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by: Bernard Teo

Sat 10 Jan 2009

Luca 2.6.10

Category : Technology

I've updated Luca to 2.6.10.

This fixed a bug with the Cocoa Number Formatter that appeared with Leopard 10.5.6. This caused the voucher reference numbers to be displayed with the format "P0710.00/19.00" instead of "P0710/0019". So we've needed to add a call to NSNumberFormatter to "setFormatterBehavior" to "NSNumberFormatterBehavior10_4" to make the formatting work as it did before.

I've also updated all my systems, including my live server, to the very latest Apple Software and Security Updates for Leopard 10.5.6. All the services, like SMTP, POP, IMAP, Dovecot, Fetchmail, DNS, and LDAP continue to work as they did before, without any new problems (though I'm always tempting fate when I make such declarations).

Posted at 9:38PM SGT | permalink

Mon 27 Oct 2008

MailServe Pro 4.0.1

Category : Technology

I've released a new version of MailServe Pro. This solves a problem with the Fetchmail Log growing too big with time.

In version MailServe Pro 4.0.1, Fetchmail logs its activity in the System Log, which, of course, does get archived and rotated automatically. You can still view the Fetchmail-related activity in the System Log using MailServe Pro's Log Panel. But from this point on, /var/log/fetchmail.log is not used by MailServe Pro and can be deleted to reclaim disk space.

If I continue to use /var/log/fetchmail.log, I have to write my own script to rotate and archive the log file periodically. But Fetchmail needs a restart when the log is rotated. So it's all very complicated. Then I realised I could achieve the same result by telling Fetchmail to funnel all its log activity to the syslog daemon and letting syslog deal with all the log rotation stuff. It worked.

I'd rather spend my energy improving the other aspects of configuring and setting up a mail server. But having the Fetchmail log grow uncontrollably to infinite size was rather troubling. So I'm glad I at least got that out of the way. I'll have to update plain old MailServe for Leopard too, next, if there proves to be no trouble or nasty side-effect due to this change.

Posted at 10:56PM SGT | permalink

Tue 16 Sep 2008

Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.5 Update

Category : Commentary

I've updated all my Macs to the new 10.5.5 Software Update. I've done the usual tests - Postfix, Fetchmail, UW/IMAP, Dovecot, and the web and DNS server - they all continue to work as before.

I had a jolt early this morning when I had an email about Dovecot refusing to start up for one MailServe Pro user after he had applied the 10.5.5 update. But a restart seemed to have fixed that, and all now seems well in MacLand.

Hope I hadn't spoken too soon.

It's the responsibility. Imagine a Software Update, and Dovecot or UW/IMAP or Fetchmail, all or singly, refusing to start up. And I can't find the answer. Can't make it work again. With 12,000 users (or at least those that paid) bearing down on the thin edge. What jolly good fun. I must have a death wish.

Posted at 4:32PM SGT | permalink

Wed 13 Aug 2008

R & D

Category : Commentary

This is a little application I made to test my understanding of Cocoa's System Configuration Framework, to see if I can mimic the behaviour of the Mac's Network Preferences panel.

To build more intelligence into MailServe and DNS Enabler I need to tell, for example, what network range the Mac is on, and whether there is a DNS Server already assigned to it and, if not, to be able to assign it for the user.

And I need to know what location the Mac is on because, if I know that, I can assign the right smart host that will work in that location.

This is something I've been wanting to work on for some time and I think I've finally cracked it.

All these will find their way into future versions of MailServe and DNS Enabler.

Mac OS X plus Cocoa is a fantastically powerful development platform. The System Configuration framework is at the heart of why the Mac often appears to be so smart, especially when it knows how to reconfigure itself so smoothly when you move around networks. And the fun thing is that your own application can get access to all these intelligences and plug itself onto all these notifications, too. Oh, the things you can do with it ...

Posted at 1:11AM SGT | permalink

Maven 0.7 Beta

Category : Technology

I've been using my own CocoaMySQL work-alike, which I'm calling Maven, quite a lot lately.

So I've done some bug fixes and added the ability to move selected data rows and columns from one database to another, just by dragging and dropping - even across database types, like from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

I've also added a keyboard short-cut (Command-D) for deleting tables, columns, and selected data rows.

This latest version (0.7 Beta) can be downloaded from the Maven page.

I've been told there's already an Apache project called Maven. But I'm stubborn about calling this Maven because I think it fits the name more. When I'm through with this, you'll see why.

Posted at 12:30AM SGT | permalink

Sun 20 Jul 2008

11469 customers in every corner of the world

Category : Commentary

I have this "Mail we love to get" page where I stick the messages I've enjoyed getting from people who've found our products helpful - enough to want to write some nice words about how they've been using MailServe, DNS Enabler, etc.

At the top right hand corner of this page, I have a count of the number of customers we've had, based on the number of unique email addresses we've recorded onto our database. Admittedly this is not a scientifically accurate count because the same person could use more than one email address, but it should be a close enough approximation.

I've been manually updating this figure. But what I really wanted to do is to automate this via a PHP call to MySQL. So, I've just done that. Proves I can still code :-)

Posted at 10:31PM SGT | permalink

Mon 14 Jul 2008

From Marconi to the iPhone 3G
- Reaching Across 100 years, Wirelessly

Category : Technology

The iPhone 3G is here (though not where I am). But are we so blasé that we don't retain a sense of wonder that the thing could even work at all - as a telephone - without wires?

It was in 1894 that Guglielmo (Goo-yee-ail-mo) Marconi first had the idea that messages could be sent over long distance through thin air. He was, then, just twenty years old.

