Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

The
Ultimate
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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Thu 03 Jul 2003

Another spot for a meet-up?

Category : Commentary/sandwichshop.txt

I'm at the Sandwich Shop at Robinson Centre on Robinson Road, which is parallel to Shenton Way. I'm enjoying its wireless network for the price of a latte. Free muffin for breakfast. It's easy to get on, though the reception feels weak. But they're not too comfortable with me taking a shot of the place. Wonder why? The word on the net flies faster than word of mouth.

Posted at 2:34AM UTC | permalink

Testing the Water

Category : Commentary/trialrun.txt

Over the last two weeks, I've noticed that I'm getting about three to four downloads of Sendmail Enabler each day. Last Sunday, there were about seven. I hope that Sendmail Enabler is doing its job for these people.

I don't really know how it's doing. I've got a couple of pleasant feedback about having done a good thing, and a couple of people who didn't offer any feedback but wanted some more questions answered. But mostly, it's silence, but I guess the number of downloads does say a thing a two.

But Sendmail Enabler is really a trial run for an Open Source project that I'm contemplating doing. After all, the Sendmail Enabler source code is also available for download and I do see it being downloaded.

So I've learnt that you've got to solve a few other problems. How do you keep an archive of your correspondences so you don't have to keep repeating yourself? I guess I could use the bulletin board, but will these Sendmail users be willing to sign in just to get an answer? It's faster for them to just e-mail me. But some of their questions are really interesting. I wish some other users could help answer them for me. Then I would have learnt something new just by doing something good in the first place. Good Karma, as a certain fella woulld say. So, time to think again.

Posted at 2:31AM UTC | permalink

Sun 29 Jun 2003

Shenton Way

Category : Commentary/shentonway.txt

I never thought I would enjoy working inside Singapore's financial district quite so much. I've always leaned towards what they used to call the "counter-culture". Shenton Way was, for me, white shirts, blue ties and dark blue pants - IBM - while I was Mac, birkenstock and chinos and all.

So when a client of ours moved to Shenton Way, and we had to follow (I was like their IT manager), I sniffed the air, thinking I'd soon be out of here. Little did I know I'd soon grow to like it, so much so that we got ourselves a unit in the same building as our client.

It may not be apparent at first blush, but there's a laid-back air around here, too. Come early and enjoy a good olde English breakfast at the Sandwich Shop at Robinson Road (which, incidentally, offers a free wireless network). Or food from a dozen ethnic origins at the old market (Lau Pa Sat). Or a cup of latte at Bratislava, next to the MPH bookstore.

I can look out our window at the gleaming SGX building across the road, where IBM used to work out from (in a building since demolished called Shing Kwang House) Life is coming back to this old place. But I think, this time, it's going to be different. It's going to be a lot more fun than it ever was, judging by URA's plans for the area.

The plans call for more mix developments - more residences, studios, home offices, lofts, mega shopping and entertainment complex, and even our own Central Park, a wide swathe of green leading back from the Central Promontory at Marina Bay.

Then there are the plans for the Marina Bayfront, which are modelled along Sydney's The Rocks area and Boston's Quincy Market.

Li Ka Shing's mega complex at One Raffles Quay, to be completed in a couple of years, is just the start of a long building boom. It's sprouting out from Shenton Way and will make its way around the bay to meet the Bayfront developments.

I'm trying to project five, ten years into the future, and I think city living is going to be a lot more vibrant than you can ever imagine it to be now. In fact, I can see myself shifting our home here too, and it may just work out great.

Go see the exhibition at the URA Centre. It's worth it.

Posted at 2:21PM UTC | permalink

Fri 27 Jun 2003

A Buying Coalition

Category : Commentary/coalition.txt

While waiting for the Oracle 9i Developer Release for Mac OS X Jaguar to download (slowly...) from the Oracle OTN site, I'm thinking of a couple of things we could do, if we could ever grow this "Mac-using community as The Ultimate Business Machine" idea.

