| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Mon 19 May 2003 Speaking of KiyosakiCategory : Commentary/kiyosaki.txt I cannot speak of Kiyosaki without thinking of Singapore's own Dennis Wee, who calls Robert Kiyosaki his mentor. A year ago, I had thought of selling an apartment my family owned but I had time on my hands, so I thought of doing it myself, without a housing agent. So I went to attend a real estate talk. Not just any real estate talk but the one conducted by the guy who has his face plastered all over the place - at the back of the buses, in a Red Indian outfit in the papers, the drop-out made good - Dennis Wee. I wasn't disappointed. It was a spectacle. Our own version of the Reality Distortion Field. I wish I can sell like Dennis Wee. At the end of the free talk, I signed up for the full S$800 course. He's that good. But like he says, it's all in your mind. To change your life, you've got to start with your mind. Clear your mind and the rest of your life will follow. It's one year ago this month since I was quite thoroughly entertained. But I've been led to Robert Kiyosaki, Anthony Robbins, and Tom Hopkins. Not to mention a full year of 20% discount whenever I placed an ad on the classified pages. PS : instead of selling the flat, I tried renting it out. I got a tenant within 45 minutes of the first call. Was it the training, or beginner's luck? I'll soon find out because the year is up. Anyway, I saved enough on commission to pay for that S$800 course. Sun 18 May 2003 PassivityCategory : Commentary/passivity.txt I believe Robert Kiyosaki has a point. We should try to understand money, learn how to accumulate money wisely and, as a counterpoint, realise how our lives could be destroyed if we let money control us, rather than the other way around. I've found Rich Dad, Poor Dad and The Cashflow Quadrant very useful and they're things I want to teach my kid, e.g., how to tell the difference between an investment and an expense. Many people commonly get these ideas mixed up, to their life's detriment. I'm not saying that it's easy to implement these ideas, just because I've read them. I'm finding that it still needs a lot of hard work to, not just accumulate investments, but also to turn them into healthy inflows of passive income. Passive income is income you earn without being actually "there", e.g. from collecting rent from other people using your physical or intellectual property. A guy who lives two doors down my street collects rent from properties accumulated by his late father. Nice work (or non-work) if you can get it. The rest of us have to work a bit harder to create assets attractive enough for others to want to employ, for a fee. It's not that I have anything against hard work. Quite the opposite. But I've seen how you can work yourself into the ground and leave no time for your family. You've got to strike a balance. It takes vision to see a need that people are willing to pay money to satisfy. Then it takes a lot of ingenuity, creativity and management skills to crystallise it into a system that can satisfy that need consistently and (apparently) effortlessly, so that it can be operated by mere mortals and scaled to fit whenever and wherever possible, without your needing to be there. So there you have it - two essential sets of skills. I believe that, if you can solve a problem at a reasonable cost for others, nobody should begrudge you your wealth. That's the root of capitalism. But it's not enough to want money. You need to see the relationship between passive income (the most efficient way to earn an income) and a system that can generate that income on your behalf, in a way deserving of the adjective "passive". That system is your very own business machine. And, in most cases, you can bet that there's an IT element in there, somewhere. Thinking for a LivingCategory : Commentary/thinkingliving.txt I thought about calling this weblog "Thinking for a Living" because that's what I do - I get paid for having ideas and figuring out how to get them implemented - initially for an assortment of government agencies, and then, for the company that I helped to start. After seven years of plenty (even though somebody once told me you can't make money as Mac developers), we're now, the three of us, living off the fat (somewhat) and that's why I've got time to waste writing this weblog. One thing I've learnt, and I don't know if anyone wants to hear, but here goes (if you've come back, you must have found something interesting) : One. Michael Gerber (The E-Myth) is right. Most small businesses don't work. In The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber describes, through the experience of a bakery shop owner, how you can start with a bright idea and fall towards despair, chained to the treadmill, doing everything yourself, struggling just to keep from slipping behind. It was, for me, a powerfully visceral image. Life as an entreprenuer was often like that. Despair was always just around the corner. I've learnt that you've got to make your business work like a machine, able to make money even when you're not there. The irony was that we did manage to help other people run their business like a machine, through the systems we designed and built for them. While these businesses ran like clockwork, we ran ourselves to the ground. So, it's time to go back to the drawing board. But how do we build the ultimate business machine of our own? Can we succeed? Stay tuned, to find out. Sat 17 May 2003 The Soul of a New MachineCategory : Commentary/soulmachine.txt If a business executive attends a course, say, on MS Access, do you think he'll learn the things that can help him become a better General Manager? If all he's learning are these - designing database tables, understanding normalisation, linking tables, writing an Access program, creating forms - who's helping him put all these into a context that can draw on his other skills? Perhaps knowing how to make queries on the data could be useful but, even then, how many executives can understand SQL, much less want to remember it after the course? It's the same kind of thinking that says that our school-children ought to be taught things like "PC Internals", so that they'll know what research engineers do when they grow up. The problem is: the specific technologies change with time. They're all likely to be obsolete by the time these school-children go to work. Unless you're a software developer, you