Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Tue 22 Jul 2003

About Hits and How Artists Work

Category : Commentary/hits.txt

Do you know how many people read Jon Udell's weblog at InfoWorld (Jon's Radio)? I believe it's a huge lot, judging by the number of people who hit the Sendmail Enabler page after he wrote about his experience using it. Thanks, Jon, if you ever read this. That, and other nice notes like that, have made it all worthwhile.

I guess that's the kind of high Steve Jobs and the people at Apple feel when they launched something that has been well received. It's addictive. And you want to work towards topping it.

I remember reading in Business Week or Fortune a criticism (perennial aren't they?) of Apple's business model - that they're dependent on a string of hits. One barren quarter and they're sunk. It's like, we're all business here. The only model worth emulating is that of the Microsoft money machine.

But if you do software, you may get an inkling that the business is closer to the chorus line than the production line on the factory floor.

I've just been loaned a book, "Artful Making - What managers need to know about how artists work" by Rob Austin and Lee Devin. From the blurb : "Despite years of trying, businesses have still not learned how to innovate reliably under deadlines. Collaborative artists, however, do it all the time - few business deadlines are as inflexible as opening night for a theatre company, for example. Today's knowledge-based, project-focused businesses can learn powerful lessons from artists about improvisation, innovation, and leadership."

"Collaborative artists" - that's closer to my experience of the mood surrounding good software development teams. You see the acceptance of uncertainty, the creativity to improvise solutions, and the readiness to make the tradeoffs that will keep you close to the deadlines.

This is a much more fun way of working. I believe there's nothing inherently wrong about working towards making hits. If you think back, ask yourself which company of the two, Apple or Microsoft, had invariably delivered OS updates when they said they would? The answer shows which model actually works.

Posted at 3:55PM UTC | permalink

Mon 21 Jul 2003

The World Wide Web

Category : Commentary/www.txt

I like looking through our server logs and finding a new site that refers to ours. New ones include Macintosh Paranoia, Prisoner of the Mind, iMacGuru, and Apfelgerüchte.

I love looking at the unfamiliar text but, of course, not being able to read Japanese, German, or even Chinese, I can't tell whether it's for the good or the bad. But I think I really see the world as this huge globe (around which the sun shines its torch) when I flip through these sites.

Posted at 8:51AM UTC | permalink

Sun 20 Jul 2003

Geometric Progression

Category : Commentary/geometricprogression.txt

I put Sendmail Enabler up on versiontracker.com on Sunday. Around midnight, I had confirmation that it had been listed. I went to sleep and woke up to find almost a thousand downloads had occured.

To put this in perspective, there was one download of Sendmail Enabler in the first three months (by a guy called Hari). Then Google picked it up and I had a hundred downloads in one month.

When I put it up on MacUpdate, I had a thousand downloads in one week. Finally, on Version Tracker, I get a thousand downloads in 12 hours. (At last count, it was 1553 at Version Tracker vs 1212 at MacUpdate).

I'm hooked. I'm hard at work porting our accounting system from 4D to Cocoa using Java and MySQL. There seems to be a shortage of accounting/personal finance management software for the Mac. Could this take off, too? It'll be fun to find out.

Posted at 4:06PM UTC | permalink

Fri 18 Jul 2003

Going Round The World

Category : Commentary/roundtheworld.txt

I found a user interface bug in Sendmail Enabler and used this chance to figure out what happens when you need to release an updated version on MacUpdate.

I'm impressed with the speed in which you can turn this thing around. I started working on the bug fix at around 9.30 pm and, by midnight, having completed a triple round of testing, I was ready to re-submit it to MacUpdate. (It was a stupid bug; though it's free, you still want it to be perfect).

The re-submission process was remarkably easy - if you take care to keep to your side of the bargain by checking that the download links are correct and writing the description in neat clear English. Mess up and you only have yourself to blame. But, do it right, and your changes are up in a matter of minutes. The system works and it's so neat. You get back what you put in but there's no free lunch.

I wish more users will understand this principle about technology. Too many people just want to be spoon-fed ("but what if I forget to update this or that, can your system somehow prompt me?"). Hey, we're all adults. That's never going to work.

I love this mode of operations. It dis-intermediates all the in-between elements that add no value. You save on making physical disks, shrink-wrapped boxes, hard-copy manuals. In fact, you save a whole lot of the earth. You don't need to negotiate with software distributors, or fight for space in computer superstores. You save on shipping. You just ship the bits and they get sucked in wherever they're needed.