One is to make it evolve into a buying coalition. Let me explain. While at the last Mac meet-up, it struck me that these are people who're quite happy to buy up the latest gadgets, from the variety of digital cameras, Bluetooth adaptor, handphones, etc., that turn up on the table. I believe that each individual would have found ways to make these purchases pay. But the point is that we're in the midst of rather savvy users who are willing to snap up the latest gadgets.

Now what if we could pool our purchases? Like, let's say, make an announcement that we're looking for people who're thinking of buying the 12-inch Powerbook. Then pool all these and form a coalition and take bids from the hardware vendors. This may make the low price they're bound to submit worthwhile because the vendor will be happy to get the bulk sale. If there's a way to use technology to systematise this (and I'm sure there's one), we would have transformed a loosely knit collection of individuals into one whose negotiating power is equal to that of a major corporation. Think of the hundreds of postings at the MUGS board. They've got lots of users on their board. I'm wondering why they hadn't moved on to this? (Or if they did, are there problems with this idea that I hadn't thought of?) So far, it's just an idea.

OK, another idea (the Oracle download has reached the half-way mark). I'm thinking of a training co-op. I've noticed, again from the last meet-up, that there are quite a few people who could really teach - e.g., how to use the Mac really well (e.g., Yezdi who, by Hai Hwee's account, not only teaches you the steps but also tries to explain the reasons behind the steps). Now, what if we could create a set-up such that you could get such people to train other Mac users and make it really worth both their time. We could set up the systems and infrastructure such that the trainers could just turn up (for a day, or a morning, even if they have a full-time job) and the system will take care of everything else (providing manuals, handling course booking, fee collection, etc...) and they just concentrate on teaching, and then get paid.

These are just ideas. But how do you make them come alive? That's where you need the magic. I'd be really happy to receive feedback.

Oracle's still downloading. We need more speed. Whatever we have is never enough. (But then, my iBook has usually worked faster than I can think. By all accounts, it should be considered fast enough.)

Posted at 12:50PM UTC | permalink

Points of Inflexion

Category : Commentary/inflex.txt

LCD monitor sales (now at the 37% mark) are on track to overtake that of CRTs while Frank Casonova, at the QuickTime State of the Union address, mentioned that digital camera sales are already more than that of conventional film-based ones.

Posted at 6:23AM UTC | permalink

Wed 25 Jun 2003

Emotional Connection

Category : Commentary/emotionalconnection.txt

While watching the WWDC keynote coverage, I needed to remind myself that this is not MacWorld. The crowd here are developers. They're the ones who were supposed to have left the platform long ago in droves. Yet they're still here, ethusiastically receptive. They're obviously liking what they're seeing. Steve Jobs seems to have made an emotional connection.

That's also the idea he used to describe the design of the iSight video camera. This makes it possible for people to see the other party's full facial expression in a web-cam conversation, and thus more likely that they'll connect emotionally.

This is a good example of how Apple "gets it" - that the whole idea of information technology is to improve the quality of human communications. And so it goes, with the shift from computer-centricty to user-centricity in the design of the new Finder.

Until I watched the keynote, I couldn't imagine what else Apple could do to improve the user's experience, besides a little improvement here and there. As it turned it, they could still do a lot. Nothing would have prepared me for Expose. Now that we've seen it, it's obvious that that's the prefect solution for managing desktop clutter.

And did you hear the crowd gasp when he showed the Mac switching from one user's workspace to another? This is called delighting the customer.

I'll leave the last words to Derrick Story at O'Reilly : "Over dinner do you think we were talking about how some Wall Street analyst thinks Apple stock should be valued? No way." These are hard core developers here. "The hardware is robust, the operating system is evolving, the developer base is growing, and customers worth having are taking notice of Apple once again. I call it peanut brittle computing: You have 'salt of the earth' Unix blended with the sweetness of GUI applications. My gosh, what a good time to be an Apple developer."

