Mon 07 Dec 2015
New SQL Installers for El Capitan
Category : Technology/LatestSQLInstallersForElCapitan.txt
I’ve built the latest MySQL 5.7.9 Installer for Mac OS X El Capitan, as well as the latest PostgreSQL 9.4.5 Installer.
Both are available from my home page at :
Enjoy!
Posted at 3:47PM UTC | permalink
Sat 21 Nov 2015
MailServe for El Capitan 9.0.5 with Dovecot Replication
Category : Technology/MailServe9dot0dot5.txt
I love the Dovecot Replication feature. I have always wanted to set up a backup of my live server, that is ready to go if (and when) my live server goes down.
I thought the hardest problem that I’ll need to solve to solve is to find a way to do a live backup of the mail server, so that one is a perfect, totally up-to-date replica of the other.
That was until I discovered that Dovecot has a most excellent replication feature. It took me some time to figure out how to do all the Unix incantation to make it work – the documentation being quite sketchy. But here it is, in all its glory :)
I’ve implemented the user interface for the replication feature in MailServe 9.0.5.
Just 4 steps :
1) enter the address of the replica server (that is also running Dovecot, as set up by MailServe), 2) enter a shared secret between the two servers, 3) turn the replication feature on, 4) Restart Mail Server.
And you need to mirror the same steps on the replica server.
That’s it.
If one fails, you’ve got all your users’ mail folders completely backed up on the other. And it runs automatically. When new mail comes, or when a user rerranges the contents of his mail folders, the backup mail server gets all the changes, within seconds. And it works in both directions. Make changes in one server – the changes will all automatically show up on the other. Great?!
Dovecot and its author(s) – they’re so brilliant.
Enjoy...
Posted at 11:05AM UTC | permalink
WebMon For El Capitan 9.0.2 • new version released
Category : Technology/WebMon9dot0dot2.txt
Posted at 10:19AM UTC | permalink
Wed 14 Oct 2015
El Capitan Server Upgrading
Category : Technology/ElCapitanUpgradingAftermath.txt
I’ve finished moving my live server to El Capitan. It took too long. This is the first time I’ve done an upgrade instead of a clean install. I upgraded from Mavericks, actually, rather than Yosemite, and I’m already seeing quite a few problems.
For example, the Apache files on my upgraded Mac Mini look to be different from the Apache files on my development machines, which I’ve always kept clean by doing clean installs (mostly). So my web server couldn’t start up and it took a while to debug it. Mail and the DNS server both started up fine.
But I’m having problems with the Keychain. My apps can’t seem to be able to save passwords onto the upgraded Mac Mini’s keychain.
So, quite a few puzzles to sort out. It wasn’t as smooth as I hoped it would be.
Posted at 4:56AM UTC | permalink
Upgrading to El Capitan
Category : Technology/UpgradingToElCapitan.txt
I’m upgrading my live server to El Capitan. As in, right now. If you see the server disappear, it’ll hopefully be only for a while.
I’ve only got this Mac Mini that I’m using as a server because I’ve been saving my money for the next incarnation of the Mac Mini from Apple and that’s taking too long to appear. So if I want to move my one and only server right now to El Capitan, I’ve got to move it in-situ.
Once I finish typing and uploading this post, I’m going to start the upgrade process.
And then start up all my Internet services using my own “enabler” apps. Time to eat my own dog food...
Posted at 12:44AM UTC | permalink
Mon 05 Oct 2015
El Capitan News
Category : Technology/elcapitan.txt
If you happen to be looking for El Capitan versions of my apps ...
Posted at 8:59AM UTC | permalink
Mon 27 Oct 2014
Liya 3.0.5 now works with iCloud Drive on Yosemite
Category : Technology/Liya3dot0dot5.txt
I have a new version of Liya on the Mac App Store. This latest version, 3.0.5, when run on Yosemite, now works with the iCloud Drive :
Liya’s iCloud folder now appears with other iCloud-compatible apps’ folders (like Pages and Keynote) inside the iCloud Drive folder, allowing you to easily share SQLite files with other apps, on both Mac OS X and iOS devices.
Posted at 2:25PM UTC | permalink
Tue 21 Oct 2014
Free iOS Apps
Category : Technology/iOSApps.txt
If you’ve been to our home page, you might see that I’ve featured two free iOS apps you can download:
WordScanner is the OCR scannning app I’ve always wanted to have on my iPhone. I read a lot of books and I often want to share what I’ve found on my Facebook page. So, what I wanted was to have an app on my iPhone where I can simply take a shot of the page I’m reading and then hope to lift the text right out of it so I can paste it onto Facebook or the Notes app or an email message.
