| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Sat 10 May 2003 A pianist doesn't spend time peeking inside the pianoCategory : Commentary/nevillebrody.txt I like this quote from Neville Brody at the Apple site, "I liken working on the Mac to jazz. To play jazz properly, you have to become highly skilled at an instrument. Working with a Mac, you have to learn the technology just as you would learn to play an instrument or learn to paint with a brush. Then you have to forget it and then simply start creating and building. A pianist doesn't spend time peeking inside the piano." I happen to read his bio at the Apple site. Just yesterday, I was looking through some old issues of "The Face", and the designer of a lot of the typefaces "The Face" used then was this guy called Neville Brody. And only a few days ago, I had been writing about how, if you're really serious about using computers well, you wouldn't bother wasting time opening and closing the PC box, pulling out cards and such. So I'm in the midst of some cross currents. I remember Arthur Koestler describing, in "The Act of Creation", how the act of creation comes about when you have "an intersection of lines of thought which brings together hitherto unconnected ideas and fuses them into a creative synthesis". That's an interesting book to read in conjunction with Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance") who wrote about how, when a craftsman is focused on the act of creation, he is at one with his creation. Like the archer fused to his target, the bow ceased to exist. Fri 09 May 2003 Humanistic TechnologyCategory : Technology/humanistictechnology.txt My colleague the other day thought of contacting a long-lost friend. So she thought of using the web to see what turns up. A search through Google turns up nothing. Then she had an idea. Give the name in Chinese:
Amazing. She found her friend in 0.16 seconds. It was spot on. Why is Google so smart? Why is the Mac so smart? With OS X, you can enter Chinese characters (or any other language) into any application. The functionality is built right in. There's no need for a "Chinese Language Kit", like in the OS 7/8/9 days. Life is sweeter with OS X. P.S. : I think the idea crossed her mind because we've been playing with stuffing Chinese characters into MySQL and then pulling them out again from our Java Tomcat motor insurance application. Imagine, we're going to be able to have insurance policy wordings in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, or whatever. For free. Thu 08 May 2003 The Renaissance ManCategory : Commentary/renaissanceman.txt Lending credence to the notion that the Mac tends to attract people who like to think with both sides of the brain is the result of a recently concluded survey by O'Reilly's MacDevCenter (a must-visit website for any Mac developer). I have always enjoyed the breadth of the articles published here - from Java and Apache to digital photography, audio and Rendezvous - and I'm not alone. Commented Derrick Story, the managing editor of O-Reilly Network : "I'm going to continue with the broader stuff too. I have a number of reasons for this thinking, but a primary one is that being a developer for Mac OS X is a little different than for other platforms. Successful Mac developers are not only good at their specialty, such as Brent Simmons [the creator of NetNewsWire] in managing RSS, but they tend to have an overall understanding of what's going on with their platform. "Having a handle on Rendezvous, digital photography, X Window, ACC, Java, artist and developer rights, bioinformatics, and QuickTime authoring, just to name a few, helps us understand the interests of the people who support our ideas and our software. I'm not saying this is exclusive to the Mac platform. Certainly Larry Wall [the creator of Perl] is a Renaissance man. But I think this trait is more common in the successful Mac developer than maybe on other platforms. That's why we mix the content the way we do on the site." I think of the Dell guy who comes into our client's office, who opens up the PC and takes out card and puts in card, takes out cable and puts in cable, calls himself a doctor, not knowing the world is passing him by. There's a better alternative. Start from the notion that we're really there to work with information - to shape meaningful information out of the mass of raw data. Then it gets easier to understand how we can possibly wield all these technology to help us reach those ends - i.e. to help other people understand the information better. And also to know what to spend time on and what to throw out the Windows. It's been said that knowing how to choose the right point of view is worth (how many?) IQ points. Can't see the forest for the trees? Wed 07 May 2003 AppleScript StudioCategory : Technology/smsourcecomments.txt I encourage anyone with even a cursory interest in programming to take a look at the Sendmail Enabler code, if only to get a feel for how much AppleScript Studio can do with so little code. Yet it is not a toy. It's quite possible to build quite intricate stuff with it. The important thing about AppleScript Studio is that while you're playing with it and going through the sample code, it may start to dawn on you just how much of a breakthrough object-oriented programming really is. With object-oriented programming, you think like a manager (or blasphemously, like a minor god): you create your objects, imbue them with intelligence, and then you can get them to work together by sending them messages to work with