Posted at 4:15PM UTC | permalink

Knowledge Diffusion

Category : Technology/knowledgediff.txt

Over the last week or so, there's been a marked increase in downloads of Sendmail Enabler. I know for a fact that somebody in Michigan has used it (he says he's been trying to get Sendmail running on OS X for six months - without success until he found SM Enabler).

Then there are the downloads done by people who were referred here by google.de and google.nl (e.g., look at this from MacFreak.org. Can somebody help me translate this? I would like to know what they're talking about.)

I've been doing an experiment with this application. I believe it's useful. It does something in under a minute, where I used to take a whole evening. All the knowledge that is needed to turn on Sendmail, PHP, and DNS on OS X is now encapsulated in this application. So I can now clear the space in my brain for other things. Yet I can give this knowledge to other people. And it'll take them less than a minute to use it.

I thought of submitting it to versiontracker, but perversiontracker could be where it will end up, so that did serve as some sort of a disincentive. But I was really curious to see whether, and how, it will get picked up (if ever). So I simply placed it on this (roadstead.com) site. About six weeks ago, the site started to show up in Google (how did these guys know?). And I've been watching the downloads. It's starting to pick up.

There's a pattern to this diffusion of knowldege, and search engines like Google are important players; they perform a crucial service. (Brandenburger and Nalebuff, in "Co-opetition", would say that your market worth is directly proportional to the value you add to the market.) Life is one Great University. But of that, another time.

Posted at 3:21AM UTC | permalink

Tue 24 Jun 2003

WWDC - Apple's World Wide Developers' Conference

Category : Commentary/wwdc.txt

So, the G5 PowerMac is now a reality. But, for me, the two most significant items were these:

One. Apple is now almost free of Motorola. For years, Moto has kept Mac users down by dragging their feet on the PowerPC - almost out of spite, it seems, after Apple pulled the plug on its Mac clone operations. For me, it's hard not to question the sanity of a company which moved away from the Mac to standardise on Windows NT (like, "What's wrong with your own chip?"). So now it's "Welcome, IBM. Really." Your G5's are a god-send. Thanks.

Two. Xcode - because the better the development environment, the more useful the platform becomes. Let's see: it's Unix-based, so that should mean it'll allow access to all the Open Source tools. It seems to allow projects to be done concurrently by multiple developers, with the usual project management tools, like searches and indexing. And it still includes the graphical development tools, which I take to mean Project Builder and Interface Builder, albeit (hopefully) in a more evolved form. So, all in all, it looks good. Now, how do I get a preview copy? I'm ready to upgrade to Panther now.

When there's some new action on the Mac software development scene, I like to monitor James Duncan Davidson's weblog. He's always got something intelligent to say: look here and here.

Posted at 5:03AM UTC | permalink

Mon 23 Jun 2003

Comes a Time

Category : Commentary/oreillynutshell.txt

While we're waiting for the Stevenote to begin at WWDC, here's a very interesting feature on Tim O'Reilly (publisher of the O'Reilly books and the MacDevCentre site much loved by Unix geeks) at www.apple.com.

Note O'Reilly's observation that we've reached an unusually interesting inflexion point - brought about by the creation of Mac OS X - which involves "Mac users re-upping to enjoy the benefits of a robust digital hub, Windows switchers seeing the light, and hackers switching from other Unix systems or even multiple systems."

I'm seeing all these and loving it. Not too long ago, I was spending more time on my laptop than on my PowerBook, building systems for others, and feeling the life being slowly leeched out of me.

Yonder lay a dead-end. But there's a time for rest and a time for reflection. And I feel the belief coming back. When you want to do things differently, you need to seek out the alternative platform - because it's too crowded where everybody else is. That felt shaky a while back but I feel it getting stronger. (And what would tomorrow bring at WWDC?).

New technologies break through at inflexion points - with new opportunities. It's time to get back in the hunt.

