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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Wed 10 Dec 2003

Megnut

Category : Commentary/megnut.txt

I've got a lot of hits coming in to both the Postfix and Sendmail Enabler pages because they were mentioned in megnut.com. Turns out that megnut is Meg Hourihan, who co-founded Pyra and Blogger. Judging from the hits I'm getting, megnut is read a lot.

Typical of the way the 'Net works is this page from Consolation Champs. This guy discovered Postfix Enabler from reading "Meg's blog" and he's "a big hero in the office now!". Yeh! (Maybe I should start compiling all these "testimonials". There have been quite a few.)

Posted at 5:33AM UTC | permalink

Oracle

Category : Technology/oracle.txt

We've got Oracle 9 running on Panther on a Titanium. It's a milestone of sorts. I can't stop looking at it, doing simple things like "desc act_accounts" or "select * from act_accounts where acctcode = 'so-and-so';". It sounds inane but you've got to appreciate how far we've come since we've got OS X.

I remember about five years ago when Apple moved from OS 8 to 9 and Oracle moved from Oracle 7 to 8. Everything to do with Oracle on the Mac stopped working. I remember pleading with friends at Oracle Singapore for drivers that will work, but they've already lost interest in the Mac. If not for the Internet, and someone on the other side of the world who discovered one particular combination that worked, we would have had to give up working on the Mac.

Even that would have been lost, had our customer moved on to Oracle 9. But, fortunately, these were people who had no interest in giving any cent more to Oracle than they need.

Until today, I've actually kept one PowerBook 3400, running OS 9, just to be able to do Oracle-related work. Now, this can be retired. (Our kid's going to have his own PowerBook, just like Daddy and Mommy.)

There's an advantage to running Oracle on a Unix server. You can simply ssh to it and do database administration. On Windows, we had to install those fat SQLNet drivers on every client machine. You can't just drag and drop the drivers and associated programs like SQLPlus. It's a non-trivial installation, so you'll be able to justify the IT headcount. On the Mac now, we just ssh to the server and "borrow" the SQLPLus running on it. Client applications access the server via a very "thin" JDBC driver. We don't need to mess up all our other Macs with SQLNet stuff.

Oracle's still got the edge in terms of the "expressiveness" of their SQL dialect. But, if we want to keep our code portable, we'll have the restrict ourselves to the 80% of the SQL expressions that will work across all the other platforms we want to run on. From this point of view, MySQL has almost caught up with Oracle. If I were Oracle, I would be seriously worried. It's hard to compete with "free".

So, now, I can show Java on OS X accessing Oracle on OS X in the forthcoming Xcode seminar. Of course, you still have all the other permutations, including Java and Oracle on PCs and Unix and Linux. Haven't you heard? Customers want choice. And it's choice they will get.

Posted at 5:28AM UTC | permalink

Sun 07 Dec 2003

Just One More Thing

Category : Technology/jobsblog.txt

This is the guy who set up the Steve Job's Blog site. It's April the First in December. Great Job.

Posted at 4:21AM UTC | permalink

Fri 05 Dec 2003

Apple Xcode Seminar

Category : Technology/xcodeseminar.txt

I'll be speaking at Apple Singapore's "Development with Mac OS X" Seminar on 19th December (at the Revenue House, from 1.00 to 5.00 pm).

I'm doing two sessions - "Building Reusable Cocoa and Web Applications using Java on OS X" and "Development with AppleScript Studio".

I'm going to be showing stuff we've been building over the last year and a half. These are things we could never have done, back in the days of OS 9. I would like to show just why we're energised by the possibilities and I hope people will enjoy the talk. But the key is in the demos. No one does demos better than Steve Jobs. That's got to be the yardstick, a big one though it is. Maybe I should content myself with finishing the talk without being an embarrassment. No, we've got to strive for greater things. Right? Let's see where this takes us.