each other. It's not just more fun. It's a lot more productive. Apple's very fine visual development environment, Interface Builder, plays a very important role in this. It helps maintain the illusion that you're working with intelligent objects that you can grab hold of and move around the screen. Once you've worked with interface Builder, you only have to do some Java programming using Swing to see how often you have to do a double-take when this illusion of working with objects is broken (e.g., when you have to hand-code the parameters of an object, like size, shape and position of an object on the screen). It's not just object-oriented programming that will make you productive. It's the whole package of little details that have been designed to work so well together. In other words, it's the "gestalt" thing again. Does Apple have a monopoly on whole-brain thinking? Tue 06 May 2003 Sendmail Enabler Source CodeCategory : Technology/smsource104.txt I've updated the Sendmail Enabler download page with the latest version's source code. It's a Project Builder project, using AppleScript Studio and the Unix command line. If you've ever downloaded Sendmail Enabler, please let me know how you are doing. I've made the source code available in case it doesn't work and people may want to poke around to see how it was supposed to work. In my experience, most of the time, the problems come from errors with the domain's DNS settings rather than with Sendmail itself. Mon 05 May 2003 SingNet Broadband May Support Mac Users, At LastCategory : Commentary/singnet.txt I've got a note from SingNet saying that they plan to put in place official support for Mac users for their broadband plans in a week or two. It may be only for Mac OS X users who use the SpeedTouch Home Ethernet ADSL modem on SingNet's list of approved modems, but it's worth at least a start. Until this happens, Mac users have had to live with often derisory support from SingNet's tech support. For example, the only approved modem for Mac users is a USB-based Eicon modem that costs almost S$400. Much cheaper Ethernet-based modems (e.g., the SpeedStream from Efficient Networks) already work very well with the Mac but they're not, as yet, officially supported. I've been lobbying SingNet to make a change, for example by putting up this web page to show how easy it is to support Mac users (at least for those running OS X). I'm looking forward to getting their confirmation. If I can cause this change to happen, it makes me wonder why the people who actually work for Apple hadn't already done so. I believe that companies like SingNet or DBS, etc., are not monolithic companies. While there are elements in the IT end, for example, who have an aversion to Macs for one reason or another, there are others in those companies who would love to get the business of the Mac users. They just don't want to have to work too hard to get it, which is fair when we're just a minority. But the great point about the technology that is embedded into the Mac is that it makes Mac users so easy to support. If you can demonstrate to the service providers that the Mac user is so much easier to support than their normal PC user, you'll see that they'll want the Mac users' business. This was what I set out to show SingNet. There is a sense of betrayal that the people who are paid to do the job, i.e. to market and sell the Mac, barely seem to try. Apple technology is great and this engenders almost fanatical support (and, dare I say it, love and affection) from among the legions of Mac users. To simply ride on this energy and just coast by can seem offensive and parasitical when compared to the lengths ordinary Mac users are willing to go to defend their choice of computing platform. Fri 02 May 2003 A Gestalt StrategyCategory : Commentary/gestaltstrategy.txt That's a strategy, coined by some business guru, where you are able to deliver something whose whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts and where the parts are melded in such a unique way that it makes it hard for other competitors to duplicate. Let's see how the following fits into the definition (again from the Time interview with Steve jobs) : TIME: Can you say anything about [Music Store's] development costs or Apple's investment? Jobs: I had somebody comment today, "Now that you have introduced your store, do you expect a lot others?" And I guess our answer is no. This is really hard. Over the last several years we've created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that's tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms - it's huge - and we've already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that's tens of millions of dollars. We have one-click shopping, only us and Amazon have that, and then to make a jukebox - how much does it cost to make iTunes and make it popular? A lot! But we've got that. And then iPod, if you want to make an iPod, what does that cost? Well, nobody has done it but us, people have tried, but they haven't even come close. That's a lot of money. So we've already made these investments and we can leverage them. And then we've invested more on top of that to make a store. But to recreate this, it's tens of millions of dollars and years. That's why I don't think this is going to be so easy to copy. Did you notice the : "... And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it..."