The last paragraph in the O'Reilly feature is interesting. "O'Reilly wrote an honours thesis at Harvard on the tension between mysticism and logic in Plato's dialogues." A renaissance man.

Posted at 3:56PM UTC | permalink

Sun 22 Jun 2003

What I've learnt from a Mac Meet-up

Category : Commentary/whatilearnt.txt

I've not attended any of the previous meet-ups before because my iBook battery's shot - it can't last 5 minutes without power

I must be a jinx around batteries. my Dell laptop can't last a single minute without power.

I learnt so many things, I'll take a while to sort it out. I think just about the most important is being introduced to this site for digital cameras ("Digital Camera Reviews"). My three-year old Kodak broke down just before the meet-up and I bought a Canon IXUS 230 to replace it. But I found that the image definition wasn't as good as the Kodak's. It may be what was traded-off for a smaller size - the IXUS is just a fraction of the size of the Kodak and has a consequently much smaller flash.

Anyway, I learnt enough that there's a lot more to know before buying a digital camera. Next time, I'll be better prepared and save a lot of money. But for now, I traded the Canon back for a higher-end IXUS 400. The image quality is so much better this time and I'm already so happy with its size. I've always wanted a camera that can slip into my pocket and that is quick to start. I remember seeing once an old lady at Chinatown sleeping on the lap of Ronald MacDonald. It was such an arresting image. Next time, I'll have a better chance of capturing those moments.

Next, there were lots of little tips that were too small to mention but they all build up to make the Mac a joy to use. I'll never forget Yezdi slipping a Bluetooth connector into the USB port of my iBook and showing Eric, who's got a new Bluetooth-capable Sony Ericsson, how to sync it using iSync. I was going "That's my address book", and I thought they were all going to get sucked into Eric's handphone. But you've got to see it to see how the digital hub idea all makes sense.

Then I learnt that Kristian ("hey, Kristian, come on over to the meet-up and I'll give you a Cocoa tutorial") is not in Singapore. That's the net, dissolving time and distance.

And I learnt that it doesn't matter if you don't kow a single soul there (just ask You Meng), but you're warmly welcome simply because you use a Mac.

To all the good guys, and ladies (Airani and Hai Hwee), thanks. I learnt a lot and, most of all, that the best way to "get" the Mac culture is to attend a Mac meet-up.

Posted at 2:54AM UTC | permalink

Sat 21 Jun 2003

Pictures from the Meet-up

Category : Commentary/meetuppics20030621.txt

I've finished putting up some of the pictures from the meet-up. Look here.

Posted at 5:15PM UTC | permalink

Meetup@roadstead (21st June 2003)

Category : Commentary/meetup20030621.txt

We completed our first ever meet-up at my place (which I mean to call Roadstead) with Kevin Guo, Yezdi, Welly, Mook Sum, Siva, Airani, Eric Pang, George, You Meng, and Hai Hwee turning up.

It's also my first time at a meet-up, and I realised just how useful these sessions are when I learnt so much about digital cameras in just the first fifteen minutes. There were Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, plus a couple more digital cameras I can't remember, turning up on the table in no time. Also Eric's latest-model Sony Ericsson, which Yezdi used to demo Bluetooth connectivity and iSync. If only money is no problem... I've got a long Christmas wish-list of wanna-haves.

We started at 0930 and the last guys (Siva and Airani) left at three-plus. So we did manage to get Siva going on his weblog. At any one time, there were discussions on Flash, web page design, accounting applications on the Mac, video on digital cameras, etc... And this must be the first time there's a PC laptop at a Mac meet-up, which was put to some good use. (Photos coming up.)

So, all in all, it was great fun. Besides Siva, Welly and Hai Hwee, I've never met the others before today. What is it about Mac users that engenders such camaraderie? Got to get my iBook battery replaced (can't go 5 minutes without power). Don't want to miss the next meet-up.

Posted at 3:27PM UTC | permalink