should work at picking up IT skills at a higher level. But is this - i.e. learning how to learn - a skill that can be taught? I've taught, say, FileMaker and even Photoshop courses where the people try to memorize and then regurgitate specific steps. It doesn't work. It'll be better if people learn how to "connect the dots"; to have the confidence to look at each novel thing with an eye as to how it can be made to work in concert with the rest of the things they already know how to do well. I believe that if we can do that - and we'll need to know that it is a problem if we don't - we'll have smarter, more creative people, better businesses, and ultimately, a richer, more resilient economy. Tue 13 May 2003 Computers as TheatreCategory : Technology/theatre.txt Let's try to connect some dots. What's the relation between creativity and the arts and computer technology? Brenda Laurel (among others) has tried to synthesise all these elements in her book "Computers as Theatre". I try to summarise some of the ideas she has covered there. When we go to a theatre, we go with a set of expectancies, e.g., a play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We start with a set of possibilities. As the play progresses, the number of new possibilities introduced into the play falls off radically. "Every moment of the enactment affects those possibilities, eliminating some and making some more probable than others." "Making some more probable than others." When confronted with a novel situation, we will attempt to match it with prior experiences, which will help us prune away at the universe of possibilities to arrive at a smaller subset of probabilities that is easier to handle. A sensitive computer interface designer will take advantage of that. When the original Macintosh presented the user with a desktop metaphor, the purpose was to help the user "get a handle on things" and have expectancies for how things were going to work. For example, one can easily guess that the trash can is for things you want to throw away. Like drama when you're immersed in the illusion, you connect with the things unfolding on the screen and "go with the flow". This idea doesn't stop at the interface. Consider its implication for the technique called object-oriented programming. Imagine you're walking along a beach and you pick up a pebble. At once, holding the pebble, the universe of things you can do with it is vastly reduced. You can skim it across the water or put it in your pocket, but you cannot eat it. Its nature determines the things you can do with it. And that makes programming easier. When the user selects a line of text, the menubar can be made to highlight the actions you can do with text and disable actions that are not appropriate. That is Brenda Laurel's "flying wedge" analogy at work - "a plot is a progression from the possible to the probable to the necessary". Both the user and the programmer are guided by a plot, which keeps both focused on just a few pertinent things at a time, while engaged in a meaningful dialogue. Contrast this with the DOS command line. Type C>DELETE or any other command and you can see that there's an infinite number of possible verb-object combinations, most of which get you "syntax error". If computers have become more useful machines as a result of the approach pioneered by the Mac, you can see just how much of an impact ideas from the arts have had on this. It may just make you think a bit differently the next time you enjoy a good movie. Think about Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho - did you actually see Janet Leigh being knifed in the shower scene? You've been led to imagine it, in all its gory details, by the preceding action and accompanying soundtrack. Your imagination does a better job than anything the old Master could do, and saved him some money too, not having to shoot it. How economical.) Connecting the DotsCategory : Technology/dots.txt I remember a Steve Jobs interview with Wired where he talked about having "enough dots to connect". I just looked up my magazine collection and, yes, there it is (Wired Feb 1996). I'm glad I hadn't thrown that away. Jobs : "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people." Jobs : "Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have." Not all those who wander are lostCategory : Commentary/creativity.txt I'm reading "The Creative Economy - How People Make Money from Ideas" by John Howkins. Just five pages into the book, I hit upon this paragraph and it expands on the image of the Zen master that I left off the last article. "The moment of creativity is sometimes accompanied by a sense of heightened consciousness, even an explosion of consciousness. When we are being most creative, we often feel most vividly alive, and more highly focused, even to the extent of becoming less aware of everything else." Bear with me while I meander through a few other notable quotes from the book. I can make a connection between all these, and technology and innovation on the Mac (I promise). "Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. When Shakespeare's Lear wants to express complete futility, he says 'nothing will come out of nothing'. We admire creative people because they do make 'something from nothing'; and we may fear them for the same reason. When people stop being creative, in an important sense they stop living. As Bob Dylan sings, 'He who's not busy being born, Is busy dying.' The Egyptian lawyer and economist Kamil Idris, who became Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization in 1997, says "It is a simple formula: to live, we must create.' Without creativity, we could not imagine, discover or invent anything. We would not have fire, language or science." And a final quote from J. R. R. Tolkien, "Not all those who wander are lost." Sat 10 May 2003 A pianist doesn't spend time peeking inside the pianoCategory : Commentary/nevillebrody.txt I like this quote from Neville Brody at the Apple site, "I liken working on the Mac to jazz. To play jazz properly, you have to become highly skilled at an instrument. Working with a Mac, you have to learn the technology just as you would learn to play an instrument or learn to paint with a brush. Then you have to forget it and then simply start creating and building. A pianist doesn't spend time peeking inside the piano." I happen to read his bio at the Apple site. Just yesterday, I was looking through some old issues