| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Tue 01 Feb 2005 Course UpdatesCategory : Commentary/Feb2005CourseUpdates.txt The registration window for the AppleScript Studio Course on 17th and 18th February has been closed. We're now informing the 20 successful applicants, 14 of whom have confirmed attendance. That leaves six places still to be confirmed. If, by tomorrow evening, there are still places left un-filled, we'll free them for the others in the queue. What I enjoy most about doing this is watching Hai Hwee's course registration system at work. It's so fun, the interactivity - sending out the invitation, and watching the registrations come in almost immediately, sending out the notifications, and watching the confirmations coming in just as quickly - with all the database updates, web page generation, and e-mail notification done on-the-fly by the intelligence that Hai Hwee had built into the scripts. That is the ghost in the machine - of the friendly type - intelligent agents that work for us while we sleep. That is what I really want to do for the rest of my life - finding businesses we can run that use our own technology. While we're on this, there is a Java on Mac OS X Course on the 1st and 2nd of March 2005. Free. Sponsored by Apple World Wide Developer Relations. Somehow, java.net picked up on it. I hadn't mentioned it in the weblog at all. But I might as well do so now. If you're interested in attending, please bookmark that page, and wait for the registration to be opened some time after Chinese New Year, next week. Actually, February is going to get pretty busy. I'm doing a custom Objective-C and Cocoa Course for a group of people at Apple Singapore on the 23rd to 25th Feb. Out of this, I hope to create something more generalised that can serve as a (hopefully, interesting) introduction to the wonders of doing programming with Objective-C and Cocoa on Mac OS X. Hai Hwee has finished creating her SQLite Cocoa framework, and that's what I'll be able to incorporate into our courses to show database access from Obj-C. Pursuing the TranscendentCategory : Commentary/seaChange.txt Two articles. Plus this picture of Creative's Sim Wong Hoo, which brings to mind the term "beleaguered". Do these all add up to a sea change? The first article was, "The Revenge of the Right Brain", at Wired : "Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent." "Pursuing the transcendent". I've often wondered at how I turned out to be a "Mac fanatic" - if we let the blinkered business press have their day by adopting their terminology. I think the turning point was when I was at our Ministry of Defense. We've just put up a pretty nice Technology Show, and we ran a lot of the presentations using MacroMind Director. Those were the days when the PCs were on character-based DOS and they only had PC Paintbrush, Harvard Graphics, etc. So, it was really liberating, on the Mac, to be able to choose nice typefaces, use pretty scanned-in graphics of high fidelity, and animate sequences with lead-ins and transitions and even music. A couple of us who worked on the presentations would have been interested in being copywriters or being in advertising, if we didn't also have an interest in the programming side of using computers. If you observed the guys or girls who gravitated to the Mac, then, you would have over-heard conversations about films or books or music or architecture, even among the techies. So there was a context, or shared understanding, that developed around the use of that tool - mainly because you could relate those extra-curricular interests at so many levels in the use of the tool. Like, I could relate the work of a master like Alfred Hitchcock to the issues I was grappling with in user-interface design. See Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre". So, it should have been a great thing to have shared this different way of using computers, and we were being complimented by people from other ministries - that we had opened up their eyes to some new possibilities - but we hadn't counted on being put down by people from our own side who were the gate-keepers - the PC admins, coordinators and sysops who made the rules and control the choices. It was all so much razzle-dazzle to them, inconsequential, signifying nothing. Not just nothing, which would have been alright. But the Mac seemed to have triggered a visceral response - which led, a couple of years later, to every single Mac being rooted out from the organisation, most of them still in good working order. It's the response to stupidity and waste and injustice that characterises the actions of someone who's called a "Mac fanatic". If you understand the Great Classical-Romantic Divide, and the difference between left-brained types and right-brained types - all these could be explained. I've spent four years in engineering school, among people whose shirts don't match the pants don't match the socks. I could live in that world, and have friends there, too. But did some of them get laughed at when they went over to check out the girls at the Arts faculty, and felt compelled to take it out on the "flashy, GQ-types" the moment they had control over them due to their better affinity with computational tools? We'll never know. But what we do know is that, from the start, computers were technically difficult. The people who moved up to positions of power were pre-dominantly left-brained, with degrees in maths, computer science or engineering. It's taken quite a bit of time but things are starting to change. The problem with the Great Classical-Romantic Divide is one of vision, or the lack thereof. The left-brained types, the people in control of the technical choices - they don't know what they don't know, can't see, and don't care. But there are more people pointing things out their way now. Like this article today, "Dell - Beware the Beige Box Blahs". " Rollins (Dell's CEO) dismissed