| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Thu 27 Oct 2005 Sky BurialCategory : Commentary/SkyBurial.txt Sky Burial by Xinran has edged out The Cliff Walk as the best book I've read this year. This book is special. I don't know how I came to know of it but I kept looking for it in the Library. When I found it, I read through it in almost one sitting. From a deceptively mushy, perhaps overly sentimental beginning, I rapidly got transfixed by it. It's simply un-put-downable.
Xinran tells the story of Shu Wen, a woman who spent 30 years wandering in Tibet looking for her husband, who was a doctor with the People's Liberation Army, who went missing without a trace. It's a wonderful, moving tale of pain, loss, hope, idealism and heroism. I've been urging everyone I know to read it. Perhaps as an antidote, if we're sick of the William Hungs and the Sim Wong Hoos. MailServe 2.0 Beta 1Category : Technology/MailServe2B1.txt I've still got a couple of things to add to it but here's a first beta of MailServe 2.0, the next version of Postfix Enabler. This fully functional demo will expire on 30th November 2005. I'll continue to work on it till then. You can download it from here. New Features Implemented support for IPv6 addressing over SSL It needs a bit more work. But I thought I'd release it and see how it goes. You can use your current Postfix Enabler serial number to try it out. It'll probably be priced at $19.99, with current Postfix Enabler users being able to upgrade for $9.99. I've been told that adding a Fetchmail implementation alone will make it worth paying $50 for. Well, I'll be happy if it's deemed to be worth 19.99. Will work on a web page next to describe the new features but they should be self-evident, I hope. Wed 19 Oct 2005 The Intersection of Technologies and the HumanitiesCategory : Commentary/humanities.txt An interesting quote from Steve Jobs at Fortune, "Our goal is to stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities." That's where I want to be. Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to do both arts and science subjects in school. But we weren't so fortunate, or liberal, then. So I made a choice. I would do science and then engineering because these are "disciplines" and I could do with a push from having to pass exams. But nobody needed to force me to read books on art, history, or philosophy. That worked quite well all the way till University. I wanted to be an architect but I opted for civil engineering school, because I wondered how architects could have the temerity to build those soaring monstrosities without a grasp of structures or why things don't just fall down. But that was when it all broke down. I found later that I couldn't "cross-over", in spite of my observations that some of the greatest architects in history were actually engineers, when there were not that strict Newtonian-age demarcation of the disciplines. I would be more at home in the Renaissance, philosophically speaking, when people like Leonardo pursued whatever their interests took them. So, I'm coming to my point. I'm observing that, through a round-about way, I'm actually living the life that I've wanted, doing not just arts and science, but also commerce, in whatever combination makes sense for the moment. It's a fluid existence, and it feels good to be alive and thinking, and savouring the days. But how much of this is due to the technology? My father surely wouldn't have been able to do that in his day, had he wanted to. It's technologies like the Mac that have been breaking the boundaries between the disciplines - boundaries that shoudn't have been there in the first place - and returning us to the state that should have been, where knowledge is best experienced whole. "The intersection of technology and the humanities", says Steve Jobs. That's the point the Microsoft-led IT industry has missed from too narrow a focus on the engineering - that technology and the humanities could intersect, and that the result would be dynamite. You know what they say about point of view being worth how many IQ points? Arthur Koestler wrote a book, The Act of Creation, where he described the nature of creativity, that it always occurs at the point of intersection between two otherwise dissimilar planes of existence - like Archimedes in the bath tub. It's a great book, and exhilarating for the ideas. Highly recommended. (The other two books of Arthur Koestler that are classics in the history of ideas and technology are : The Ghost in the Machine and The Sleepwalkers.) Tue 18 Oct 2005 WebMon at MPGCategory : Technology/WebMonMPG.txt I was wondering why there so many hits coming in from the Apple site. This is WebMon's page at the Macintosh Product Guide :
P.S. : A PFE Update. I've added mail queue management, virtual alias domains support, the ability to keep multiple Smart Hosts, and keychain support to MailServe, which is the next version of Postfix Enabler. There'll be a beta version to try out soon. Sun 09 Oct 2005 Care to show me your work?Category : Technology/MacAtWorkShowCase.txt WebMon and DNS Enabler have been doing quite well, and for this I'm very thankful. I'm wondering how people are doing and what they're building with these tools, including Postfix Enabler or Luca. If anybody is willing to send me links about how they're doing, using Macs for their businesses, and especially if the tools here have been of use, I would love to feature them in these pages. Just send me a note. I'm also getting an impression that the Mac Mini is a very popular machine among the people who're setting up their own servers. I love the Mac Mini. It's been performing beautifully and quietly. IP over FirewireCategory : Technology/IPoverFirewire.txt While debugging WebMon today, I found that SSL doesn't work between two machines, a client and server, when they're connected across a firewire cable. My two iBooks sensed each other immediately when they were connected via firewire. Using their Bonjour (previously known as Rendezvous) xxx.local names, I can connect from one to the other via SSH and HTTP, but not HTTPs. That's interesting. Connect two Macs via a simple ethernet cable and it just works (no cross-over cable needed). Connect two Macs via a firewire cable and it (almost) just works. Did somebody at Apple miss this? I'll come back and explore this when I get the time. Fri 07 Oct 2005 MailServe?Category : Technology/MailServe.txt I'm quite a bit further along in my update of Postfix Enabler. It's going to include : a) IPv6 support for UW's POP and IMAP plus maybe a few other things, like Postfix's virtual table