Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

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.

Posted at 1:28AM UTC | permalink

Sat 19 Apr 2003

The Disappearing DJ Music Cart

Category : 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.

Posted at 2:14AM UTC | permalink

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.

Posted at 9:05AM UTC | permalink

Wed 16 Apr 2003

Airport Base Station Tutorial

Category : 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.

Posted at 11:21AM UTC | permalink

Safari with Tabs

Category : 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).

Posted at 2:58AM UTC | permalink

Tue 15 Apr 2003

OS X Graphics and Font Management

Category : 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.

Posted at 4:22PM UTC | permalink

The Design of Technology

Category : 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.

Posted at 11:57AM UTC | permalink

An OS X-on-Broadband Tutorial

Category : 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.

Posted at 11:42AM UTC | permalink

Good reads today

Category : Commentary/gdreads1504.txt

What's going on in the music industry these days; why are the music labels losing money, and what's Apple role in all these? Bill Palmer puts together one of the better pieces of analysis I've read about Apple possibly buying Universal Music.

Are you reading this with your freshly-minted Safari with tabs? Go over to the Surfing Safari weblog and read about what's good and bad about this latest release. For instance, I've just realised how usable Safari's History menu really is. Was it always like this? Still not working with DBS, though.

Posted at 7:22AM UTC | permalink

The Multiple-Mac Household

Category : Commentary/multiPChousehold.txt

We've got three Macs at home, one for each of us - I work on an iBook, my wife uses a Tibook, and our kid uses an old Graphite iMac (which doubles as a back-up server) just for fun.

I'm just reading how the multiple-PC household is driving a dramatic growth in wireless home networking. This is Apple's sweet spot, where the whole of its offerings is so much greater than the sum of its parts. Imagine the components - the portability of the PowerBook, the beauty of its design with the Apple logo nicely lit in a dim light, the little touches that makes even a kid want to anthropomorphise a mere machine (my kid calls his iMac Gilbert after the cat in the Caillou kid show).

And I can't imagine anyone wanting to use anything less than the Airport Base Station in the home. Trade a slick milky-white compact beauty (that always looks just about to take off) with a black, clunky, antenna-sticking-all-over-the-place contraption? No way. You are your own IT department at home, so choose the best. It need not cost more, you know.

Posted at 1:47AM UTC | permalink

Mon 14 Apr 2003

SARS

Category : Commentary/SARS.txt

Due to SARS, I'm working quite a bit from home these days. I can do exactly the same things at home, as I could do at the office. There's maybe, at most, five seconds more delay when I update the server. But it's easy to forget where the server is and just get on with the work.

I'm thinking that this would have an impact on the real estate business. More people can and will work from their homes. It's an attractive idea - to convert a part of the home into some sort of a design studio (what the architects would call an atelier). So we need to think then about what sort of function the office ought to serve. I think there is a still a need for an office (if only for the interaction with other people); but we've got to give better reasons for people to want to work out of an office, beyond just being a place to go to.

Posted at 2:53PM UTC | permalink

Sendmail Enabler 1.03

Category : Technology/smenabler103.txt

I've updated Sendmail Enabler. Besides the tabbed feature, I've added the ability to deactivate the services you've enabled using Sendmail Enabler. I've left the config files in place, so that it'll be easier to turn them on again. But I felt that the system should make it just as easy for the user to turn off the services.

Posted at 2:30PM UTC | permalink