| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
|
Mon 06 Oct 2003 Postfix breaks in 7B74Category : Technology/postfixbreaks.txt I like the look of Panther so much that I'm now running it permanently on my iBook. Otherwise I can't start work a Postfix Enabler, can I? But Postfix seems to break with the 7B74 release. It's hard to find answers because everybody is supposed to be on NDA. Will have to see if the problem goes away in the 7B80 or 85 release. Other than that, everything else that I need survived the upgrade (even the rsync command that I use to update this weblog). I think Panther really does improve the Mac experience, in terms of end-user productivity. So there's no going back, as far as I'm concerned. Panther is going to be good for the Mac. Fri 26 Sep 2003 News GothicCategory : Commentary/newsgothic.txt Actually, as a follow on from the previous article, I just realised that the font I used to simulate the classified ad pages is News Gothic, not Times. It matches the font used by the newspaper most closely. So, the ability to play with all these typefaces on the Mac has other direct commercial uses besides just benefiting graphic artists and DTP designers. While on the same subject, I just used a system that allows you to see how the ad will look, directly, while you're submitting the advertising copy. And it does away with an operator entirely. The ad gets queued up for publishing on the dates you specified, exactly as you had set it. And the cost is 70% cheaper (30 cents per line as opposed to $1.00). Score a point for technology. AbracadabraCategory : Commentary/abracadabra.txt Words are like magic. When we were children, we read stories about how sorcerers could cast a spell or make something supernatural happen just by chanting the magic word. Words do hold real power. The key is to find the right combination that will unlock the power. Am I talking nonsense? I'm putting out ads in the local newspaper to find tenants for some office space that we manage. But the market is bad. Last month, I managed to find a suitable tenant for an apartment that we own. But it took two months of searching when, only the previous year, we found a tenant within 45 minutes of taking the calls. Advertisements cost money. The effectiveness of the advertisement is measured by the number of calls that you get. And the effectiveness of your handling the calls is measured by the number of viewings that you get. Like Dennis Wee, our real estate guru says, "Only when buyers come, can the home sell." The more calls you get, the more your chances of getting a viewing, out of which, hopefully, one will result in the sale. You can see how words can affect the number of calls you get. Put aside a budget, write a series of ads in diifferent styles. And watch how many calls each one pulls. In today's market, an ad put out without any idea of how to push the right buttons in the mind of the busy, fussy, squeezy, tenant-to-be will most likely result in zero calls. That's $40 to $50 bucks down the drain. Better not to have put it out, unless it has thought you something. Now, back to the Mac as the Ultimate Business Machine. How do we use our favourite toy in this situation? Ads are charged by the number of lines that you use, which is not exactly determined by the number of words that you use. To see what I mean, use something like InDesign. Create a column that is about the size of the column in the newspaper classified page. Then use a font like Times that corresponds as closely as possible to the font the newspapers use. Then set the appropriate font size and kerning (the space between the letters). Take an ad that you've submitted previously, and type it into the column. Then adjust the font size and column size until the words break just like way the ad looked on the newspaper. You can test it by simulating other ads on the same page. If you can get similar line breaks and the same number of lines as they appear on the newspaper, you've got a really valuable tool. Because, when you next write an ad, you can use this column to get a feel for how many lines it's going to take and, therefore, how much it's going to cost you to place the ad. You can see how making just one change in the wording (for example, by finding a shorter word - the Bartleby site is a great on-line resource for finding synonymns) can save you a whole line. Or where you've got space to use a longer and more appropriate word without adding to the line count. The benefits don't end here. When you submit your ad (the smart kids use e-mail rather than the phone because you can get an idea how much you've spent on adverts to date just by counting the ads you've sent), you can have the InDesign column ready when the operator calls back to confirm that you did get the number of lines that you've planned for. More times than not, you would have got it right. If you don't, you can look at your own copy to suggest dropping or changing words, and you should be able to do it fast enough before the operator gets impatient. It's magic. It's now possible to really concentrate on finding the most impact you can make with your words, at the lowest possible cost. Note : See how fast we can switch from talking about technology, and sendmail and SASL, to English, and design and artwork, and commerce and business? If the Mac is not a machine for those who want to live life to the full, I don't know what else is. Wed 24 Sep 2003 A HiatusCategory : Commentary/hiatus.txt Just realised that it's been some time since this weblog was last updated. But I've needed to take that break. I remember reading about how William Gibson ("Neuromancer") has stopped writing a weblog