| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Fri 02 May 2003 We Just Make StuffCategory : Commentary/jobstimeinterview.txt I love this quote from Steve Jobs when he was interviewed by Time magazine for the iTune Music Store launch : TIME: The Wall Street Journal recently fashioned you as a "digital music impresario." How do you feel about that? Jobs: I didn't know what it meant. Does that mean I run a carnival? What we do at Apple is very simple: we invent stuff. We make the best personal computers in the world, some of the best software, the best portable MP3/music player, and now we make the best online music store in the world. We just make stuff. So I don't know what impresario means. We make stuff, put it out there, and people use it. Wed 30 Apr 2003 SimplicityCategory : Commentary/simplicity.txt It's the aftermath of the iTunes Music Store launch. A quick glance through the articles indexed by MacSurfer shows mostly gushingly favourable responses from the PC-centric business press. What could they say? This is show business and, if it's good enough for Sheryl Crow and The Eagles, saying anything else would quickly push them out of their depth. But they also waste no time in reassuring the PC users that it'll soon work them also, Apple's market share being so minuscule it's not worth a consideration. (Maybe Apple should make it work for the other Mac users around the world before doing that.) But let's not argue about that. What I'm looking for is whether this is going to be the breakthrough that will finally help the masses "get" (as in "do you get it?") Apple. I mean, it's not Everyman who will ponder about Zen and Simplicity and Karma. I really think that this is Apple's big problem. Ironically for the maker of "the computer for the rest of us", it's such a radically different way of thinking that it has aroused such hostility over the lifetime of the company. But I believe, like many Apple fans, that such a thinking will win out - eventually. Because it has enough truth about it and, like the child of the sixties that I am, "it'll make the world a better place." The signs are encouraging. Listen to an unlikely source, "Storage Supersite", for this gem of perception : "Above all, the new online service, the iTunes software, the iPod and even this integration appear simple to the user - an attribute that sometimes seems to have a bad name in the technology business. We're used to comparing long check-off lists of features (unsurprising in a market founded on frequent upgrade cycles)." "We're used to ..." Just because we're used to doesn't mean it's right. Difficult technology can be made simple to an end user. Apple has kept this mantra going. What is needed is care, and a willingness to put doing the right thing above mere commercial gain. I think Apple's continued ability to survive is proof enough that God exists. Tue 29 Apr 2003 SamizdatCategory : Technology/samizdat.txt I've just updated the Weblog article. I'm making the PHP code I am using to run this weblog available for download. I must emphasise that I did not write the original code. That was done by a guy called Robert Daeley who ported the Perl-based Blosxom to PHP. If I had actually written this system, I would have called it Samizdat. BooksCategory : Commentary/books.txt Chanced upon an interesting new book store at Goldhill Centre, diagonally opposite Novena Square. It's got a nice though smallish selection of books, many of which I hadn't seen before. It's called ResearchBooks Asia ("your best source of specialist books"). I noted a few books on technology and history that I would love to find time to read. My first thought was about how long it's going to last, considering we've got the two behemoths - Borders and Kinokuniya - and the Word Shop and Dymocks, Times and MPH, have all either bite the dust or are faltering. But I'm sucker for bookshops and I think this is a good find. Mon 28 Apr 2003 Black Out, Power OffCategory : Commentary/poweroff.txt Had a power failure at the office, where this server is kept. So we switched the server's domain name address to point to my iBook at my home, which contains an exact mirror of the server's contents. Total time to switch the mail and web servers to make them run off the iBoook - less than 10 minutes. We ran the servers off the iBook for a while until we found that the power had come back on at the office, at which point we switched back over. It's not rocket science, yet it has tremendous power in its simplicity of execution. It's hard to explain but if you've done this yourself, you will know. Is this why IT managers hate the Mac? It makes what they think of as their job way too simple. Sendmail Enabler 1.04Category : Technology/php.txt Updated Sendmail Enabler with a new tab to check OS X's built-in web server to see if PHP is enabled (it's not by default since 10.2.x). If it is not, it will make the right incantations to turn it on. Actually, it just copies a file containing the PHP-related directives to Apache's /etc/httpd/users directory. This file can be easily deleted to reverse the process. It doesn't touch Apache's main httpd.conf file. With PHP enabled, a user can easily make a stock OS X Mac run a weblog, in addition to the web, mail and DNS services that I've already described (in the articles on the right side-bar). Sat 26 Apr 2003 Decline and Fall and what has this got to do with MySQL 4.1?Category : Technology/MySQL41.txt A new version of the free Open Source database, MySQL, was released yesterday, bringing with it "subqueries and derived tables", two major pieces that were needed to make MySQL complete in a feature-by-feature comparison with Oracle. It's now possible to replace Oracle entirely in a system we've been porting to Java ("we" is the company I'm part of in my "day job"). In years to come, MySQL 4.1 may be remembered as the release which heralded the beginning of the end for Oracle. Or at least Oracle's dominance of the database market. MySQL is more programmer-friendly in the sense that you'll find things that are there simply because hordes of programmers had needed them. In the Open Source world, if you need something that isn't there, you build it yourself and contribute back to the source so others can use. And it's hard to beat a competing product that is "free". MySQL is more than just free. It often feels superior to Oracle. We're seeing a process that is akin to what Clayton M. Christensen described in The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Read that book and watch this play unfold. Fri 25 Apr 2003 Information AnxietyCategory : Commentary/infoanxiety.txt In the field of marketing, there is a saying attributed to Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, who said, "In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope." This is often taken to mean that we ought to know what business we are in. Ask anyone in the IT industry and they'll say they're working with computers. Very seldom