| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Fri 25 Apr 2003 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. Mon 21 Apr 2003 "If Apple's Dead, It's the Most Productive Corpse I've ever seen"Category : Commentary/corpse.txt Tom Yager writes another great article in defence of Apple from deep in the heart IT Ville - InfoWorld. "Tracking the innovation coming from this dead, irrelevant company is wearing me out." Also, he writes "... watch any PowerBook user - they never turn their machines off. When they're not working on them, they play and explore. There are endless nooks and crannies in OS X that even nongeeks are moved to discover. All Macs should be built for constant use." I think that's true. "All Macs should be built for constant use." Ever since I've had broadband and Airport at home, I'm never far from my iBook. There's so much more I've learnt to exploit, e.g., at the Unix level, over one weekend while waiting for the football to start, while the kid is sleeping, etc. I have a Windows laptop, too, but I don't think I'll ever have the same amount of affection for it. I've been wondering if this weblog is ever read. Over the weekend, I've cobbled together a weblog monitor of some sort, using AppleScript Studio and a short Unix script. So I know that a couple of people (using Safari) wandered over to take a look at midnight and 1 am respectively. Would be great if they left a note. Sat 19 Apr 2003 The Disappearing DJ Music CartCategory : Commentary/djcartdisappear.txt "As I took my position with camera in hand and waited for the groom to make his entrance, I noticed a couple of guys off in a corner pew peering into an illuminated G4 PowerBook. You don't see TiBook-toting wedding attendees every day, so I made a mental note to find out later what they were up to." Derrick Story at O'Reilly MacDevCentre recounts when he realised a 1-inch PowerBook can make a DJ Music Cart brimming with CD's and hardware disappear into thin air. There was a brilliant British mathematician around the time of the second world war, called Alan Turing, who described the workings of a machine (there was no technology to build it then) which, though by itself working on quite simple principles, e.g., using just ones and zeroes, could simulate the workings of any other machine in the world. This machine (the term "computer" then meant a human being who does some statistical calculations) was henceforth called the Universal Turing Machine. The computer, as we know it today, is a Turing Machine. So we shouldn't be surprised to see even more things made redundant in our lifetime. Fri 18 Apr 2003 Can Asians Think?Category : Commentary/canasiansthink.txt Sometimes I think so, but quite often not. Like Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's (former, I think) ambassador to the UN, I can argue both ways, but probably not as well. He's written a book on that subject "Can Asians Think?", subtitled "Understanding the Divide between East and West". I believe this question is worth thinking about because if you ask the wrong questions, you may spend your life solving the wrong problems. For example, there is a question that many have spent no small amount of time, money and energy solving - like "How do we make our people more entrepreneurial so that we can generate more wealth?". This may be the wrong question to ask because being entrepreneurial may be a result rather than a cause. This parallels something written by a guy called Rick Smith who reviewed Mahbubani's book at Amazon: "It's taken Mahbubani's book to make me realize that today's free speech and universal franchise may have been the RESULT and not the CAUSE of American middle-class prosperity." which is a pretty deep insight, if you think about it. I believe that being entreprenuerial requires an ability to make a deal, to understand that the profit motive needs to exist on both sides of the equation, and therefore to think from the other person's point of view. In social terms, it means to be considerate. In personal terms, it means to have integrity, to keep to one's side of the bargain. But above all, to think of what it means to be a decent human being. Coming to work each day, I'm sick of people sneezing into my head and coughing into my face. It's the thoughtlessness that reminds me of the difficulty many entrepreneurs have of collecting money after they've done the job and getting a fair shake. In Japan, it seems that people voluntarily wear a mask when they're ill, in consideration for others, rather than the other way round. I've looked with interest at Japan's Sars statistics - so far none. Is there a correlation between this and intelligence, and, from there, the quality of civic life and ultimately wealth? We need to learn how to think better, whether we're already good at it or not. Mahbubani's book is as good a place as any to make a start. Wed 16 Apr 2003 Airport Base Station TutorialCategory : Technology/airportbasestation.txt I've completed the guide to using the Airport Base Station with a broadband network. It will work also with the new Airport Extreme Base Station because I've got one and I've tried that out already. Now to move on to my real work. Porting our accounting and payroll systems to run on Cocoa. Safari with TabsCategory : Technology/safari.txt It's amazing how a single improvement to Safari can contribute to so much increase in productivity. With tabs, my desktop has certainly stopped being cluttered up with windows that I've launched that I couldn't wait for the pages to load. I've stopped having to look for the page I was reading just to bring it to the front again. If you're doing some writing and need to make references to several other web pages, you can put all the related pages in separate tabs on one window, in order to make it easier to copy the links later. Finally, the rendering of Safari web pages seem to be getting closer to those rendered by Explorer (at least on the Mac). This is important for web designers because it may make it possible to use just Safari to test the look of the pages, while remaining reasonably confident that the pages will look OK on other systems. (Developers are firmly behind Apple when they say they want Safari to be the most standards-compliant of the browsers). Tue 15 Apr 2003 OS X Graphics and Font ManagementCategory : Technology/fonts.txt Graphic designers contemplating the conversion to OS X ought to take a look at these two Apple documents - Using and Managing Fonts in OS X, and Quartz Extreme - to get a feel for what they're missing. Imagine not having to deal with Adobe Type Manager (ATM), screen fonts, printer fonts, QuickDraw, or even Postscript (for drafts). OS X works with Postscript Type 1 fonts, Mac TrueType, Windows TrueType, Adobe Multiple Masters, Apple's .dfont (introduced in OS X), and the emerging standard, Open Type. It has a built-in font rasteriser with advanced typographic capability that can render stuff like this :
Quartz, which draws everything you see in OS X, is resolution-independent. It will take advantage of higher resolutions wherever it can (e.g.,it will draw at 600 dots per inch when given a 600 dpi printer). If you present it with a Postscript printer, OS X has a built-in Postscript rasteriser that will do the conversion. All you need to use a Postscript printer is a PPD file (the exact same ones used by OS 9). This is needed to tell OS X about the features that are supported by the printer. There's really no need to supply an OS X machine with third-party Postscript drivers. What this means is that OS X users have a much wider range of printers to choose from. From my observation, OS X output produced on non-Postscript printers is about 80-90% of the quality of the same output produced on Postscript printers, quite unlike the days of OS 7, 8 and 9 when non-Postscript printers were virtually unusable with a Mac. There's so much good in OS X that designers really ought to switch, and fast. Wait for Quark at your peril. The Design of TechnologyCategory : Commentary/harmony.txt Only on the Apple site will you get something that combines art and technology quite so exquisitely. "Twenty-first century print designers find themselves in an intriguing position. Their medium is ink on paper - but their days are spent eyeing pixels on screens. Their technique is based on centuries of tradition - but their technology is changing at a rapid pace. Their business often depends on stable client relationships - but their portfolios depend on doing challenging, cutting-edge work. Striking a balance among these demands can sometimes be a high-wire act. But that's exactly what gets a designer's blood flowing." - A Design Studio Makes the Move to OS X. I am more than a fan. I have a vested interest in keeping this platform alive because there is no happier person in the world than a craftsman in total harmony with his tools. An OS X-on-Broadband TutorialCategory : Commentary/broadbandtutfinis.txt I've just finished a tutorial on using SingNet, PacNet and SCV broadband with OS X machines. I'm working on another - how you should set up an Aiport Base Station to make the whole OS X-broadband combo work like heaven. Maybe, after that, this madness will be totally satiated. 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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