Apple's mega-selling iPod as a "fad," calling it a "one-product wonder," and he pooh-poohed the eye-catching Mac mini as inconsequential. " Rollins' comments are more than uncharacteristic. They're troubling -- and not just for their snippiness. They raise real questions about how well Dell understands the home market." That's it, again. Fad. Inconsequential. That was the kind of response we got so many years ago. But now the tide is turning. How much does Dell understand about what the PC market's turning into? Or Sim Wong Hoo, for that matter? How much does Sim Wong Hoo understand about the war he has declared. He, with his harmonica, is as un-cool as anyone could be from U2 and The Edge. And we're talking about being in the music business - that's where the war is being waged, and he doesn't know. Not that I'm picking on a fellow countryman. How much does Bill Gates really understand about working with information on a computer, with his "Business at the Speed of Stupid" ideas. We're really working with information, not computers. Like the way Revlon doesn't really sell cosmetics but hope. It's really about integrating art with technology - "artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent". If we believe that we've got this just one life to live, ought we not to try to live life to the full, in all its multi-facetted glory? Why bother to use just one side of our brain when we could use both? It's about having breadth of vision and a unity of purpose. And remembering to thank our Creator for having made it possible. At this point, imagine Van Morrison singing "Have I told you lately that I love you". That version gives true meaning to the word "transcendent". Just what do we do without iTunes? Thu 27 Jan 2005 AppleScript Studio Course (17th, 18th Feb) UpdateCategory : Technology/ASCourseUpdate.txt We've about 26 to 28 people registered for the course, as of now. Leon may be closing registration soon, because we're going to do about 20. But we've had people signed up, and later neglected to confirm their attendance. So it's not too late. Places may free up later. So, hurry to sign up before the window closes. Wed 26 Jan 2005 AppleScript Studio Course @ Apple SingaporeCategory : Technology/AppleScriptStudioCourse1718Feb05.txt Apple World Wide Developer Relations is sponsoring an AppleScript Studio Course on the 17th and 18th of February. It's free. Just sign up on-line as an Apple developer (also free) before registering for the course. If you're registering, you're using Hai Hwee's course booking and training administration system - all written in PHP plus MySQL, all on the Mac. We've got one registration within a minute of Leon Chen sending out the course invitation. That was fast. An update: as I was writing this, another five's come in. Great! Tue 25 Jan 2005 Application software development on the Mac? Let me count the waysCategory : Technology/softwareDevelopmentPathsOSX.txt Last week, I was too busy, but not that busy that I'd miss this discussion at silicon.com. "CIO Jury: Apple irrelant to businesses." "... CIO Jury was invented by silicon.com to take the pulse of the UK's top IT users. We regularly put questions to our pool of key CIOs, IT directors and other heads of IT ..." Key CIOs? Top IT users? Sure don't look like it. Read the readers' comments. The tide is turning. One CIO said, "Proprietary hardware and software, overpriced, few applications." Microsoft is proprietary but that doesn't seem to stop them buying Microsoft. "Few applications"? If they only knew. I've been wrapping my head, these last few weeks, around all the different ways we can build custom applications on the Mac. So I'm going to do a summary, as much for myself, as for anyone who's reading these pages. Firstly, where Windows has Visual Basic, the Mac has Real Basic. Or AppleScript Studio. Or FileMaker Pro. These are good for custom applications that don't need to be "professionally" done, but that need to be put together in a hurry, and can be "thrown away" without too much bother once they've done the job or served some need. They don't need a deep investment in technical knowledge, and they're often cobbled together by the more knowledgeable (and committed) among the end users, themselves. Now, when more "serious" programming is required, we can turn to Java - on both platforms. Java is great for building server-based applications that can run on any hardware platform on earth. On the Mac, there's a twist. You can build native Mac OS X Cocoa applications using Java. And re-use a lot of your code at the data model end of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) continuum. Java-Cocoa is eminently do-able. We've mapped out a large enough part of the Java-Cocoa API to be able to help people who want to port code they've already written in Java to the Mac so that it gets a Cocoa front-end. With Java, too, you can get access to any SQL database engine that you want. From Oracle to MySQL to PostgresSQL. Oh, the choices. Thy name is legion. There is one problem with Java, though. Java applications are easily de-compiled. Unless you first try to "obfuscate" your code, it's really quite possible to recover the source from the compiled byte-code, thus turning away people who'd rather keep their source code hidden. But obfuscation is really so much extra bother. Java is great for server-end stuff, or for in-house system development (as contrasted with shrink-wrapped applications), or for open-source projects. That is still a lot of areas, as far as productive work goes. Now, shrink-wrap software developers might want to do their software development using Objective-C. (I know, the term shrink-wrap itself is so 20th Century). No doubt that keeps the selling opportunities within the smaller world of Mac users, but there are compensations in the sense that developing Cocoa applications using Objective-C is fun, and you can do quite involved and seemingly