do they say they're working with information, or trying to understand the nature of information, so that they can choose the right tools to shape, channel, and marshall it. But if you're willing to understand the distinction, if only to refute that there's a distinction, try reading Richard Saul Wurman. Ten years ago, he coined the term "Information Anxiety" and described a business he calls "The Understanding Business". That helped me build a context around the work I was doing with computers and the kind of business I wanted to be building. That book is out of print but I see from Amazon that he has a follow-up called Information Anxiety 2 which appears to be just as good. I hope to read that too. I see people reading ".Net" or "C#" or "Oracle" and all these stuff on the MRT. It may be easy to miss the forest for the trees. Linking BackCategory : Commentary/linkingback.txt I've created a weblog monitor so that I can see who's been coming over to this weblog. Since having it, I've been surprised that quite a few visitors are Windows users. So, hey welcome there. My interest in the Mac is as a serious business machine; so you may get a different viewpoint from what is usually associated with the Mac. Hope it's been worth your time reading this. Also, where I can see links being made to this weblog (from the Referer information in the access log) I'll make a link back to that site, as you can see from the left side-bar. Just paying back the compliments. Not only that; I'm learning something new, like a new piece of music at sooundingblue. Finally, I've improved the weblog code further and I'm going to release it for anyone to use over the weekend. It doesn't yet have comments and trackbacks, but other than that, the other stuff works smoothly. I just wanted to show how we could create a system that allows the artist and the technician (it could be the same person) to work together to build something useful. So, with an Internet line and a Mac that you're willing to leave on all the time, you can have a web server, a mail server, a weblog system, a calendar system (more about this in future), and a database system, most of them free, on which you can build a business around. Remember an old Apple saying, "The Power to be Your Best"? Thu 24 Apr 2003 A Weblog of My OwnCategory : Technology/ownweblog.txt I finally had time to go through this weblog code. In the end, I re-wrote a large chunk of it - enough, I think, to call it my own. I'm doing this because I'm going to release it (a weblog) as yet another feature one can turn on using Sendmail Enabler. And I thought I shouldn't foist it on people without knowing what it does in its entirety. In fact, I had a bug from between 12 noon and 12 midnight where my permalinks (links to individual articles) were all screwed up. But that's fixed now. I hope, through doing this (since the PHP code is there for all to read), that I can show how a system could be designed so that it will give a web page designer all the leeway to express his (or quite likely, her) creativity in the layout of the information content. I think more and more enterprise systems will work across the web using the browser as the user interface. I've seen quite a lot of exciting web page layouts (not the Flash kinds but clean static pages) where the eyes are guided smoothly through the flow of the information. If we can put this interface on top of data that is dynamically generated from the enterprise's databases, we may find we've found a better way to communicate business information clearly and concisely, and by several orders of magnitude. Actually, I've seen quite a few Mac-based companies move their home page to a weblog format. A weblog is designed to be easily updated and most weblogs produce an RSS syndicate feed which the company can use to deliver press releases which are automatically aggregated by software like NetNewsWire. So it's quite a low-overhead way to get something meaningful done. Wed 23 Apr 2003 Is Beauty more than Skin Deep?Category : Technology/skindeep.txt I did it. I can now change the look of this weblog very easily without needing to change the weblog code. Just try it. On the left side-bar is an invitation to give this page a different look. Or, just do it, now. I know they all look terrible because I just downloaded them from the free HTML template sites and this is just a quick hashed-up demo. But the point is that it now takes me less than a minute to turn any (and I mean any) web page design into a home for a weblog. Of course the look must fit the ideas on the weblog, and that leads me to my second point. Look at the ideas expressed here (the page with the little green apples) and look at the same ideas expressed on, say, the Blue page. Do they feel different? Do they feel like they're conveying the same message? They're the exact same words. I believe that the look clearly matters and this is not something that is obvious to the guys over at the PC world. I believe that there should be beauty in the design of the user interface, as well as beauty in the design of the underlying system. And it's not just a pretty face because the aesthetics clearly serve a utilitarian function - that of helping people understand information better. Without the Mac setting the style, this notion in computing would have been long buried under the rubble. We've still some way to go, this synthesis of art and technology. May the journey be our reward. Tue 22 Apr 2003 ArchivesCategory : Commentary/justoneclick.txt I've added the ability to produce an archival view of this weblog, organised by date of postings. This way, the default view of the weblog can be made shorter, with only 20 articles, so it'll load faster. The rest of the articles can be found in the archives. I've now got an RSS feed, an archive, the ability to bookmark individual articles through permalinks, and the ability to read by categories. And I still don't know, largely, how this weblog's program really works. That's because I didn't write it, at least not originally. I just mangled a copy of PHPosxom, a weblog system written in PHP by Robert Daeley who, in turn, based it on Rael Dornfest's Blosxom, which was written in Perl. What I wanted to do, that these original systems didn't allow me, was to encapsulate the programming code cleanly away from the code that determines how the weblog will look. This way, I can change the look very easily, say using GoLive, and still get the same set of features. I think I can find time to show what I mean. I can add to Sendmail Enabler a feature to activate PHP in OS X's built-in web server so people can run a weblog. I can also use Sendmail Enabler to load in the weblog code plus, say, three different sets of looks they can adopt for their weblog. A customisable weblog with just one click. I should call our company Just-1-Click Software. 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. |
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