because it interfered with his writing. When writing gets to be a chore, we should stop. Fullstop. And give time for the daily impressions to settle. And germinate. And hopefully, sprout fresher ideas. I've just finished reading "Artful Making - What Managers Need to Know about How Artists Work". I believe that it's an important book, putting aside the rather clumsy phrase, "Artful Making". It describes, quite accurately, what we actually do in software development projects. But I've realised that it may be totally at odds with my objective of making my business work like a well-oiled business machine, like a MacDonald's. I know it's possible to help our clients make their businesses work like a smoothly efficient business machine - we know we've done that - but it takes a whole lot of care, improvisation, and not a little bit of doggedness on our part to do it. It does not help that, at the end of the book, the authors (Rob Austin and Lee Devin) describe how artists often do their work for the sake of doing their work - as if the need to uphold the standards of their craftsmanship takes higher precedence than the mere thought of remuneration. ("Most actors earn considerably less than $20K a year doing acting.") Shades of the starving artist. And that's what sends a chill through me. I often see the Bangladeshi workers toiling under the sun, being paid pittance, yet their work is the hardest any man can do. It may surprise people but high-tech is not any different. The guys who work out the programs, design the loops, fix the bugs - the software coolies - they're paid, if at all, rather grudgingly. The legions of Linux programmers contribute their work for free, yet it's the people at Red Hat who, by and large, benefitted from being able to do an IPO. Maybe craftsmanship does not pay. Just look at Apple. But I never want to be the starving artist. It's silly. If you're smart enough to make a complex piece of software work flawlessly, you must believe that you're smart enough to make yourself reasonably rich. How do you make this work? That's the question. Fri 12 Sep 2003 SMTP-AUTH actually works on Postfix on OS XCategory : Commentary/postfixsmtpauth.txt We've finally got SMTP-AUTH working on Postfix on OS X. So it's really going to be exciting this move to Panther. We're going to have this first-class Unix system to work on that loses nothing to Linux. It wasn't easy and I wanted to give up a few times. But I felt that this was going to be a key piece of technology, if the Mac is going to be accepted as a first-class computing platform for the enterprise. I can imagine corporate IT departments frowning on the use of a roving SMTP server enabled by either Sendmail or Postfix Enabler. They'll be pushing to have all mail sent out exclusively from the corporate server. So we'll always want have this SMTP-AUTH option working when we need to. And this is just the start. Imagine being able to authenticate against an enterprise-wide LDAP server or against a MySQL database, or both. The tools on OS X just gets better and better. Yet another PC Guy goes MacCategory : Commentary/computerworldguygoesmac.txt From InfoWorld to ComputerWorld, yet another PC guy goes Mac. The thing about these conversions is that these are probably the guys who were most vociferously anti-Mac in the days of OS 9. How can I tell? Well, the first thing he recommends you do is to activate the OS X firewall. After all, he found the Mac after a search for an easy to use and secure operating system. And he writes a book, "Securing the Network from Malicious Code." The first thing a real Mac user does, in the days of OS 9, is to create a printed page and experiment with all the fonts and the layout, and dream about impressing the boss or the client with all the printed stuff, viruses and hackers be damned. But try to get another Mac into the department? Not if the IT guy can help it. I've gone through all these fights. Come on, Apple. Play the game well. You're going to get a stab at the huge enterprise market. Just don't lose it this time. It may be your last. Thu 11 Sep 2003 Otterman's BlogCategory : Commentary/sivablog.txt My friend Siva the Otterman has been filling up his weblog lately. I've just been too busy to notice. I've always enjoyed reading his posts to the local Mac Users' Group and felt that he is one person who should write a blog. So here it is, at last. You'll get a feel for what's going on up there at the National University of Singapore, and he is into conservation and nature, and biking, and stuff like that. Definitely off the beaten track, and you may just find a place or two you don't even know exist in Singapore. Notable QuotesCategory : Commentary/timhoward.txt I like this quote from Tim Howard, Manchester United's solid new goalkeeper, comparing life in the English Football League with his old one in the United States. "When you're at Manchester United, everything is scrutinised, every little thing. There's a pressure to perform every day that is greater. Pressure can bust pipes or make diamonds. I turn that pressure into something I can enjoy. "The real unfortunate part is when I make the saves it's 'brilliant save by Howard'. When I make a mistake, it's 'the American has a lot to learn'. You could get consumed by that, but you have to let it slide off your back." I love that - 'you can get consumed by that, but you have to let it slide your back'. Tim Howard looks tough enough, mentally, to stay up with the Roy Keanes of the world, and that's alright with me. On the subject of United, I've just finished a book I salvaged from the discards, "Manchester Unlimited, The Money, Egos, and Infighting Behind the World's