Look at the economics. You cut a huge chunk of the costs out of making and distributing software. So you can sell it much cheaper than ever before. You can make a free "lite" version that is useful enough for people to use. Yet you can try out different price points for a more full-featured product until you reach a level that can sustain further investment on the product. You can do this with a very small team of developers. Yet you can use technology (like bulletin boards and mailing lists) to support your users and keep them in a dialogue, so you will know what they will like, so you can continue to make what they will buy.

When you can keep the overheads down, even a market (supposedly small) like the Mac can give you enough volume to do worthwhile work. And you're performing on a world stage right from day one. That's the exciting part.

The world is in flux. Always. Nothing remains still. Next time you read technology writers who write with great certainty, ask yourself how much they've immersed themselves in the slip stream. Maybe it's just as well they write what they write. It's great, the dusty confusion they generate. You get a better view when you're lower at the ground.

There's a multiplier effect at work when you put stuff out in places like MacUpdate or Version Tracker. I've noticed that other sites have picked up on the links, and they've kept up-to-date even with the bug fix releases (wonder how they do that). Examples are faq-mac.com, download.com, and even a Japanese weblog, here. See what I mean about going round the world?

Posted at 2:09PM UTC | permalink

Wed 16 Jul 2003

Bluetooth will set you free (or, at least, I think so)

Category : Technology/bluetoothadaptor.txt

I was so impressed with the potential of iSync that I swiped my wife's Sony Ericsson T68i, the one with Bluetooth built-in (she liked my Motorola V66 more anyway), and added a Bluetooth USB adaptor to my iBook.

Since I had my address book and calendar all set up on my iBook, it took less than five minutes to get them all transferred to the T68i. That's reaping the immediate benefit of iSync.

But there's more. Now that I've got Bluetooth, I'm able to send and receive SMS messages directly from my address book application. I know that I'm going to have a lot of use for this (in my other life hawking real estate), especially if I can figure out how to send to a group of numbers all at once.

Then there's the ability to use the T68i as a wireless modem to connect to the Internet. Now, wherever I am, I can read my mail (so long as I have the iBook and T68i with me, and that's most of the time). That's freedom.

I am still having trouble downloading pages to a web browser while using the Bluetooth modem connection. I need to fix this and I'd love to figure out, also, how to fax things out.

But I've seen the way Bluetooth on OS X had progressed since its first preview release (by scanning Google for past articles) and I can imagine that it'll quickly get even better (especially with fax capabilities built-in in Panther).

A final bonus : I downloaded a demo of the Salling Clicker (formerly known as the Sony Ericsson Clicker). What fun this is, controlling my Mac from my handphone. There's tremendous potential here. I'm sure I can figure out more use for it. I'm going to try Romeo (a free alternative) next. I want to know how everything works, yet life is so short.

Speaking of the Salling Clicker, I noticed that it had 26,000 downloads on versiontracker and 4,000 on MacUpdate, making about 30,000 in all. At $10 per copy, that's US$300,000 for Jonas Salling (its developer) minus expenses, since a year ot two ago. Great work, if you can get it. I don't understand all those technology writers, always parroting each other by questioning the viability of the Mac market. Maybe they're just not curious enough to go look and think for themselves for a change. Anyone remember "Lemmings"? Anyway, my Sendmail Enabler has reached 600 downloads. At $10 a pop, that's US$6000 for me. I can dream, can't I?

Posted at 3:59PM UTC | permalink

Tue 15 Jul 2003

MacUpdate

Category : Commentary/Macupdate.txt

I placed Sendmail Enabler on MacUpdate this morning, about 12 hours ago. Since then it seems that Sendmail Enabler has been downloaded almost 500 times. This is the relevant MacUpdate page.

But the 500 figure should be taken with a pinch of salt. From the log files, I've seen multiple downloads from the same IP address. Seems like some people may have problems getting a working archive. But I can't reproduce this problem. So I hope anyone having this problem will get in touch with me directly.

So, maybe, I got at most 300 effective downloads today (we've still got another 12 hours). That's still three times what I had over the last one month. But then, it's free. Would people still download if they had to pay. At what price?

I'm really trying to learn something out of all this. As a company, we've been really good at execution - i.e. figuring how to do the things people want really well - but we're really clueless when it came to sales and marketing.