difficult things using relatively little code, and you're, on the whole, super-productive, allowing you to build better quality products with a lot less people. I used to think there was a deficiency in the area of database access when I switched from Java to Objective-C - that meant losing the ability to use the JDBC database-connectivity mechanism and its bountiful harvest. That was why we've been trying a few approaches over the last few weeks. One was to use Objective-C and keep all the database access using Java. But that got too messy. The solution turned out to be quite simple, actually - at least conceptually. A lot of the relational databases we want to use have C API's - MySQL, SQLite, Oracle. Now, following the example of the MySQL Cocoa Project at sourceforge, we now know that it is possible to build a Cocoa framework that is callable by the rest of the Objective-C code, but hides the actual implementation of the database access. In effect, it does what the JDBC layer does for Java applications. That turned out to be quite exciting. We could use the Open Source sMySQL framework. Or we could build our own, now that we understand the concept. What we want to do is to build something that will mirror the JDBC calls so that it'll make it easy to port our Luca Accounting System code from Java to Objective-C. What's more. SQLite is expected to be included in the next revision of our favourite OS. It's currently quite limited in features compared to MySQL but it's usable, and has a pretty liberal usage policy (none of that copyleft viral stuff that comes with GNU licenses). We've tried modifying the Cocoa framework to work with SQLite. The idea works. My friend, Hai Hwee, has also built a little prototype of Luca that works with an embedded SQLite database. That idea also works. All these is so that we can avoid having to install a database for the users before they can use our applications. If we're careful with the design, we can take the inspiration from JDBC and build the Cocoa frameworks so that we can access different SQL databases, just by swopping in and out the relevant Cocoa frameworks, without needing to re-write much of the calling Objective-C code. That will be super-powerful. There's Core Data in Tiger that does something like that. But it's good to know how to do your own thing, just in case that's not good enough for our purposes. Zooming out from the trees and surveying the forest, I believe in the phenomena whereby, when the time is right, many people around the world suddenly see the same possiblities, almost simultaneously. I can't remember what this phenomena is called. But the Internet surely makes this even likelier to happen. Whatever it is, I expect to see an explosion of useful database-linked software coming out for the Mac. The ingredients are in place. And when it arrives, those top, top CIO's aren't going to know what hit them. And, perhaps, where their jobs had gone. Mon 24 Jan 2005 Programming on Mac OS XCategory : Technology/Feb2005OSXProgrammingCourses.txt This is a teaser. There are a couple of courses on Mac OS X software development coming up at Apple Singapore for the month of February. More details will be available soon. Watch this space if you're interested in attending. It'll probably be absolutely free. (That should get some attention.) Fri 21 Jan 2005 Follow Your DreamsCategory : Commentary/followyourdreams.txt Bruce Whitred came down all the way from Japan to sit with me through an AppleScript Studio Course at Apple Singapore. (In the picture below, I had asked Hai Hwee, who knows some Japanese, to come along and show Bruce how to do English-to-Japanese localisation using AppleGlot.)
Actually, at the end of the two-day course yesterday, I realised that it was really my privilege to have met up with Bruce, who's a most interesting guy. Dreamsclub.com is his website and this was what he told me when we first corresponded, which I reproduce below because I feel you really ought to hear him in his own voice : Regarding the home page, I really must get it set up in English, sorry. It`s probably hard to understand the concept without reading it but one of my dreams is to inspire people to be the best they can be. Hence our company`s slogan "Follow your Dreams". To that end, I decided four years ago to try something out of my normal sphere of activity to inspire others. So with everyone saying I couldn`t possibly do it (having had no experience with running) I set off to run 3,100 km over 4 months from the northern tip of Japan to the island of Okinawa in the south. My degree was in bio-resource engineering though I found quickly that my true love was with education, computers and challenging people to take control of their life more like an artist or writer would develop something beautiful out of an idea and effort. The street performances were originally added into my motivational speeches to jolt people into seeing themselves and their potential beyond the limited framework of what they do now. I believe things happen for a reason. Talking to Bruce did jolt me out of a rut I had got into lately. We really ought to be glad we're alive. Living life to the full, stretching ourselves to meet our potential, believing that anything is possible - if we set the goal, put in the effort, and work out the process to get there. I watched Bruce grope around with the key concepts on the first day, clicked into gear at the start of the second, and then accelerate as his understanding took root at the end of the day. This is a guy who can prove that the idea works. I think I learnt more than I had taught. Mon 03 Jan 2005 I get a breakthroughCategory : Technology/spamblocks.txt We know for a fact that some mail servers are rather picky. They will reject mail coming from a dynamically assigned IP address, or one without a domain name, or follow any some other rule. I've been wondering why my mail from cutedgesystems.com (which is on a dynamic IP address) sometimes get through to the people at Apple Singapore and sometimes they don't (when Apple's servers' decide that it could be spam). It's puzzled me for over a year - i.e., what has changed in my configuration that makes those servers decide one way or the other, because obviously I want my mail to get through all the time. I rebooted our server today and realised that I couldn't send mail out to Leon Chen at Apple anymore, even though I've been able to do so for months now. So something has changed. I dug around and found the answer - it's the DNS server. I've been playing around with setting up a DNS server, on and off, over the year. Turning the DNS server off causes the mail to be bounced back from a picky server. Turning it back on gets the mail through. If there is a DNS service running on our local network when the mail server starts up, it'll be able to correctly discover its own domain name. (Otherwise it knows itself as, say, roadsteadserver.local). Seems like, when it knows that it should be cutedgesystems.com, it'll be able to send mail out to other servers without getting bounced. (Or some such explanation.) I don't know if I really understand what is happening but the moral of the story is - it's good to be able to run your own DNS service. I've got a version of Postfix Enabler (in Obj-C) that will work with the next revision of our favourite OS - except that it leaks memory. Lots of it, I'm sure, until I figure out how all these retain and release stuff works. (Mike Beam's article at O'Reilly is a great starting point.) It ought to be known as Postfix Configurator or something because it won't be doing much enabling anymore. The Sun Breaks ThroughCategory : Commentary/newbeginnings.txt After four days of torrential rain, we greet the sun for the first time in the New Year. Like the sky has been crying buckets, for the trail of devastation left behind in Asia.
Wed 29 Dec 2004 Java Debugger in XcodeCategory : Technology/XcodeJavaDebugger.txt The nice thing about getting hit with problems is that you often discover new things in the process of solving those problems. We thought we had lost the ability to debug Java code when we moved from Xcode 1.2 to Xcode 1.5. That was something that was asked about quite a lot during the "Java on OS X" course last week. So we were planning to move back to Xcode 1.2 the next time. However, while trying to stop the Java code from crashing, doing Cocoa Bindings, we really needed to know what was happening to the code. Finally, Hai Hwee, who could have been a top-notch detective in a previous life, found out how to turn the debugger back on, while fortuitously following a random Google link about remote debugging. The control's hidden in the Get Info pane for the project executable. With the debugger back on, we really made a lot of progress after that.
The great thing is, we discovered that debugging now works for AppleScript Studio projects, too. At last. So, Xcode 1.5 is it. No use going back. What will 2.0 bring in Tiger? Mon 27 Dec 2004 At the Sungei Buloh WetlandCategory : Singapore/sungeiBuloh.txt
We were at this nature reserve at the northern end of the Singapore, just across the Straits from Johore. It's called the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. It's a wonderful place - a transit stop for migratory birds among the mangrove swamps, with crocodiles (though we didn't see one), sandpipers and otters. Siva, otterman and Mac user, writes a blog about nature, bio-diversity, conservation, and the Mac. Glad I've finally had a chance to make it to his home ground. Doing Cocoa Bindings in JavaCategory : Technology/JavaCocoaBindings.txt We've found a way to stop our Java-Cocoa demo of Cocoa Bindings from crashing - comment out the call to "super.windowControllerDidLoadNib". Of course, why this should be so remains a mystery, since "[super windowControllerDidLoadNib:aController]" works okay on the Objective-C side? But, with this out of the way (for the moment), I've converted the project we use for our Java-Cocoa course to Cocoa Bindings :
What does this show? One, there are places in the framework where you can step in and make a call to an existing database. The resulting data will get picked up by the Table View. Then, Cocoa Bindings takes over to synchronise the display of the detail view with the table view. This is where we save a lot of writing of Controller-type code. All the notification-related code can disappear. In fact, some of the things handled automatically by Cocoa Bindings work better than the code we write. Then, at the end of the cycle, we should be able to find a convenient place to push the changes back to the database. The things left are to figure out how and when to do data validation, how to open the detail window by double-clicking on a selection in the table view, and how to have more than one detail window open (because it's possible that a user may want to compare two detail records side by side). Also, I still don't yet know how to do handle check-boxes (though I've just had an idea). In summary, this is seriously useful technology, though quite a few kinks remain. I keep watching out for when I'm going to fall off the deep end. Database access is so good on the Java side - we have an embarrassment of riches using JDBC to connect to a wide range of databases, remotely as well as locally. The down-side is that you get more problems using Java with Cocoa than with Objective-C. But then, there is none of the database capability we've come to expect on the Objective-C side (though Tiger promises to correct this - but is the database access there only going to be single-user/single-machine, and only via SQLite?). This situation is so typically Apple. Simultaneously brilliant and clue-less - like a well-loved idiot savant. 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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