Posted at 12:12PM UTC | permalink

Thu 04 Dec 2003

If you have eyes, you will see

Category : Commentary/eyes.txt

Rev. Dr. Corey Bantik writes, "I'm a regular reader of your UBM blog ... The pictures of the Final Cut Pro course that are up on your site bothered me - the guy's eyes are closed in two of them. Since I have nothing better to do right now, I did a little editing in Photoshop. Hope you don't mind."

Thanks, Corey. Ian's a sight better to look at, now.

Posted at 5:30AM UTC | permalink

Fri 28 Nov 2003

If we build it, will they come?

Category : Commentary/FCPCourse.txt

We completed our very first Final Cut Pro course at Roadstead. Thanks to Adeline Soh and Edward Saw, and to Ian Beattie, the trainer.

Did the trainees enjoy the course? Look at the pictures below. Looks like Ian did a great job and we have two very satisfied customers.

Posted at 11:00AM UTC | permalink

The Joy of Discovery

Category : Commentary/patternsofs.txt

Yet another discovery brought about by a PayPal notification. The Enablers, Postfix and Sendmail, may not have brought in much in terms of remuneration but I think I've been rewarded in other ways.

I received a payment from Richard Gabriel and I followed the link back to his website, Dreamsongs.com.

I discovered an essay that he has written, called "Patterns of Software", and I've been making my way through the ideas he expressed there ever since, in between snatches at my "real" work.

It's very interesting reading, if you've ever spent any time thinking about why software development is hard, how to make it easier, and how to build things of beauty that also really work (and will continue to work).

I've come to accept that requests for changes to software never ends. Business strategy changes, the competition changes, the rules change - so the software has to change. Constantly.

Putting aside the hard problem of how to arrange to be paid for making all these changes, the conscientious developer is always grappling with the problem of design. How do you arrange things so that you can make changes, without bringing the whole edifice down.

I like the analogy he makes with architecture because building software is like building a house that will be used by normal human beings (though there are notable differences).

I don't have a summary to make, because reading it has stirred up a few thoughts and they will take some time to land. I just want to recommend "Patterns of Software" to others. Read it, please. It may be the best book ever written about the nature of software development, in ages.

Posted at 9:33AM UTC | permalink

Sun 23 Nov 2003

The Woz uses Postfix Enabler

Category : Commentary/woz.txt

One particular PayPal notification came in last week that made me do a double-take.

"Dear Cutedge,

This email confirms that you have received a Payment from Steve Wozniak (steve@woz.org)".

How about that for a collector's item?

I took a look at woz.org and in it he writes :

Dear Woz,

When you call Apple to order stuff and you give them your name, do people recognize you and say "Hey, your that dude that created Apple!"

Woz: I order Apple stuff online. I doubt that any human ever sees the names. But once I ordered a gigabit ethernet option. Apple noticed two months later that only two of these had been ordered, both by me! I do get noticed every time I buy shareware, and that brings me a lot of T-shirts that I get good use out of.

We would love to send over a tee-shirt one day.

But that just proves how you'll never know who's going to be using your software, one day. And I was just talking about how there's a lot of responsibility putting out a piece of software that a lot of people will use. I really, really hope it worked for him.

Posted at 8:39AM UTC | permalink

Sun 16 Nov 2003

Released Postfix Enabler 1.0.4

Category : Technology/postfixenabler104released.txt

Released version 1.0.4, the one with UW-IMAP and POP3 capability. Hope there are no bugs. The code's getting messier. May need a re-write before I add in more features.

I'm trying to make as little change to a stock OS X installation as I can to get each feature working. It's the ecological approach. I hate to have my system messed up by an application. And I try not to do it to others'.

There's a lot of responsibility putting out a piece of software for other people to use. It's five times harder to build a system that will be used by many people, than one that will be used only by ourselves, internally. And it's really hard to find good developers. There's so much to do and so little time to do it. It really helps to be working on a Mac.

