Mac@Work : The Ultimate Business Machine

The
Ultimate
Business Machine

Technology, business
and innovation.

And, not least, about
the Mac.

Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Mon 28 Apr 2003

Sendmail Enabler 1.04

Category : Technology/php.txt

Updated Sendmail Enabler with a new tab to check OS X's built-in web server to see if PHP is enabled (it's not by default since 10.2.x). If it is not, it will make the right incantations to turn it on.

Actually, it just copies a file containing the PHP-related directives to Apache's /etc/httpd/users directory. This file can be easily deleted to reverse the process. It doesn't touch Apache's main httpd.conf file.

With PHP enabled, a user can easily make a stock OS X Mac run a weblog, in addition to the web, mail and DNS services that I've already described (in the articles on the right side-bar).

Posted at 3:05PM UTC | permalink

Sat 26 Apr 2003

Decline and Fall and what has this got to do with MySQL 4.1?

Category : Technology/MySQL41.txt

A new version of the free Open Source database, MySQL, was released yesterday, bringing with it "subqueries and derived tables", two major pieces that were needed to make MySQL complete in a feature-by-feature comparison with Oracle.

It's now possible to replace Oracle entirely in a system we've been porting to Java ("we" is the company I'm part of in my "day job").

In years to come, MySQL 4.1 may be remembered as the release which heralded the beginning of the end for Oracle. Or at least Oracle's dominance of the database market.

MySQL is more programmer-friendly in the sense that you'll find things that are there simply because hordes of programmers had needed them. In the Open Source world, if you need something that isn't there, you build it yourself and contribute back to the source so others can use.

And it's hard to beat a competing product that is "free". MySQL is more than just free. It often feels superior to Oracle.

We're seeing a process that is akin to what Clayton M. Christensen described in The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Read that book and watch this play unfold.

Posted at 3:31AM UTC | permalink

Fri 25 Apr 2003

Information Anxiety

Category : Commentary/infoanxiety.txt

In the field of marketing, there is a saying attributed to Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, who said, "In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope." This is often taken to mean that we ought to know what business we are in.

Ask anyone in the IT industry and they'll say they're working with computers. Very seldom do they say they're working with information, or trying to understand the nature of information, so that they can choose the right tools to shape, channel, and marshall it.

But if you're willing to understand the distinction, if only to refute that there's a distinction, try reading Richard Saul Wurman. Ten years ago, he coined the term "Information Anxiety" and described a business he calls "The Understanding Business". That helped me build a context around the work I was doing with computers and the kind of business I wanted to be building.

That book is out of print but I see from Amazon that he has a follow-up called Information Anxiety 2 which appears to be just as good. I hope to read that too. I see people reading ".Net" or "C#" or "Oracle" and all these stuff on the MRT. It may be easy to miss the forest for the trees.

Posted at 3:49PM UTC | permalink

Linking Back

Category : Commentary/linkingback.txt

I've created a weblog monitor so that I can see who's been coming over to this weblog. Since having it, I've been surprised that quite a few visitors are Windows users. So, hey welcome there. My interest in the Mac is as a serious business machine; so you may get a different viewpoint from what is usually associated with the Mac. Hope it's been worth your time reading this.

Also, where I can see links being made to this weblog (from the Referer information in the access log) I'll make a link back to that site, as you can see from the left side-bar. Just paying back the compliments. Not only that; I'm learning something new, like a new piece of music at sooundingblue.

Finally, I've improved the weblog code further and I'm going to release it for anyone to use over the weekend. It doesn't yet have comments and trackbacks, but other than that, the other stuff works smoothly. I just wanted to show how we could create a system that allows the artist and the technician (it could be the same person) to work together to build something useful.

So, with an Internet line and a Mac that you're willing to leave on all the time, you can have a web server, a mail server, a weblog system, a calendar system (more about this in future), and a database system, most of them free, on which you can build a business around. Remember an old Apple saying, "The Power to be Your Best"?