Richest Football Club" by Mihir Bose. Interesting views of football as serious business, especially if you're soccer fan like me. Best three bucks I've spent lately. Now, how about the Triads as a serious business? I'm enjoying Timothy Mo's "Sour Sweet" about life in Chinese Soho in the sixties, which I bought umpteen years ago but which I've only just managed to find time to read. This is really the purpose of this weblog - to figure out how to get close to running the ideal business, from learning from all these different perspectives. Will IT see the light?Category : Commentary/CTOswitcher.txt Following on from the last posting. I just came across this. This is the CTO of InfoWorld, talking about how a Mac running OS X successfully replaced both a PC and a Linux server in the setup he has at his home, and how this experience has forced him to re-examine his preconceptions. Contrast this with an article he wrote back in January, which is typical of the kind of IT mindset that has boxed the Mac into irrelevancy, as far as the enterprise is concerned. It's like when you're sailing. Often the first inkling that the wind has changed comes from the tiny ripples around the boat. It's interesting to watch these events unfolding. Even as we're talking, many OS 9 users still have to be dragged kicking and screaming into OS X and Unix. So they're too busy grumbling to notice that the Mac is starting to get the respect they've always wished was there, so that they can get support they've always wanted. Tue 09 Sep 2003 Alice in WonderlandCategory : Technology/aliceinwonderland.txt I've got a version of Postfix compiled to support SMTP-AUTH. I'm getting quite close to making it all work. But I couldn't quite make the saslpasswd2 command work with the rest of OS X's built-in SASL libraries and I don't want to have to override anything built-in. A search through Google shows that, as usual, there are others with the same problem and, also as usual, no sign of a solution. So I thought of avoiding sasldb and using pam, and that's where I had a sensation of falling through a trap-door. It has led me to a discovery of Apple's efforts at integrating directory access - to support centralized network repositories for users, groups, passwords, security policy and other administrative data. What this means to an end-user is that you only need to make a single sign-on to your system, and from there you will be granted access to every service imagineable, either on your own machine or across the network, that you have the rights to. Apple calls this Open Directory and, because it is designed to work with Microsoft's Active Directory, your single log-on gets you access to both Mac and Windows environments. It makes it easy for the end user - you don't have to remember passwords for every service, e.g., for your mail, corporate and departmental web sites, databases, file servers, etc - and it also makes it easier for a systems administrator - he only needs to go to one place to update the access rights. Michael Bartosh has a an excellent series of articles on MacDevCenter and this is just the start. Reading all these remind me of when I was wading through the Active Directory documentation. There's a lot of meat and you can start to believe that you may just have the tools to control the complexity of operations if the system needs to scale to match the size of a large enterprise. I'm contrasting this feeling with the response I got from a message I sent out to a local Mac users' group about using the Terminal and the sudo command to delete stubborn files from the Trash. There's a general grumbling from OS 9 users about the loss of simplicity. I remember going through this phase too as I read MacFixit comments about the sudo command when I first tried out OS X Public Beta. I remember thinking that this contraption from NeXT may have a hard time trying to fly. I don't know when I became a full convert to OS X but it may be close to the time I got MySQL runnning, for which I remain eternally grateful to Marc Liyanage. (If there's anything I feel good about doing Sendmail Enabler, it's that he's actually got a link to the Sendmail Enabler page from his PHP page). So the point I'm getting at is that Mac OS X is getting enormously powerful. And, increasingly relevant to an enterprise. There's going to be a point where the corporate IT guys are going to realise that, hey, there are a lot of fun stuff in there in OS X for them to play with, too. And they may just want to get in. There's when the tide will start to turn for Apple in the enterprise market. But then again, I may be wrong. All I know is that, we're not in Kansas anymore. Thu 04 Sep 2003 Postfix works greatCategory : Technology/postfixworksgreat.txt A couple of things that have made sendmail a pain to use are : on some machines you have to restart sendmail manually even after a reboot, and you have to restart sendmail whenever your IP address changes (if you're on a dynamically assigned IP address). Postfix seems to have none of these problems. Apple's probably made the right decision to go with Postfix. Plus it's a cleaner design. So here's looking forward to Panther. (Trying the SMTP-AUTH feature next). Wed 03 Sep 2003 DNS EnablerCategory : Technology/dnsenabler.txt Finally had enough time to finish up a basic DNS Enabler for the Airport Base Station tutorial. Had enough people writing in for it, so I might as well just finish it. This used to be bundled with Sendmail Enabler. Now that it's "unbundled", it may be possible to give it more "features". Well, maybe... 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. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