And I wanted it all to be so drop-dead easy — I wanted it to work even if I can’t position the page precisely on the iPhone camera viewer, or if the lighting is not particularly good. And I need to be able to crop out my fingers holding the edges of the page. And I wanted it to work so fast that I can get the text onto Facebook before I lose inspiration for whatever I wanted to write about that I was reading.
I want it to never crash because OCR is particularly finicky and memory intensive. So I decided to write the app myself, using the open-source Tesseract OCR engine and some image editing code I found on the web. The result is WordScanner. I’ve had this app for a couple of months and I’ve used it to share a lot of stuff I’ve read on Facebook. And it hasn’t yet crashed, so that’s what I’m very happy about. When I first did this, it would crash every short while.
I really love this app, maybe because I had built it myself, but I’m happy to share it. It’s available for free.
BookNapper is another app for a book lover, but in this case it would only be really useful if you’re in Singapore. We’ve got this lovely, first-class public library that I always think of as our national treasure. It’s very current, so if you’re in a nice book shop and you see a nice book, chances are that our library would have it.
So what I do is, I scan the book’s ISBN number into BookNapper, which will then keep a list of books I want to read. BookNapper tells me if this book is available in our library’s collection , and if so, in which particular branches of the library system. (It also gives me the Amazon and Goodreads reviews). Then when I step into any branch of the library, Booknapper tells me which of the books I want to read is available in that library for borrowing, right then. And leads me precisely to the right shelves.
So it’s like a precision heat-seeking missile for taking out good books! And it’s available also for free.
Posted at 10:26AM UTC | permalink
Yosemite
Category : Technology/Yosemite.txt
New Yosemite versions of all our apps (except for Luca which will take a bit longer) are out now.
MailServe has a new Dovecot binary (version 2.2.14). And so does DNS Enabler with a new BIND binary (version 9.10.1).
Actually I would be happier if Apple slows down the OS X releases because this way, we are struggling just to stay in place — we’ll never get much time to build new stuff if we keep going back to the apps to fix things that used to work on the previous releases.
Enjoy!
Posted at 9:45AM UTC | permalink
Thu 29 May 2014
Liya 3.0.4 does Chinese and UTF8 better
Category : Technology/Liya3dot0dot4.txt
Bug fix: Custom SQL Command field didn't allow the use of the Character Input Menu, e.g., to choose Pinyin to enter Chinese characters into the SQL query string. This has been fixed.
Made MySQL connections work more like PostgreSQL connections, in terms of the choice of character set used. The character set used in each connection to the database follows that of the database. If at the point of the connection, no database has been chosen, then the connection defaults to using UTF8. New databases in Liya are created using UTF8 as the default character set.
Also fixed a crash while importing and exporting databases that occurred after version 3.0.3, when Liya was made to be Sandbox-compliant.
Posted at 10:40AM UTC | permalink
Sat 03 May 2014
Liya 2.0.1 for iOS
Category : Technology/Liya2dot0dot1.txt
Liya on iOS is now a Universal binary that works for both iPhone and iPad, thanks to the AutoLayout feature in Xcode.
Oh, and I’ve added an option for the port number to be given as a connection parameter.
The iCloud part continues to work well. We’ve been told that SQLite on iCould is not recommended. But it’s worked OK so far. So much so that I’m now quite far along with an iCould version of my BookNapper app (available on the iOS App Store), where you can run BookNapper on both your iPhone and iPad, accessing the same list of books on iCloud, to organise your search for good books to read. That’s also almost done now.
Posted at 8:09AM UTC | permalink
Fri 25 Apr 2014
Liya 3.0.2 Available Now on the Mac App Store
Category : Technology/Liya3dot0dot2.txt
Liya 3.0.2 has finally passed the Mac App Store review process. This version adds iCloud support and I finally found the time to fix some user interface oddities, so it’ll now work exactly the way I had wanted it.
Notice that there is a new error log. This had been an oft-requested feature, and with this I’m now moving towards making Liya work better as a database design tool. I’d love to be able to set up compound keys and views using Liya.
If I can design an interface to allow the user to specify custom views of the database data—by dragging in tables and connecting keys between the tables, dropping columns that are not needed in the views, then I’m just one step away from making Liya work even better as a data mining tool. I’d love to be able to analyze the data across any number of dimensions, e.g., sales by product type by quarter or financial year, just by dragging visual representations of keys around the user interface, so the user can pivot the data around any focal point.
That’s the dream.
Posted at 1:04AM UTC | permalink Read more ...
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