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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Sun 20 Jul 2008

11469 customers in every corner of the world

Category : Commentary/11469Customers.txt

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 2:31PM UTC | permalink

Mon 14 Jul 2008

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

Category : Technology/Marconi.txt

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 9:00AM UTC | permalink

Thu 10 Jul 2008

"Though I was blind, now I see"

Category : Commentary/scales.txt

"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 1:31PM UTC | permalink

Mon 07 Jul 2008

China Rail - The Importance of Being Punctual

Category : Commentary/CRH.txt

Okay, last post about China, in case anybody is interested in making a similar trip. We travelled between Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou via China Railway High-Speed (CRH)'s bullet train.

This is the relatve location of the four cities :

China Railway's bullet train system is very impressive. It's always on time and it makes travelling very easy from Shanghai to beyond (just 30 minutes between Shanghai and Suzhou, in the time I take to get from Woodlands in the north of Singapore to the Central Business District in the south via our own Mass Rapid Transit system and we all know how small Singapore is).

There's a bullet train between Shanghai and Beijing that I'd like to try out when I next get the chance. And I think it's possible to get from Shanghai to places like Xian and Chengdu via the same system.

This is a link to a China Rail map.

And in each of these cities that I've mentioned, there's a Ming Town Youth Hostel - which we stayed in and which I highly recommend if you don't mind roughing out (once I saw this, below, in Shanghai, everything else seemed such a bore) :

Another jibe at our MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) system. In the last four years, while we've been building our Circle Line and which we'll still be building next year or two, Shanghai had completed 4 (four !) new lines, making eight in all, including their own circle line, and much of these tunnelled under very dense built-up areas. Have we lost our spark, O people of Singapore? How can we compete? It's frightening, isn't it?

Posted at 6:14PM UTC | permalink

Hangzhou

Category : Commentary/Hangzhou.txt

The joy of traveling is to discover delightful places. These are some of the pictures that I took when we were in Hangzhou :

I can work anywhere in the world, so long as I can get an Internet connection. I don't even need to be where my server is. If not for my kid's schooling, my wife and I would be quite happy to stay a few months each time in a different place. And Hangzhou would be one of those places. And, maybe, Beijing, too, in spite of the pollution, if they would have us.

Posted at 5:06PM UTC | permalink

Idle Distractions

Category : Commentary/IdleDistractions.txt

I'm supposed to be working on updates to DNS Enabler and WebMon for Leopard, but I'm distracted by the thought of having to update my weblog.

So why bother writing a weblog?

That's a thought I've had more than once.

Would I be more productive if I stop wasting time writing entries into this weblog? I probably would.

But anyway, now that I've got going, here's a thought -

Apple's WWDC has gotten bigger with each passing year. This year, it was even sold-out, which is supposed to be the first time that had ever happened. And, if you plot the trajectory, that's probably not going to be the last.

A particular dream of mine is that we have a conference for Mac developers, that is like WWDC, but where we don't have to fly so far to San Franciso, but that is held each year in a different city in Asia, like the way Siggraph holds its conference in a different city in the US each year.

So, since WWDC is so big, maybe we can spin off some of it into an Asian conference. Then we could have it one year in Singapore, then in Hong Kong, and then in Tokyo. And it need not be a major city. You can have it one year in a place like Hangzhou in China, which is actually, potentially, quite marvellous as a convention city, whether anyone else has realised that or not (and which would be quite a lot of fun getting to).

So, is there anyone else in the world who has a dream just like this?

Posted at 4:40PM UTC | permalink

Tue 01 Jul 2008

Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4

Category : Commentary/Leopard10dot5dot4.txt

I've updated to Leopard 10.5.4.

Mail Server, Web Server, WebDav, POP, IMAP, Fetchmail, Dovecot, FTP, Remote Login, and Firewall services - all seem well.

Posted at 3:16AM UTC | permalink

Mon 30 Jun 2008

The China Price

Category : Commentary/ChinaPrice.txt

This is the smog in Nanjing. You can't make out the details of buildings that are less than 400 metres away on foot. Actually, it's the same in Shanghai and Suzhou, but maybe not as bad. The air is especially bad in Nanjing because it's surrounded by mountains. The smog gets trapped in between.

On the bullet train from Suzhou to Nanjing, if you sit on the left side of the cabin, you see the source of all these pollution - smoke billowing out from umpteen furnaces.

You see farmland if you sit on the right but I didn't know that till the return trip.

It's easy to imagine lungs blackened by continued exposure to the smog. Especially wretched are the fumes coming off the buses when you're stuck with them in traffic. You gulp for air - but what you get is nausea.

So, for the time I was in Nanjing I was thinking, the famous so-called China Price does come at a great price - to the Chinese people. Eventually there will be a payback - tuberculosis, exploding heath-care costs - and China will no longer be able to offer the China Price.

And that time may come sooner rather than later.