Posted at 10:09AM UTC | permalink

Thu 24 Apr 2003

A Weblog of My Own

Category : Technology/ownweblog.txt

I finally had time to go through this weblog code. In the end, I re-wrote a large chunk of it - enough, I think, to call it my own.

I'm doing this because I'm going to release it (a weblog) as yet another feature one can turn on using Sendmail Enabler. And I thought I shouldn't foist it on people without knowing what it does in its entirety.

In fact, I had a bug from between 12 noon and 12 midnight where my permalinks (links to individual articles) were all screwed up. But that's fixed now.

I hope, through doing this (since the PHP code is there for all to read), that I can show how a system could be designed so that it will give a web page designer all the leeway to express his (or quite likely, her) creativity in the layout of the information content.

I think more and more enterprise systems will work across the web using the browser as the user interface. I've seen quite a lot of exciting web page layouts (not the Flash kinds but clean static pages) where the eyes are guided smoothly through the flow of the information.

If we can put this interface on top of data that is dynamically generated from the enterprise's databases, we may find we've found a better way to communicate business information clearly and concisely, and by several orders of magnitude.

Actually, I've seen quite a few Mac-based companies move their home page to a weblog format. A weblog is designed to be easily updated and most weblogs produce an RSS syndicate feed which the company can use to deliver press releases which are automatically aggregated by software like NetNewsWire. So it's quite a low-overhead way to get something meaningful done.

Posted at 5:19PM UTC | permalink

Wed 23 Apr 2003

Is Beauty more than Skin Deep?

Category : Technology/skindeep.txt

I did it. I can now change the look of this weblog very easily without needing to change the weblog code. Just try it. On the left side-bar is an invitation to give this page a different look. Or, just do it, now.

I know they all look terrible because I just downloaded them from the free HTML template sites and this is just a quick hashed-up demo. But the point is that it now takes me less than a minute to turn any (and I mean any) web page design into a home for a weblog.

Of course the look must fit the ideas on the weblog, and that leads me to my second point. Look at the ideas expressed here (the page with the little green apples) and look at the same ideas expressed on, say, the Blue page. Do they feel different? Do they feel like they're conveying the same message? They're the exact same words.

I believe that the look clearly matters and this is not something that is obvious to the guys over at the PC world.

I believe that there should be beauty in the design of the user interface, as well as beauty in the design of the underlying system. And it's not just a pretty face because the aesthetics clearly serve a utilitarian function - that of helping people understand information better.

Without the Mac setting the style, this notion in computing would have been long buried under the rubble. We've still some way to go, this synthesis of art and technology. May the journey be our reward.

Posted at 11:17AM UTC | permalink

Tue 22 Apr 2003

"If Apple's Dead, It's the Most Productive Corpse I've ever seen"

Category : Commentary/corpse.txt

Tom Yager writes another great article in defence of Apple from deep in the heart IT Ville - InfoWorld. "Tracking the innovation coming from this dead, irrelevant company is wearing me out."

Also, he writes "... watch any PowerBook user - they never turn their machines off. When they're not working on them, they play and explore. There are endless nooks and crannies in OS X that even nongeeks are moved to discover. All Macs should be built for constant use."

I think that's true. "All Macs should be built for constant use." Ever since I've had broadband and Airport at home, I'm never far from my iBook. There's so much more I've learnt to exploit, e.g., at the Unix level, over one weekend while waiting for the football to start, while the kid is sleeping, etc. I have a Windows laptop, too, but I don't think I'll ever have the same amount of affection for it.

I've been wondering if this weblog is ever read. Over the weekend, I've cobbled together a weblog monitor of some sort, using AppleScript Studio and a short Unix script. So I know that a couple of people (using Safari) wandered over to take a look at midnight and 1 am respectively. Would be great if they left a note.