so that we can at least provide some support for virtual domains and virtual users. Still no support for maildirs, I'm afraid. That will need another round of updates to see if there is life beyond UW/IMAP. I'm thinking of calling it MailServe to get a better handle on what this project is trying to do. I'm thinking of pricing it at 19.99, with current Postfix Enabler users being able to upgrade for 9.99? Pricing is such an art. Right now, I'm deep in the bowels, programming that beast - so further thought on this will have to wait. But I did want to do both art and science, didn't I? So, I shouldn't be complaining. It's been a good life. WebMon 2.0.1Category : Technology/WebMon201.txt I've just updated WebMon to 2.0.1 because I realised that auto-listing of server directories is turned on, in OS X's Apache, by default. This may cause the contents of WebDav folders to be listed in the browser, if someone happens to load the WebDav URL in the browser rather than in the Finder (which is where we need to go to to work with WebDav folders, using the Finder's Go->Connect to Server menu). Sorry to have overlooked this. But it's patched now. It can be downloaded from here. Fri 23 Sep 2005 Ora et LaboraCategory : Commentary/oraetlabora.txt Talking about a labour of love. The corner shophouse had been vacant for a while. I passed it this afternoon. I've been seeing people moving in. Now they're putting a new coat of paint. They looked Japanese or mainland Chinese, but I recognised neither in their speech. So I asked. The lady said they're Koreans. They're starting a Korean bakery. I said, that sounds like fun. Tonight, I was coming back after driving Hai Hwee home and saw them, still working. The place was well lit and the lady was sitting on a stool, while the guys were putting up the partitions. Cream coloured plastering. Nice. They're still hard at work. The lady looks like she's seeing exactly how the bakery will look and willing it into being. And I was thinking, please God, please don't be cruel with them. So much hope. And optimism. I hope they don't get disappointed. Ora et Labora. That was the motto of the school I went to. Work and Pray. Or, more accurately, Pray and Work. I think I understand so much better now what that all means. WebMon and DNS EnablerCategory : Technology/WebMonDNSEnablerReleased.txt I've released WebMon and DNS Enabler as commercial software, priced at $15 each. I hope they do well and keep us going and allow us to develop Luca, in turn. I hope $15 is not too much. They've been a labour of love. Wed 21 Sep 2005 The Mac Mini as ServerCategory : Technology/MacMiniAsServer.txt I switched over to a Mac Mini as the server for this web site yesterday. It's the 80 GB, 512 MB RAM, 1.42 GHz version, with the Combo drive, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, and a built-to-order modem. I've just tested that Tiger's built-in shared fax feature works. That's why I wanted that modem. We can fax through the Mini from anywhere in the house. And I've checked that I do get all in-coming faxes forwarded to me via e-mail, too. The Mini has been running great. It's so quiet, and it's about one-tenth or one-twentieth the size of the old G4 PowerMac that it replaces, so it'll probably also consume a lot less power. The Mini is running OS X Tiger 10.4.2 with all the security updates. I wanted to see how fast I could set things up and move everything over. Mail was the easiest, probably because Postfix Enabler has been used so much that it should just work by now. Same with DNS Enabler. And WebMon had PHP, SSL, and WebDav set up in seconds. So, basically, most of the services that I'm running - web, mail, DNS, FTP, WebDav, shared iCal calendars, the fax server, the PHP-based PayPal interface - they were all set up in minutes. It took a bit more time to copy the IMAP folders over. And the MySQL database containing the user names and serial numbers for Postfix Enabler. We actually had a payment coming in from Eddy Martinez the minute (literally seconds after) the Mini took over as the server, and that was pretty amazing. I had to check with Eddy that he did receive his serial number because I coudn't believe that it didn't get messed up. But he did. We did hit one problem, though - I found that SSL doesn't start up automatically on reboot for the Apache web server - I have to manually stop and start Apache for SSL support to take effect. This didn't happen with Panther, so it's probably something to do with Tiger, and it'll be something to look into. The performance of the Mac Mini is good. So good that I suspect it was causing us some new timing problems with our PayPal interface. We've had to do some re-programming to sort that out. So that was what actually consumed most of the time in the migration. I love this Mini. It's great value for money. It's the way to go for small businesses. We've now bought two new iBooks and this Mac Mini. Seems like Apple's hardware sales numbers are looking good for this quarter. Sun 18 Sep 2005 Icons and IdeasCategory : Technology/icons.txt I've created these icons for Luca, WebMon, and DNS Enabler respectively :
That's a branch from my frangipani tree you see in the Luca icon. I'm amazed by the way Nature works. Flowers will bloom and they die but they're replaced, almost effortlessly, by new ones. Same with leaves and branches. A business should bloom the way Nature does in the garden. That regal, regenerative vigour - that's what Luca's icon is paying homage to. WebMon's icon just shows the WebMon window peeking out the OS X monitor. And DNS Enabler is about creating a map of your domain names. It's good to get back to using Photoshop and Illustrator after all these years. I got my break as an independent "free-agent" ten years ago by teaching all those long-haired graphic artists Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and Freehand. I used to sit outside that AppleCentre (Tricom, at Gateway, long dead but fondly remembered) and think, wow, I just made a couple of thousand dollars today. Just by talking. Just like magic. Nowadays, it's not that easy to get these kind of returns. But that was how I managed to hire my wife, Bee Khim, and then Hai Hwee, and a couple of other people out of the company we all last worked for - with the proceeds from the Photoshop/Freehand training as the seed. It's to say, if you're ever out of a job, don't panic. It's possible to turn ideas into real income. Just dig deep into yourself and pull them out. Read more ... |
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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