? A lot of companies (that I've helped built systems for) don't seem to grasp the importance of this part of the process. Most people just slap together a system and think, "That's it." They don't realise that you could have figures produced at the accounting end that bear only a fictitious relationship with the reality. You've got to build an ability to verify the figures deep into the system. And that, I feel, can only happen if you come to the job knowing you're there to work with the information rather than computers. When I read business books, I feel that there is an amazing disconnect. The gurus will start describing how to do things right and start quoting from Microsoft and slam Apple. A lot of the time I can argue the other way round. It's like, "I am rich therefore I must be doing right. Or, might is right." If you're struggling to establish a business, not just any business but a business that can also "make a dent in the Universe", you can learn a lot from studying Apple and immersing yourself in its travails. We Just Make StuffCategory : Commentary/jobstimeinterview.txt I love this quote from Steve Jobs when he was interviewed by Time magazine for the iTune Music Store launch : TIME: The Wall Street Journal recently fashioned you as a "digital music impresario." How do you feel about that? Jobs: I didn't know what it meant. Does that mean I run a carnival? What we do at Apple is very simple: we invent stuff. We make the best personal computers in the world, some of the best software, the best portable MP3/music player, and now we make the best online music store in the world. We just make stuff. So I don't know what impresario means. We make stuff, put it out there, and people use it. Wed 30 Apr 2003 SimplicityCategory : Commentary/simplicity.txt It's the aftermath of the iTunes Music Store launch. A quick glance through the articles indexed by MacSurfer shows mostly gushingly favourable responses from the PC-centric business press. What could they say? This is show business and, if it's good enough for Sheryl Crow and The Eagles, saying anything else would quickly push them out of their depth. But they also waste no time in reassuring the PC users that it'll soon work them also, Apple's market share being so minuscule it's not worth a consideration. (Maybe Apple should make it work for the other Mac users around the world before doing that.) But let's not argue about that. What I'm looking for is whether this is going to be the breakthrough that will finally help the masses "get" (as in "do you get it?") Apple. I mean, it's not Everyman who will ponder about Zen and Simplicity and Karma. I really think that this is Apple's big problem. Ironically for the maker of "the computer for the rest of us", it's such a radically different way of thinking that it has aroused such hostility over the lifetime of the company. But I believe, like many Apple fans, that such a thinking will win out - eventually. Because it has enough truth about it and, like the child of the sixties that I am, "it'll make the world a better place." The signs are encouraging. Listen to an unlikely source, "Storage Supersite", for this gem of perception : "Above all, the new online service, the iTunes software, the iPod and even this integration appear simple to the user - an attribute that sometimes seems to have a bad name in the technology business. We're used to comparing long check-off lists of features (unsurprising in a market founded on frequent upgrade cycles)." "We're used to ..." Just because we're used to doesn't mean it's right. Difficult technology can be made simple to an end user. Apple has kept this mantra going. What is needed is care, and a willingness to put doing the right thing above mere commercial gain. I think Apple's continued ability to survive is proof enough that God exists. Tue 29 Apr 2003 SamizdatCategory : Technology/samizdat.txt I've just updated the Weblog article. I'm making the PHP code I am using to run this weblog available for download. I must emphasise that I did not write the original code. That was done by a guy called Robert Daeley who ported the Perl-based Blosxom to PHP. If I had actually written this system, I would have called it Samizdat. BooksCategory : Commentary/books.txt Chanced upon an interesting new book store at Goldhill Centre, diagonally opposite Novena Square. It's got a nice though smallish selection of books, many of which I hadn't seen before. It's called ResearchBooks Asia ("your best source of specialist books"). I noted a few books on technology and history that I would love to find time to read. My first thought was about how long it's going to last, considering we've got the two behemoths - Borders and Kinokuniya - and the Word Shop and Dymocks, Times and MPH, have all either bite the dust or are faltering. But I'm sucker for bookshops and I think this is a good find. Mon 28 Apr 2003 Black Out, Power OffCategory : Commentary/poweroff.txt Had a power failure at the office, where this server is kept. So we switched the server's domain name address to point to my iBook at my home, which contains an exact mirror of the server's contents. Total time to switch the mail and web servers to make them run off the iBoook - less than 10 minutes. We ran the servers off the iBook for a while until we found that the power had come back on at the office, at which point we switched back over. It's not rocket science, yet it has tremendous power in its simplicity of execution. It's hard to explain but if you've done this yourself, you will know. Is this why IT managers hate the Mac? It makes what they think of as their job way too simple. Read more ... |
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