But, coming from the trenches, observing how the war was really fought and, more importantly, understanding why, I've had little patience for that piece of revisionist history. History was always written by the victors. What has been written could be true, but was it the only valid account, or, more importantly, was it the account that most closely matches the evidence? That, I think, is something that remains to be seen.

It's been said that Microsoft has won because the users have chosen. But the people who've chosen were often only the IT departments. The users, themselves, often fought bitterly to hang on to their Macs, right to the end. And you can find an abundance of anecdotal evidence to support this statement.

Now, why would IT departments choose Microsoft over Apple's solution? Robert X Cringely, for one, has made an attempt to answer it. (" First, a trick question: Why aren't Apple Macintosh computers more popular in large mainstream organizations?")

When the Mac first came out, when the pockets of Mac users in organizations started producing minutes of meetings in neatly organised, laser-printed documents, the keepers of the corporate IT resources were often asked why theirs were still produced using ugly dot matrix printers.

The implication underlying such subtle signals from management, like the raised eyebrows and the quick double-take when they compared the reports handed back during meetings (picture the beaming Mac user) was that, maybe, the IT guys were starting to get out of touch and maybe we could get some help from those Mac users. What we saw ensuing was a power struggle, pure and simple. They're things that happen everyday in organisations. But it was still a fight - between people who held a vision in the glint of their eyes of what their organisation could be, if you could just exploit the potential in the technology, and those who saw technology as merely a form of control, and not incidentally, the source of their own privileges in the organisation.

The latter had to find a solution that looked like they gave the users what they wanted, i.e. something that, to management's un-trained eyes, looked and worked like the Mac, and yet kept the strings of control firmly in their hands. But it couldn't really be the Mac, because the Mac was all about liberation, and joy and verve. Of course, in the waning days of their champion, IBM, there was, waiting in the wings, Microsoft, who stepped in and obliged. Microsoft's genius was, and continues to be, in recognising the true needs of IT departments, which may or may not be (and more often was not) aligned with the needs of their organisations.

So, in a situation when there are no IT departments to control individual purchases, would people choose Microsoft over Apple? (They are both intent on "locking you in".) I've often believed that the "systems architecture" model espoused by Ferguson and Morris was flawed. It was true in general but wrong in the particular. People want tools that work. And, since tools are often an intricate melding of hardware and software, people want tools that have been seemlessly and carefully integrated. In the PC world, it's not clear whose responsibility it is to provide that superior computing experience - certainly not Dell, not Microsoft. Mac users are like craftsmen who love their tools and they're glad to pay Apple for continuing to make them.

So without an IT department to act as controller of purchases, I believe people would vote with their dollars for the company that best provides that superior experience. And that un-analysable feeling of being cool and being hip.

I bet the guys who feel good listening to their iPods have their eyes glaze over when you talk about "architectures and standards". Sure, it's a theoretical argument that you could get abundantly more choices with Windows Media Format. But will all those stuff, with their layer upon layer of "architecture", just work. In over twenty years, with our IBM PCs and Windows-based PCs as evidence, we can be sure, as night follows day, that they won't.

Posted at 7:32AM UTC | permalink

Sun 29 Feb 2004

Joy and Verve, and InDesign

Category : Commentary/IndesignJoyVerve.txt

We slipped into this by chance. Somewhere along the way, putting together the Java course, I decided I need to include a concise description of the Java language, together with an explanation of classes and objects, encapsulation, inheritance, method overriding, and exception handling. Something that a person can get a good grasp of the language with, over a weekend of reading. Something along the line of Java in a Nutshell, the very first (slim) edition of which I bought many years ago, and which did the job for me - i.e., taught me Java over a weekend.

Due to the shortage of time, I quickly extracted just the parts I need, in an effort that will be difficult to defend against charges of plagiarism. So, I'm going to promise that I will make sure all the students are encouraged to buy the now much-fattened book from O'Reilly, and subsequently rewrite all my notes in my own style, with our own examples, for future courses.

But the point I'm getting at is about InDesign. I used InDesign to create that language guide and I always knew I could print out a PDF version to distribute to the students. But then I realised that I could export a "text-selectable" version of the notes using InDesign's export-to-PDF feature.

So I tried it out and, yes, you can select the snippets of code, copy them into BBedit or Xcode, and run them right away. So we're on a roll. We quickly moved in all of our examples, both Java and AppleScript code, and wrote up the tutorials, all in InDesign.

Except for some problems we continue to have with either InDesign or the PDF file, or BBEdit or Xcode, putting in extraneous characters that mess up the purity of the copy and paste process, we can pretty much run the course off the PDF version of the course notes - with all the explanatory pictures, instructions and source code available in one place.

Fortune may, or may not, favour the brave - but we've now got a way to move people quickly through a course - and we're going to find out if it works, or not, soon.

But that's not all about InDesign. If you're on QuarkXPress, PageMaker, or, horrors, still on OS 9, dump them all and move on to inDesign on OS X. It's a high-performance productivity engine. Plus, you get application integration between the Adobe applications that, for once, live up to their marketing hype.

And the Adobe applications really do exploit the OS X platform. While you're designing the look of the page, you may not like the fonts you already have on your system. For example, I felt serif typefaces didn't look quite at home on a page about Java and object-oriented programming. I wanted a clean modern serif-less typeface. I got out the OS X Font Book, looked through all the fonts I have, and loaded in a couple more that I happened to have on my external hard disk. When I got back to InDesign, the new fonts were picked up automatically by the running program. If you use style sheets, it's a snap to switch in the new fonts and see the effects percolate through the document.

So, at one go, I'm writing a manual for computer programmmers, looking through a book about type faces ("The ABC's of Type : A Guide to Contemporary Typefaces" by Allan Haley), and I'm putting it all together in InDesign. So I'm a writer, geek, and designer, all at once.

And, one more thing. It's so easy to build a Table of Contents in InDesign from the style sheets' structure. And you can put in hyperlinks that will lead your reader to other resources on the web, when they're clicked on. Export them all into a PDF document, and you've produced an indexed, free-text searchable book that faithfully represents the look you've designed into the original document. And you've done it just like a pro.

Posted at 9:47AM UTC | permalink

Read more ...

Mac@Work
Put your Mac to Work

Sivasothi.com? Now how would you do something like that?

Weblogs. Download and start a weblog of your own.

A Mac Business Toolbox
A survey of the possibilities

A Business Scenario
How we could use Macs in businesses

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