I had picked up Kishore Mahbubani's book, "The New Asian Hemisphere", immediately when I got back home (my hunger for information having grown stronger rather than was satiated from that trip) and this jumped out at me on page 190, in the section on global warming -

Even though China ia a major new cause of greenhouse gas emissions, Chinese officials are genuinely worried. The chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Biro, gave a talk in New York in late 2006. He was asked which country, in his view, had the most environmentally conscious government. Most people expected him to mention one or two Scandinavian countries, or perhaps even the UK. Instead, he named China, to the surprise of everyone in the room. [italics added]

Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environment Law and Policy at Yale University, says that although the Chinese government has avoided any commitment to limiting CO2 emissions, it has set a target of cutting energy use per unit of GDP by 20 percent by 2010 - an ambitious goal for a country that gets 70 percent of its power by burning coal. "China has adopted fuel-economy standards that will push average car mileage to nearly 40 miles a gallon over the next five years, and much higher than in the US. And it has promised to reduce water pollution by 10 percent by 2020 and increase industrial solid-waste recycling by 60 percent." He says that these "aren't just empty promises. The State Environmental Protection Agency, which recently acknowledged that air- and water-quality levels are worsening, blocked 163 projects worth US$99 billion in 2006." Furthermore, "startup companies are being launched every day to develop pollution-control technologies, improve energy efficiency, and create alternate sources of power. The US$220 million in clean-tech venture capital China received in 2006 puts it ahead of Europe as a venue for new environmental companies." The good news is that in this field, China does not need to reinvent the wheel. It can learn a lesson or two from Japan, which weathered the oil crises of the 1970s and from that difficult experience learned to become one of the world's leading leading countries in energy efficency...

I hadn't known all these. So that was interesting. Because, while Shanghai was predictably Shanghai, and Suzhou was depressing, and Nanjing somewhat surly, Hangzhou had a nice, clean, cool, happy feel - like Fisherman's Wharf during WWDC week. And I was told China had more great places just like that. So there's all this potential - if they could just fix this pollution problem. They'll have a place where no Chinese would ever want to leave. What more incentive is there, then, to lick the problem?

Posted at 7:31AM UTC | permalink

Sat 28 Jun 2008

China's March to Modernity

Category : Commentary/ChinaMarchToModernity.txt

I'm borrowing the phrase "March to Modernity" from Kishore Mahbubani's book, "The New Asian Hemisphere", subtitled "The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East", though whether it is irresistible or not, I don't yet know. Writes Mahbubani (who's been known to question whether Asians can think):

"When many Western observers look at China, they cannot see beyond the lack of a democratic political system. They miss the massive democratization of the human spirit that is taking place in China. Hundreds of millions of Chinese who thought they were destined for endless poverty now believe that they can improve their lives through their own efforts. ... The real value of free-market economics is not just in the improvements in economic productivity. It is about how it uplifts the human spirit and liberates the minds of hundreds of millions of people who now feel that they can finally take charge of their destinies. This is why Asia is marching forward."

It's been two weeks since since I've been back from China. And I'm still processing the impressions. Before I left, I would have thought I would be excited to write about what I'm going to be seeing. But early on in the trip, I've had the feeling that maybe it would be wise to just keep still and think - because things are going on there now that are going to change the trajectory of the rest of our lives - for me, my family and especially for my kid.

So for now, just some photographs from the trip - through Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou via the "bullet train". It had been a great trip.

Posted at 12:49AM UTC | permalink

Fri 30 May 2008

Leaving on a jet plane for Shanghai and Suzhou

Category : Commentary/LeavingOnAJetPlane.txt

In a couple of hours we will be leaving for the airport. We've decided to just go ahead with our planned trip. We're staying about half the time at Suzhou and the other at Shanghai, with hopefully a visit to Nanjing squeezed in between.

My MacBook Pro goes with me so I can still get mail while away. It'll be a good test of the server while we're away for two weeks.

Hope it'll be a good break. When I get back, I'll continue work on my feature request lists for all three of my "configurator" apps for the rest of the year, and hope I'll still have time for Luca.

Posted at 11:24PM UTC | permalink

Thu 29 May 2008

Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3

Category : Commentary/Leopard10dot5dot3.txt

I've upgraded my servers to 10.5.3. The mail server, web server, webdav, POP, IMAP, Fetchmail, FTP, and firewall services all seem to be working OK.

So I think it's safe to upgrade.

Glad it's released today rather than next week. One less thing to worry about if I'm going to be away for two weeks.

Posted at 4:04AM UTC | permalink

Wed 28 May 2008

My very own Leopard-based Server with Dovecot

Category : Commentary/LeopardiMacServer.txt

I've only just found the time to upgrade my own server to Leopard. (Talk about the cobbler's children going without shoes.) It used to be on a Mac Mini running Tiger, which had performed admirably well, chugging away quietly and efficiently for two years without giving any problems. But the workload has increased and the Mac mini had felt increasingly slow under all that weight.

My server's now running on an Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz iMac and I'm very happy with it. It's running Dovecot and I'm enjoying being able to organise my IMAP folders into sub-folders, because I've got so many of them, damn folders.

I've kept almost every single message that I've received or sent out over the last five years, just so I can build up the background information quickly if anyone ever writes to me for support. So my IMAP store is huge. UW/IMAP was struggling to keep up. Dovecot does feel snappier.

I've enabled all the essential services, of course using DNS Enabler, MailServe Pro and WebMon. I did a clean install of Leopard and the services were set up in literally minutes. Most of the time I spent moving mail from UW/IMAP on the Mac Mini to Dovecot on the iMac.

So, would I pay for these, my own applications? Definitely :-) I am proud of them. But that's not to say they can't be improved. They can and I will be working on that, after the short break we had planned for in China.

But to go or not to go? Earthquakes, flood, hand-foot-mouth disease and other possible epidemics. How things had changed in just one month.

Anyway, I've prepared the servers. I've a backup for everything - for the server, broadband line, etc - so my friend Hai Hwee can switch over if anything happens to the server while we're away for two weeks.

The good thing about buying the tickets directly from Singapore Airlines is that you have up to almost the last day to change your mind and you can exchange the tickets for vouchers that are valid for one year.

Shanghai, Suzhou and Nanjing beckon. Or do they? Will need to decide soon.

Posted at 2:59AM UTC | permalink