Posted at 1:28AM UTC | permalink

Sat 19 Apr 2003

The Disappearing DJ Music Cart

Category : Commentary/djcartdisappear.txt

"As I took my position with camera in hand and waited for the groom to make his entrance, I noticed a couple of guys off in a corner pew peering into an illuminated G4 PowerBook. You don't see TiBook-toting wedding attendees every day, so I made a mental note to find out later what they were up to." Derrick Story at O'Reilly MacDevCentre recounts when he realised a 1-inch PowerBook can make a DJ Music Cart brimming with CD's and hardware disappear into thin air.

There was a brilliant British mathematician around the time of the second world war, called Alan Turing, who described the workings of a machine (there was no technology to build it then) which, though by itself working on quite simple principles, e.g., using just ones and zeroes, could simulate the workings of any other machine in the world. This machine (the term "computer" then meant a human being who does some statistical calculations) was henceforth called the Universal Turing Machine. The computer, as we know it today, is a Turing Machine. So we shouldn't be surprised to see even more things made redundant in our lifetime.

Posted at 2:14AM UTC | permalink

Fri 18 Apr 2003

Can Asians Think?

Category : Commentary/canasiansthink.txt

Sometimes I think so, but quite often not. Like Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's (former, I think) ambassador to the UN, I can argue both ways, but probably not as well.

He's written a book on that subject "Can Asians Think?", subtitled "Understanding the Divide between East and West".

I believe this question is worth thinking about because if you ask the wrong questions, you may spend your life solving the wrong problems. For example, there is a question that many have spent no small amount of time, money and energy solving - like "How do we make our people more entrepreneurial so that we can generate more wealth?". This may be the wrong question to ask because being entrepreneurial may be a result rather than a cause.

This parallels something written by a guy called Rick Smith who reviewed Mahbubani's book at Amazon: "It's taken Mahbubani's book to make me realize that today's free speech and universal franchise may have been the RESULT and not the CAUSE of American middle-class prosperity." which is a pretty deep insight, if you think about it.

I believe that being entreprenuerial requires an ability to make a deal, to understand that the profit motive needs to exist on both sides of the equation, and therefore to think from the other person's point of view. In social terms, it means to be considerate. In personal terms, it means to have integrity, to keep to one's side of the bargain. But above all, to think of what it means to be a decent human being.

Coming to work each day, I'm sick of people sneezing into my head and coughing into my face. It's the thoughtlessness that reminds me of the difficulty many entrepreneurs have of collecting money after they've done the job and getting a fair shake.

In Japan, it seems that people voluntarily wear a mask when they're ill, in consideration for others, rather than the other way round. I've looked with interest at Japan's Sars statistics - so far none. Is there a correlation between this and intelligence, and, from there, the quality of civic life and ultimately wealth?

We need to learn how to think better, whether we're already good at it or not. Mahbubani's book is as good a place as any to make a start.

Posted at 9:05AM UTC | permalink

Wed 16 Apr 2003

Airport Base Station Tutorial

Category : Technology/airportbasestation.txt

I've completed the guide to using the Airport Base Station with a broadband network. It will work also with the new Airport Extreme Base Station because I've got one and I've tried that out already.

Now to move on to my real work. Porting our accounting and payroll systems to run on Cocoa.

Posted at 11:21AM UTC | permalink

Safari with Tabs

Category : Technology/safari.txt

It's amazing how a single improvement to Safari can contribute to so much increase in productivity. With tabs, my desktop has certainly stopped being cluttered up with windows that I've launched that I couldn't wait for the pages to load. I've stopped having to look for the page I was reading just to bring it to the front again.

If you're doing some writing and need to make references to several other web pages, you can put all the related pages in separate tabs on one window, in order to make it easier to copy the links later.

Finally, the rendering of Safari web pages seem to be getting closer to those rendered by Explorer (at least on the Mac). This is important for web designers because it may make it possible to use just Safari to test the look of the pages, while remaining reasonably confident that the pages will look OK on other systems. (Developers are firmly behind Apple when they say they want Safari to be the most standards-compliant of the browsers).

Posted at 2:58AM UTC | permalink