The
Ultimate
Business Machine

Technology, business
and innovation.

And, not least, about
the Mac.

Weblog Archive Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo








Creative Commons License

Copyright © 2003-2012
Bernard Teo
Some Rights Reserved.

Mon 28 Jun 2010

What's on our iPad Simulator

Category : Technology/Keystone.txt

This is a project we're resurrecting on the iPad simulator :

It's a General Insurance System (for motor, cargo, fire, etc). It was developed, pre-Mac OS X, using 4th Dimension on OS 9 and cross-compiled for Windows, back in the days when we weren't allowed to use Macs in corporations, but of course we persevered.

The company we built it for had to shut down in the wake of September 11 - its US parent was already struggling, I think, with long-tail claims and 9/11 pushed it over the edge - and so the system was orphaned. But I've always felt it was a great system and even now, almost 10 years later, I don't think any other system in use in Singapore has come close to matching it - in power, flexibility, completeness, accuracy and simplicity in use. So it's an idea I hadn't given up on. This is my unfinished business - to see it in use again and pitting it against the competition.

So, all the things we've been building - MySQL & PostgreSQL installers, database access frameworks, Luca, and now Liya - were really meant to set us up for another crack at doing this kind of work again, but with modern-day, Internet-centric, untethered mobile devices.

The iPad isn't here in Singapore for another couple of weeks. But we managed to borrow one yesterday to test our database frameworks against. Theoretically, they should work, if they work with the iPhone. But I wouldn't believe until I see it for myself. They worked, and ran pretty fast, too.

Now, my favourite segment in the Steve Jobs' D8 interview was when he talked about how the things he love about selling to the consumer space were exactly the things he hated about the enterprise market :

But I love doing enterprise-level work - for the complexity, for the scale, and OK for the "messiness", and there are so many moving parts that the solution can get to be quite intricate. And so, there's a challenge there to your craft that you have to push it to the limit. But, unlike Apple, I haven't yet found a way to make an end-run past the "orifices".

Posted at 12:38PM UTC | permalink

Mac@Work
Put your Mac to Work

Sivasothi.com? Now how would you do something like that?

Weblogs. Download and start a weblog of your own.

A Mac Business Toolbox
A survey of the possibilities

A Business Scenario
How we could use Macs in businesses

VPN Enabler for Mavericks

MailServe for Mavericks

DNS Enabler for Mavericks

DNS Agent for Mavericks

WebMon for Mavericks

Luca for Mavericks

Liya for Mountain Lion & Mavericks

Postfix Enabler for Tiger and Panther

Sendmail Enabler for Jaguar

Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:

  • Apache 2 Web Server
  • Postfix Mail Server
  • Dovecot IMAP Server
  • Fetchmail
  • SpamBayes Spam Filter
  • Procmail
  • BIND DNS Server
  • DNS Agent
  • WebDAV Server
  • VPN Server
  • PHP-based weblog
  • MySQL database
  • PostgreSQL database

all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks.