Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Sun 26 Feb 2006

The Weekend Warrior? No, programmer.

Category : Commentary/weekend.txt

It turns out that Saturdays and Sundays are my most productive time of the week. That's when my wife brings out the kid and I'm left to concentrate on my work. I get a lot of programming done on weekends - often I'd tackle the hardest conceptual problems during that weekend slot.

So I've turned my world upside down. On weekdays, I often go with my wife to send the kid off to kindergarten. The other parents and teachers must be wondering why I don't have to go to work, like other dads do. Just the other day, one teacher couldn't help herself but had to ask - don't I have work to do?

Yes, but I enjoy having that long leisurely lunch with my wife. And to browse the library and Borders, before going back to pick up the kid again.

But I'm always thinking about my work - how to make it better and what I need to do next. It's just that I don't look like I'm working, even when I really am.

But this is the life. Life is too precious to be cooped up in an office, going through the motions. If I can just make this idea work - do good, make enough to feed the family, and make a little dent in the Universe...

I get most of my mail during the night, when the sun has moved over to the Western world. The quietest time of the day for me are the hours between one and six in the afternoon. If only there are more Mac users in China, India, and Africa. (You'd think, with billions of people in China and India, there should be a few more Mac users). Then I'd get business 24 hours a day.

Posted at 1:59PM UTC | permalink

Upcoming Releases/Updates for end February 2006

Category : Commentary/upcomingEndFebReleases.txt

I've an update coming to MailServe and DNS Enabler early next week.

For MailServe, I have added an SSL option to the Fetchmail settings, as requested. Also, I've taken the chance to simplify the Keep/Fetchall/UIDL set of options since the settings for Fetchall and UIDL can be implied from the setting chosen for Keep - e.g., keep implies no fetchall (and uidl, if protocol is POP3), whereas no keep implies fetchall (and no uidl).

So that's two popup menus eliminated and one added, resulting in a net simplification of the interface.

Over to DNS Enabler. I've added the ability to set up multiple secondary (slave) name servers, as requested by Paul Sloan of the Westwind School Division, Canada.

I'll release these early next week on Monday or Tuesday, after I've done another test and checked through the localisations.

I've a couple of new localisations coming for Postfix Enabler. One is a Spanish localisation contributed by Pablo Rodriguez. The other is an attempt by Hai Hwee to do a Japanese localisation. Thanks to Makoto Imai for being willing to take a look at it and sending over his comments. Sorry, if we've tortured your language. We really need to get better at this. We'd really like to do Japanese translations of all our software. If you'd like to help us, please write to me. I'd love to hear from you.

Posted at 9:58AM UTC | permalink

Thu 23 Feb 2006

DNS Enabler on Version Tracker

Category : Commentary/DNSEnablerOnVT.txt

I've put up DNS Enabler on Version Tracker, finally, because I thought it might help people who would need it but didn't know it exists.

But I've learnt not to expect much from the reviews. There'll evitably be the bad ones.

When I first announced Postfix Enabler on Version Tracker, I thought I'd be a hero. Little did I expect the reviews I did get, or at least the early ones. What was I smoking?

But I think DNS Enabler could be really useful. I've made it into the tool I wished I had when I was first learning to set up DNS.

I used MacDNS when I first needed to set up DNS. When that didn't work, I used QuickDNS Pro, which cost me $360, I think. I went through one feverish week figuring out how to make that work for my mail server - feverish because I was using a Mac server (AppleShare IP, then) in the midst of a Mac-hating IT organisation - another day more and the Mac would be thrown out. And I finally figured what I needed - reverse pointer records - but I had to create them manually. So, I've made DNS Enabler do it all.

Posted at 5:32AM UTC | permalink

Sendmail Enabler lives on

Category : Commentary/SendmailEnablerStillLives.txt

Remember Sendmail Enabler? I'd almost forgotten.

There's a sudden resurgence of interest in it, from monitoring my WebMon log window.

I wonder why?

Posted at 12:07AM UTC | permalink

Fri 17 Feb 2006

Cocoa is good for you

Category : Technology/Cocoa_is_Good.txt

Always, after a session working with these apps, I look up and smile at how wonderfully easy, and yet powerful, Cocoa is.

Drag and drop, hierarchically-organised table views, resizeable table columns, swappable table columns, saving your data structures into persistent storage without using a database - all these were all very difficult to do in the days we were using 4th Dimension.

I can only wonder at how much the major corporations are missing by not picking up on this potential. I used to spend a lot of time thinking, when I was last in a major corporation, of all the things we can build to help achieve the business goals - but always we were limited by the quality of the tools.

But Cocoa is like a sword - well-crafted, balanced, precise, sturdy and sharp - that we can wield to cut through the clutter, to build applications that are tight, clean, focused, useful, and yet economical.

What more can you ask (though one has to ask, whose failure is it that it's not better known) ?

Anyway, here are a couple of observations. One is that the object-oriented way of developing systems really does work. The proof is in the eating - surely the speed with which I've been able to come up with these enhancements is proof enough of the quality of the tool I've been using.

And second, remember when Steve Jobs placed a BMW motorbike and a grand piano in the lobby of the place that served as office for the original Mac team. Why? They were meant to inspire, to serve as examples of great design. In the same way, we might want to get a lot more generations of programmers to look at Cocoa, and learn what it means, and how useful it could be, when you're able to do great software component design.

Posted at 10:25AM UTC | permalink

WebMon and real live certs

Category : Technology/WebMon206.txt

I've updated WebMon to 2.0.6. This update provides WebMon with the ability to configure the web server using a working, pre-existing, live certificate :

The interface allows the certificate and key files to be dragged from the Finder into their corresponding fields in the Certificate Panel. WebMon will then store them in the right places in the /System/Library/OpenSSL/ folder for http over SSL to work, and all with just one click.

Posted at 9:08AM UTC | permalink

Thu 16 Feb 2006

MailServe 2.0.7 Released

Category : Technology/MailServe207Released.txt

I've released MailServe 2.0.7 with Fetchmail support for multi-drop mode. From this version on, mail server configurations can also be saved.

Next up - WebMon - adding the ability to import pre-existing digital certificates.

Posted at 8:00AM UTC | permalink

Wed 15 Feb 2006

MailServe supports Fetchmail in Multi-Drop Mode

Category : Technology/MailServe207.txt

I've been working on this 2.0.7 release of MailServe which will configure Fetchmail to work in multi-drop mode. This is how MailServe's Fetchmail panel will look like :

For example, you may have all of your mail delivered to a single mailbox on pop3.demon.nl, under an account named node.demon.nl. This account receives mail for annie@node.demon.nl, jack@node.demon.nl, etc.

What you want Fetchmail to do is to log into your node.demon.nl account with your user name, node, and give your password, and get Fetchmail to download and split the mail into individual mailboxes - for annie, jack, etc - on your server machine.

Then these individual users will log onto your server, and read their mail via IMAP or POP, just as if their mail had been sent there all along.

Fetchmail does the job of splitting the mail into the individual mailboxes and the individual users can forget about the existence of the pop3.demon.nl server. This way, you can consolidate the mail for all your users, from any number of ISP POP servers, into their POP or IMAP accounts on your own mail server.

MailServe, with this improved Fetchmail integration, will now allow people to do all that. I've just got to test it a little more and release it tomorrow.

And this MailServe update will also let the user save the current configuration, including the log records. You can save any number of configurations into MailServe's .msrv data files, and double-click on them from the Finder to open MailServe. It's great for swapping or backing up servers or sharing a working configuration as a template for a friend.

Also, I'm now able to issue the Start Fetchmail, Restart Fetchmail, and Stop Fetchmail commands, all from the same button. To Stop Fetchmail, the user just holds down the Option key and the button name changes to Stop Fetchmail. The button knows whether it should be Start Fetchmail, when Fetchmail is not running, or Restart Fetchmail, when Fetchmail is already running. The point is, I took some point to figure out how to detect modifier key presses that will change button state in Cocoa. But with that figured out, I can look forward to cutting down all the buttons that mess up the MailServe/Postfix Enabler interface to just one each for Postfix, POP, and IMAP.

Posted at 6:07AM UTC | permalink

Fri 10 Feb 2006

WebMon 2.0.5 is Universal

Category : Technology/WebMon205.txt

I've released a Universal Binary version of WebMon (ver 2.0.5). With that, WebMon, DNS Enabler, MailServe and Luca are now all Universal Binaries.

WebMon may benefit more from a faster machine than either MailServe or DNS Enabler because it has to pull out and format the webserver log records. So we could do with more speed here.

I've taken the chance to improve WebMon's interface so that a user can set up everything now - including SSL, test certs, PHP, and WebDav - in one step rather two or three. Hope it'll work better now. If it does, I'll have the base to build further and turn on more stuff.

Once you've set up a WebDav folder, you may want to allow a Windows client to access it. This link leads to an overview of using WebDav folders on Windows. And this is the page to go to to download a Software Update for your Windows machine to act as a WebDav client. It may be evening by the time you get all these done. They're all built-in on a Mac. So which is the serious business machine?