of "The Face", and the designer of a lot of the typefaces "The Face" used then was this guy called Neville Brody. And only a few days ago, I had been writing about how, if you're really serious about using computers well, you wouldn't bother wasting time opening and closing the PC box, pulling out cards and such. So I'm in the midst of some cross currents. I remember Arthur Koestler describing, in "The Act of Creation", how the act of creation comes about when you have "an intersection of lines of thought which brings together hitherto unconnected ideas and fuses them into a creative synthesis". That's an interesting book to read in conjunction with Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance") who wrote about how, when a craftsman is focused on the act of creation, he is at one with his creation. Like the archer fused to his target, the bow ceased to exist. Fri 09 May 2003 Humanistic TechnologyCategory : Technology/humanistictechnology.txt My colleague the other day thought of contacting a long-lost friend. So she thought of using the web to see what turns up. A search through Google turns up nothing. Then she had an idea. Give the name in Chinese:
Amazing. She found her friend in 0.16 seconds. It was spot on. Why is Google so smart? Why is the Mac so smart? With OS X, you can enter Chinese characters (or any other language) into any application. The functionality is built right in. There's no need for a "Chinese Language Kit", like in the OS 7/8/9 days. Life is sweeter with OS X. P.S. : I think the idea crossed her mind because we've been playing with stuffing Chinese characters into MySQL and then pulling them out again from our Java Tomcat motor insurance application. Imagine, we're going to be able to have insurance policy wordings in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, or whatever. For free. Thu 08 May 2003 The Renaissance ManCategory : Commentary/renaissanceman.txt Lending credence to the notion that the Mac tends to attract people who like to think with both sides of the brain is the result of a recently concluded survey by O'Reilly's MacDevCenter (a must-visit website for any Mac developer). I have always enjoyed the breadth of the articles published here - from Java and Apache to digital photography, audio and Rendezvous - and I'm not alone. Commented Derrick Story, the managing editor of O-Reilly Network : "I'm going to continue with the broader stuff too. I have a number of reasons for this thinking, but a primary one is that being a developer for Mac OS X is a little different than for other platforms. Successful Mac developers are not only good at their specialty, such as Brent Simmons [the creator of NetNewsWire] in managing RSS, but they tend to have an overall understanding of what's going on with their platform. "Having a handle on Rendezvous, digital photography, X Window, ACC, Java, artist and developer rights, bioinformatics, and QuickTime authoring, just to name a few, helps us understand the interests of the people who support our ideas and our software. I'm not saying this is exclusive to the Mac platform. Certainly Larry Wall [the creator of Perl] is a Renaissance man. But I think this trait is more common in the successful Mac developer than maybe on other platforms. That's why we mix the content the way we do on the site." I think of the Dell guy who comes into our client's office, who opens up the PC and takes out card and puts in card, takes out cable and puts in cable, calls himself a doctor, not knowing the world is passing him by. There's a better alternative. Start from the notion that we're really there to work with information - to shape meaningful information out of the mass of raw data. Then it gets easier to understand how we can possibly wield all these technology to help us reach those ends - i.e. to help other people understand the information better. And also to know what to spend time on and what to throw out the Windows. It's been said that knowing how to choose the right point of view is worth (how many?) IQ points. Can't see the forest for the trees? Wed 07 May 2003 AppleScript StudioCategory : Technology/smsourcecomments.txt I encourage anyone with even a cursory interest in programming to take a look at the Sendmail Enabler code, if only to get a feel for how much AppleScript Studio can do with so little code. Yet it is not a toy. It's quite possible to build quite intricate stuff with it. The important thing about AppleScript Studio is that while you're playing with it and going through the sample code, it may start to dawn on you just how much of a breakthrough object-oriented programming really is. With object-oriented programming, you think like a manager (or blasphemously, like a minor god): you create your objects, imbue them with intelligence, and then you can get them to work together by sending them messages to work with each other. It's not just more fun. It's a lot more productive. Apple's very fine visual development environment, Interface Builder, plays a very important role in this. It helps maintain the illusion that you're working with intelligent objects that you can grab hold of and move around the screen. Once you've worked with interface Builder, you only have to do some Java programming using Swing to see how often you have to do a double-take when this illusion of working with objects is broken (e.g., when you have to hand-code the parameters of an object, like size, shape and position of an object on the screen). It's not just object-oriented programming that will make you productive. It's the whole package of little details that have been designed to work so well together. In other words, it's the "gestalt" thing again. Does Apple have a monopoly on whole-brain thinking? Tue 06 May 2003 Sendmail Enabler Source CodeCategory : Technology/smsource104.txt I've updated the Sendmail Enabler download page with the latest version's source code. It's a Project Builder project, using AppleScript Studio and the Unix command line. If you've ever downloaded Sendmail Enabler, please let me know how you are doing. I've made the source code available in case it doesn't work and people may want to poke around to see how it was supposed to work. In my experience, most of the time, the problems come from errors with the domain's DNS settings rather than with Sendmail itself. Read more ... |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
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