Posted at 9:11AM UTC | permalink

Fri 14 Nov 2003

PacNet blocks ports 995 and 993

Category : Technology/PacNetSSL.txt

Following on the previous posting, I think I was wrong about the Airport Extreme Base Station. It was my ISP that was blocking ports 995 and 993, for whatever reason they had, and that was why POP and IMAP over SSL didn't work.

I took the Airport Extreme Base Station out of the equation by connecting the server directly to the broadband line and SSL still didn't work for POP and IMAP. So I can't blame the base station, though I guess I've still got to do a test that will prove conclusively that the Airport Extreme Base Station will channel the SSL ports in correctly. So, the situation is, if I don't have a bug in the latest version of Postfix Enabler (1.0.4), POP and IMAP over SSL will work most of its users.

Posted at 1:07PM UTC | permalink

Airport Extreme and IMAPS and POPS

Category : Commentary/IMAPSPOPS.txt

I've discovered that the Airport Extreme Base Station does not pass ports 993 (for IMAP over SSL) and 995 (for POP over SSL) through even though I've set port mapping on.

I've noticed this before when I got POPS and IMAPS working on a home machine that had the old Airport Base Station, but not at the office where we have an Airport Extreme.

But, then again, it be could be due to the different networks I am on - one on PacNet and one on SingNet. But I don't think so. It's probably the base station. I need to do a test again tonight to prove this conclusively.

Which brings me to the point of this whole weblog. Even when you try to make everything work smoothly (a click here and a click there), you're still going to get hit by blocks like these. A lot of the opposition to the Mac from the IS perspective comes from the belief that the Mac would eliminate IS department headcount. How do you spend your days when you're not going to be busy troubleshooting system failures?

My point is that there is a whole lot of stuff we can spend our time better on - like how do you organise the business workflows, how do you account for things so that you know if you're making money or not? All these use IT but you're working on things at a higher level. The whole point of driving your way quickly past all the low-level SMTP, sudo, /etc/xinetd stuff is to get to this top-level view fast - before the business gets eaten away by the competition.

In case this is overstating things, we need to remember that a programmer or graphics artist in China (or India) is happy making S$400 a month (that's like $250-plus in US dollars). That's why a friend of mine can do a pretty nice business bringing work out to China. You can be sloppy sizing a project, and let it overshoot by three months and still make money. It's a tremdendous cost difference. That's why we want things to just work. That's why we use the Mac. It's not because we love Apple. It's because there's no way out but to compete - but we've got to choose our tools well.

Posted at 3:59AM UTC | permalink

Thu 13 Nov 2003

Postfix Enabler 1.0.4

Category : Technology/postfixenabler104.txt

I've got a version of Postfix Enabler with POP and IMAP (with SSL) support built-in. If anyone wants to test it, just write to me. I've also written to the University of Washington for permission to bundle the ipop3d and imapd binaries and they've said they've got no problems with that, so long as I point people to the disclaimers in the UW Free-Fork license, which I'm trying to work into the Postfix Enabler interface. But, if you're going to use this un-released version of Postfix Enabler, please read the UW-IMAP license on :

http://www.washington.edu/imap/legal.html

Further information on the free-fork license :

http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#license

I've no doubt that the qpopper license works the same way. So when someone asked, "Aren't you violating qpopper's license agreements by distributing the popper binary in a shareware package?", I think I can now answer, no, quite truthfully. I had a lot of problems with that "violating" word, but you learn something new everyday.

PS : If this works, I may be inclined to include a button that the user can click to create the SSL cert, if that's possible to do. (Also, to put in a button that will solve that stupid bug that's still in Apple's eFax solution so that the PDF file containing the fax image will appear correctly in Mail.app. I've applied a patch and the Panther shared fax solution works really great now. It's got nothing to do with Postfix, but why not throw in the kitchen sink?)

Posted at 2:52PM UTC | permalink