Posted at 4:10PM UTC | permalink

Tue 07 Feb 2006

DNS Enabler 2.0.6

Category : Technology/DNSEnabler206.txt

I've released DNS Enabler 2.0.6, with a new feature to save the configuration into a .dns file, and you can double-click on the config file to open it. It'll all work like a Mac application should, the amazingly omniscient "Open Recent" menu being implemented and it has its own document icon and all.

Being able to save and recall different sets of configurations, representing different scenarios, can make DNS Enabler a useful teaching tool. I've already made use of it to allow people to download the configurations that I'm using as examples on the DNS Enabler webpage. Plus it'll make it that much easier to move servers, by allowing the current configuration to be backed up.

I've also implemented another feature request - the ability to set up MX records for the secondary domains and not just for the primary domain. In the example below, misery.movie.edu acts as the mail server for not just the primary domain, movie.edu, but also for domain1.com and domain2.com. In the MX[xx]for.which.domain notation, if the domain name component is missing, the primary domain is implied.

The more I use Cocoa, the more I believe this is Apple's crown jewels. It's fun, it's powerful, and it's economical. You can try to be absolutely parsimonious about the amount of code you're willing to write and still be able to express quite intricate concepts.

Posted at 5:49PM UTC | permalink

Sun 05 Feb 2006

Amazon Recommends ...

Category : Commentary/amazonrecommends.txt

I did a double-take when this popped out at the top of the page when I went to the Amazon site just now :

It's the one on the left - The Kite Runner.

"Why was I recommended this?"

That was the right question - because that book was exactly what I was planning to read next.

How did Amazon know? It's uncanny.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - so says Arthur C Clarke.

Posted at 2:41PM UTC | permalink

A New World Currency

Category : Commentary/FaCai.txt

You know, the Chinese greet each other during the New Year with a hearty "Greetings! wish you'll erupt all over with wealth and prosperity!", or something to that effect, and it's all done with somewhat more vigour than the average Westerner's genteel "Merry Christmas".

Gong Xi! It looks like we're finally going to turn a corner and Fa Cai this year. The prognostications look good because, for one thing, office rentals have gone up significantly towards the end of last year, and that's a sure sign of business expansion. Although it's not quite the seller's market yet, it's steadily getting there.

And the Singapore dollar's on the up and up. It's sliced 5% off the value of my software sales in just the last two weeks.

So my mind's thinking of schemes, like where and how do I stash the money to keep its value?

I never thought I'd see the day when I'd be rooting for the Singapore dollar to go down and down. The cheaper it was, the more Singapore dollars I had to spend when I moved it down from PayPal, where the money's kept in US dollars.

The point is not that I'm thinking like a big-time businessman. It's more like I'm amazed at the experience, and luxuriating at the opportunities, that the Internet economy has brought within reach of the average man.

A few years ago, a person can never hope to do this - get in touch with and sell your wares to thousands of people all around the world - without needing to leave your house and, better still, without even needing to play golf to "establish contacts and touch base".

There's this Brazilian businessman I like to read, Ricardo Semler - Maverick and The Seven Day Weekend - and he was reflecting about the business adage that one should go out to socialise to smooth the business relationships, and he's wondering why he should do that when he could use the same amount of time to make his products work better, and surely that would be what the customers want.

Contrast this with the way business is done in China, as recounted by James McGregor in One Bilion Customers - "Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China", and since it's clear which way I'm more at home with, it's no wonder, at least to my wife, that I'm going through an identity crisis.

But, anyway, back to the theme of this message. It's about two things - that the world is going through some really profound change, and the best thing to do is to jump right in and take part, to see where it's going. Like the old Reebok advert says, "because life is not a spectator sport".

For example, if I can make this software business work, then theoretically I can live anywhere in the world where I can get an Internet connection and, of course, if I may dream, it'll preferably be where the air is cooler and fresher and life is great. If money will flow to where we are, won't it make sense, then, to find a place where the money can be made to last a little longer?

What does this mean for nation states and citizenship, and loyalty and fealty and sovereignty? Nobody knows. Whatever it is, it won't be business as usual.

And one more thing - at the core of a lot of these changes is ... PayPal. PayPal has a lot of bad press. Some people hate it and refuse to use it. But it's reached 85 million users now, and that's going to be some network effect.

Read the PayPal Wars by Eric Jackson, about the ideas the original PayPal founders had and that gave birth to it. Some of these ideas are just emerging into fruition. Some day, we'll read about the creation of The New World Currency. And then we, who're using payPal right now, and its future progenies, will remember that we were there, present at the Creation. May we continue to live in interesting times.

Posted at 2:40PM UTC | permalink