| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Mon 06 Oct 2003 The Millionaire Next DoorCategory : Commentary/millionaire.txt There's this book "The Millionaire Next Door", by Thomas Stanley and William Danko, that I enjoyed reading and just realised that, if I had looked carefully, much of what they described also happens here in Singapore. The other day, we were talking to the owner of a noodle shop about why he's decided to move his operations somewhere else. He said that he's paying $10,000 a month in rent and the landlord refused to cut the rent by even $500 to help him out of the current recession. As we were talking, he pointed out the landlord, and it was the little lady who runs a fruit stall in the next shop. Not only does she own the two shops, she also owns the third and all three are in a high pedestrian traffic area. And as we were talking, she was clearing up what's left on a table. It can't be true, can it? Yes, it can, because a few days later I met her in the lift, on her way to a management meeting for people who own units in the building, and she confirmed it. Down the street where I live, there are a couple of other little old ladies who have no evident sources of income, who have no cars, and who wear the same clothes almost everyday. Yet their houses are always well-maintained. And they seem happy and they do live well, if not ostentatiously. How do they do it? Passive income, from either property or other investments that they or their family had made. So I asked my friend Hai Hwee who would she rather be? The guys who are visibly rich with their beemers and condos bought on credit. Or one who is really rich though nobody can tell? Her answer? She'd rather be that little lady. Of course. Java and CocoaCategory : Technology/javacocoa.txt My colleague, Hai Hwee, just found an answer as to why simply opening and closing windows will eventually crash an application written in Java that uses Apple's Cocoa framework for creating the user-interface. It's got to do with "garbage collection". Java has automatic garbage collection that will reclaim memory that is not in use. But garbage collection needs to be explicitly specified in Objective-C, which is the language Apple used to build Cocoa. I've often wondered how you use these two conflicting schemes together. The answer is : you get crashes - unless you manage it in some way. Now we know why, the crashes have stopped and we're happy coding again. So the bottomline is: it's really possible to create "native" OS X applications using Java. There are tons of stuff in Java out there for which the cource code is available. And there are a whole lot more Java programmers than Objective-C programmers. This is one religious argument for which I will gladly take the side of the pragmatists. So, Java is it, for us. It brings the Mac back to the mainstream and every little thing helps, if you want to see the Mac accepted by the enterprise market. Postfix breaks in 7B74Category : Technology/postfixbreaks.txt I like the look of Panther so much that I'm now running it permanently on my iBook. Otherwise I can't start work a Postfix Enabler, can I? But Postfix seems to break with the 7B74 release. It's hard to find answers because everybody is supposed to be on NDA. Will have to see if the problem goes away in the 7B80 or 85 release. Other than that, everything else that I need survived the upgrade (even the rsync command that I use to update this weblog). I think Panther really does improve the Mac experience, in terms of end-user productivity. So there's no going back, as far as I'm concerned. Panther is going to be good for the Mac. |
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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