That's why we've taken this this break - to go back to school again. It's the school of hard knocks. I really admire the great salespeople, the guys who can stomach all the rejection and still have that zest for life. I wished I've discovered the Anthony Robbins, Tom Hopkins, and our own Dennis Wee earlier. The Power of Positive Thinking. It's not always an easy thing to do.

Posted at 3:59PM UTC | permalink

Sat 12 Jul 2003

The Circle LIne

Category : Commentary/circleline.txt

Every morning that I come to work, I pass by the enormous construction along Dhoby Ghaut and Bras Basah, caused by the building of the Circle Line.

It's now reached Phase 3. Phase 1, 2, and 3 are being built simultaneously. The last known station is at Marymount, near where I live in Upper Thomson.

I believe it's the Circle Line that will make the public transportation work really well in Singapore. Take the case of the journalist who lives in Sengkang. To get to her office in Braddell, she needs to go all the way down the North East Line to Dhoby Ghaut and then back-track up the North South Line to Braddell.

With the Circle Line, she'll get down half of the way in Serangoon, switch to the Circle Line to move sideways to Bishan, and then get down south one more stop to Braddell. It's a zig-zag pattern. But, at about three minutes per stop (about eight stops in all plus some allowance for changing lines), she may get to her office in half an hour. That should cut the time lost to travel by half.

It's like the spider's web. The Circle Line ties everything together. It's the piece that will make all the other lines jive.

I'd like to see the Circle Line pass by Coronation, Holland Village, and Buona Vista, on its way to Alexandra and the Harbour Front. How many of these guesses will be spot-on? Time will tell.

Posted at 6:09PM UTC | permalink

iUse iSync and iChat

Category : Technology/iUse.txt

iSync and iChat are a couple of things I had paid very little attention to on OS X. But, the other day, Timmy from Mean needed to get in touch with me and he asked me to turn on iChat. Believe it or not, that's the first time I've ever really used it.

I've got a .Mac account (bernardteo@Mac.com) and so I guessed (correctly) that it goes into the Screen Name field for setting up iChat on my iBook. (Now, what if I didn't have a .Mac account?). I entered Timmy's ID and typed "hello", or something, and promptly forgot about it. A few minutes later I saw a commotion on my dock. It was the iChat icon jumping up and down for attention.

So I brought iChat up in front and there was Timmy and we're off "chatting". I sent him a file (by dropping it into the text box I used to type my messages - it was so intuitively obvious) and we concluded business in five minutes.

After that, I really understood how iSight is going to be a big, big thing. The biggest drag I had was to type my messages because I'm a one-finger typist. When I get iSight - notice it's when not if - I'll just look the other guy in the eye and say it like it is. I believe I've seen the future and it doesn't include the telephone system as we know it now.

What about iSync? I used to think that I'll get into iSync when I have a Bluetooth phone. But iSync 1.1 introduced support for some models of Motorola mobile phones (including the V.66 that I'm using) via USB. So I got the USB cable and ... it just works. iSync did a scan and soon a picture of the V.66 appeared on the iSync bar. I hit the Sync button and I've got my phone numbers from the phone onto my address book and vice versa).

And, one more thing: the entries I made into iCal appears on my phone's Date Book. Suddenly, my iBook is so much more the center of my life (though my wife would dispute that - she's sure it's our son who's the center of my universe).

It now makes sense for me to focus on the things I'm putting into my iBook - the dates and events in my calendar, and the name and numbers on my address book. Because, now, I know I'm only going to enter it once, and I get to use it everywhere. Even when I change phones. I used to lose numbers when I change phones because I can't quite figure which ones are in the phone and which are on the SIM card. So I'm saying goodbye to all that. Gladly. I want simplicity in my life.

My friend, Hai Hwee, has an older model Motorola C330. The USB cable I got didn't fit. Then I realised the C330's connector is shaped like the one on the Canon USB cable, which I got with the IXUS 400 digital camera. So I plugged that in ... and guess what? The C330's icon soon appears on iSync's devices bar. So we've got another happy iSync camper.