If you're interested in how we got from there to here, read Erik Larson's Thunderstruck which brings that age of discovery to life, when giants like Marconi and Nikola Tesla competed to create those inventions that we now take for granted, yet can't live without. How I love books like these.

That was when I first saw a great new way open before me," Marconi said later. "Not a triumph. Triumph was far distant. But I understood in that moment that I was on a good road. My invention had taken life. I had made an important discovery."

It was a "practician's" discovery. He had so little grasp of the underlying physics that later he would contend that the waves he now harnessed were not Hertzian waves at all but something different and previously unidentified.

Enlisting the help of his older brother, Alfonso, and some of the estate's workers, he experimented now with different heights for his antennas and different configurations. He grounded each by embedding a copper plate in the earth. At the top he attached a cube or cylinder of tin. He put Alfonso in charge of the receiver and had him carry it into the fields in front of the house.

He began to see a pattern. Each increase in the height of his antenna seemed to bring with it an increase in distance that was proportionately far greater. A six-foot antenna allowed him to send a signal sixty feet. With a twelve-foot antenna, he sent it three hundred feet. This relationship seemed to have the force of physical law, though at this point even he could not have imagined the extremes to which he would go to test it.

Eventually Marconi sent Alfonso so far out, he had to equip him with a tall pole topped with a handkerchief, which Alfonso waved upon receipt of a signal.

The gain in distance was encouraging. "But," Marconi said, "I knew my invention would have no importance unless it could make communication possible across natural obstacles like hills and mountains."

Now it was September 1895, and the moment had come for the most important test thus far.

He sat at the window of his attic laboratory and watched as his brother and two workers, a farmer named Mignani and a carpenter named Vornelli, set off across the sun-blasted field in front of the house. The carpenter and the farmer carried a receiver and a tall antenna. Alfonso carried a shotgun.

The plan called for the men to climb a distant hill, the Celestine Hill, and continue down the opposite flank until completely out of sight of the house, at which point Marconi was to transmit a signal. The distance was greater than anything he had yet attempted - about fifteen hundred yards - but far more important was the fact that it would be his first at sending a signal to a receiver out of sight and thus beyond the reach any existing optical means of communication. If Alfonso received signal, he was to fire his shotgun.

The attic was hot, as always. Bees snapped past at high velocity and confettied the banks of flowers below. In a nearby grove silver-gray trees stood stippled with olives.

Slowly the figures in the field shrank with distance and began climbing the Celestine Hill. They continued walking and eventually disappeared over its brow, into a haze of gold.

The house was silent, the air hot and still. Marconi pressed the key on his transmitter.

An instant later a gunshot echoed through the sun-blazed air.

At that moment the world changed, though a good deal of time an turmoil would have to pass before anyone was able to appreciate the true meaning of what just had occurred.

"At that moment, the world changed". The other person at the time who saw the world as we have it today was that great, though tragic, figure Nikola Tesla. There's this passage in Thunderstruck :

In a much-read article in the 1900 issue of The Century Magazine, Tesla alluded to things he had learned from experiments at his laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which he claimed could generate millions of volts of electricity, the equal of lightning. He wrote that in the course of his experiments he had found proof - "absolute certitude," as he put it - that "communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable."

The article prompted J. P. Morgan to invite Tesla to his home, where Tesla revealed his idea for a "world system" of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. "We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance," Tesla wrote in the Century article. "Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face."

That word: television. In 1900.

"That word: television. In 1900."

"Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face."

... and now we have iChat AV.

Leonardo, Marconi, Tesla, Jobs :-) Visionaries all.

Posted at 5:00PM SGT | permalink

Thu 10 Jul 2008

"Though I was blind, now I see"

Category : Commentary

"Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he regained his sight, and he got up ..." and became an apostate.

Reading "god is not Great - How Religion Poisons Everthing" (as capitalised by its author, Christopher Hitchens), and being persuaded by his argument, is like experiencing the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, only in reverse.

On the other hand, you may just want to burn the book, and the author with it. There are not many "faiths" left in the world that Christopher Hitchens has not insulted. But insult is in the eyes of the beholder. It depends on how you've come to pick up this book.

It helps if you've read Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and have been persuaded enough to open up - to critical inquiry - all your years of ingrained beliefs.

So, if you're persuaded (note that I use "persuaded" three times - the point being that you're not forced to believe by diktat) that the evidence in favour of evolution (as to how we came to be) is incontrovertible, then Hitchens makes you come face-to-face with the implications of that switch in world-view - with no apologies whatsoever. Not while people are being burned, killed or otherwise dismembered somewhere in the world this very minute, in the name of religion of one stripe or the other.

So, there, I've laid clear my sympathies. Were we ever to go through our very own "Cultural Revolution" (or "Religio Inquisition"), the web being such that everything ever written can be searched, indexed, filed and noted for future action, I may have just signed my own death warrant. Would it be better then following Descartes' injunction, that "He who hid well, lived well"? But, can anyone show me a better way to stop the carnage than to let the scales fall from our eyes?

In Amy Chua's "World on Fire", you'd get rather more prosaic, and rather more believable, reasons for these same killings - or pogroms, fatwas, and ethnic cleansings. "Imagine there's no heaven" - do we believe in John Lennon now?

Posted at 9:31PM SGT | permalink

Luca 2.6.10

MailServe Pro 4.0.1

Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.5 Update

R & D

Maven 0.7 Beta

11469 customers in every corner of the world

﻿From Marconi to the iPhone 3G- Reaching Across 100 years, Wirelessly

"Though I was blind, now I see"

From Marconi to the iPhone 3G
- Reaching Across 100 years, Wirelessly