Posted at 4:51PM UTC | permalink

Thu 10 Jul 2003

Sendmail Enabler 1.1

Category : Technology/smenabler11.txt

I'm done. Finished testing it. This is going to make it even more useful. There's a new Options button which brings up the following dialog :

The main purpose is to allow the user to enable "Restricted SMTP Relay", which means that the server will now only relay mail for users who are on the local area network. That should stop the spammers from exploiting your mail server. But, what if you're at a client's site and want to still send mail out through your mail server? Just enter the client's domain name into the Relay-Domains field, restart Sendmail, and it will allow you to send it through.

Even without using the Restricted SMTP option, you can still make use of the other fields to create blacklists (by entering the e-mail address of known spammers into the Access field) or user groups (by using the Aliases field).

There's a tiger (a Jaguar, maybe a Panther) hiding inside your Mac. You should let it rip.

Only need to update the web pages and prepare the download files. Should be done by tomorrow night. Also I would love to give the app a nice icon. Contributions are most welcome...

Posted at 9:26AM UTC | permalink

Tue 08 Jul 2003

Miscellaneous Updates

Category : Technology/sendmailenablerupdate.txt

I'm updating Sendmail Enabler to close down the Open Relay. The way it's set up now, it's an open hole for spammers to drive their drivel through. The original idea was to make it very easy for people to activate the built-in Sendmail feature in OS X. It seems to have succeeded because now I'm getting close to five downloads of Sendmail Enabler a day, making it about a hundred to date.

I was counting on people figuring out how to close the hole themselves because I just didn't have the time to add the enhancement that will let them close it and yet keep it open for selected domains. But maybe, a hundred open holes for the spammers is way too much.

So, being a responsible citizen, I will have a new version of Sendmail Enabler, due out later this week. That will close the hole - again with just one click.

Also, if you've come to this weblog to search for answer to the question, "How do you set up DNSUpdate on your server so that it will know how to get the external IP address from the Airport Base Station", the answer is: use the "External (bypassing Proxy)" option, as shown below :

Posted at 8:49AM UTC | permalink

Mon 07 Jul 2003

It Just Works

Category : Technology/justworks.txt

The Broadband and Sendmail tutorials (that I had posted on the right side-bar) have been bringing me a flurry of e-mails from all over the world lately. Some of them bring questions that have piqued my own curiosity. So, over the weekend, I managed to try a couple of things and learnt something new.

One was Mac OS X's Internet Sharing. I had used IPNetRouterX to create a software-driven Airport Base Station before but found it quite tedious. So, when I was at a friend's place (she had a Titanium connected to a broadband line via Ethernet) and found that I needed to get on the Net with my iBook, it was perfect for trying out another of OS X's built-in services.

First, make sure that the Titanium has at least two network ports enabled. That's because we've already used one port - to enable the Titanium to connect to the cable modem via the built-in Ethernet port. If we enable a second port - the Airport network (and we can do that because the Titanium has an Airport card) - we will see, when we go to Sharing Preferences, that the Internet Sharing button has now come alive.

It's inviting us to share the Titanium's Internet connection with other computers that are connected to the Titanium via the Airport network ... like my iBook. So we went ahead and share it. From my iBook, after just a few seconds' pause, I can see the Airport network created by the Titanium show up.

So I connect to it. And I'm on the Internet. It just works.

On the Airport network, you don't even have to do any TCP/IP settings. You can leave everything to auto (DHCP). This is the part that amazes me because, when I used IPNetRouterX to create a software base station, I had a bunch of TCP/IP settings to straighten out. From this point on, you can connect a whole lot of other machines, all sharing the same broadband connection. You can set a password for the network quite easily. Again, it all works.

I was trying this out because I had someone using Sendmail Enabler to turn on the mail server for a network similar to this. So I downloaded Sendmail Enabler to the Titanium, gave it a domain name (free from dyndns.org), and ran Sendmail Enabler on it. Guess what? Again, it works. So I'm sending out mail through the Titanium (acting as a mail server) from my iBook. You can run a company on top of all these technologies. It's so simple. Why do we need an IT department?

Posted at 3:54AM UTC | permalink

Thu 03 Jul 2003

Sendmail Enabler Forum

Category : Commentary/sendmailforum.txt

I've created a forum for Sendmail Enabler users. Look here. In case you're interested, these are the messages I've received so far and the answers I've given. It took some work to transfer these messages over to the forum, but I'm hoping that it'll save me from having to repeat myself in future. Also I'm hoping that people who know the answers that I don't will jump in and help me learn a thing or two.

This is also Live Art. Watch how an idea grows.

Posted at 8:19AM UTC | permalink