category_name=articles
Capturing AirPort Extreme Log with Lion Server Syslog
August 9, 2011 | Comments Off
Mac OS X Lion Server can be used as a syslog server to capture the log messages from an Apple AirPort Extreme wireless router. The instructions below walk you through setting this up.
Syslog is controlled by a plist file found in the launch daemons directory. The full path to the file is:
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
You need to edit this file to add a network listener. The plist is stored in a binary format so you need to use the plutil to convert it to XML using this command:
$ pushd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons $ sudo plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist $ sudo vim /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist $ sudo plutil -convert binary1 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist $ sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist $ sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
Here is a complete example of the modified plist file. The new key is the NetworkListener. Be sure you add it nested inside the Sockets key or it will not work.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"><plist version="1.0"><dict> <key>EnableTransactions</key> <true/> <key>EnvironmentVariables</key> <dict> <key>ASL_DISABLE</key> <string>1</string> </dict> <key>HopefullyExitsLast</key> <true/> <key>JetsamProperties</key> <dict> <key>JetsamMemoryLimit</key> <integer>300</integer> <key>JetsamPriority</key> <integer>-49</integer> </dict> <key>Label</key> <string>com.apple.syslogd</string> <key>MachServices</key> <dict> <key>com.apple.system.logger</key> <true/> </dict> <key>OnDemand</key> <false/> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/usr/sbin/syslogd</string> </array> <key>Sockets</key> <dict> <key>NetworkListener</key> <dict> <key>SockServiceName</key> <string>syslog</string> <key>SockType</key> <string>dgram</string> </dict> <key>AppleSystemLogger</key> <dict> <key>SockPathMode</key> <integer>438</integer> <key>SockPathName</key> <string>/var/run/asl_input</string> </dict> <key>BSDSystemLogger</key> <dict> <key>SockPathMode</key> <integer>438</integer> <key>SockPathName</key> <string>/var/run/syslog</string> <key>SockType</key> <string>dgram</string> </dict> </dict></dict></plist>
Once you have updated the plist the next step is to update the configuration of your AirPort Extreme. Under Applications => Utilities open the AirPort Utility and connect to your AirPort Extreme. On the Advanced tab select the “Logging & Statistics” panel. Enter the IP address of your Mac OS X Lion Server in “Syslog Destination Address:” and select “6 – Informational” for the “Syslog Level:”. You can see a screenshot of the AirPort Utility settings below. Update the settings on the AirPort Extreme.
Now, you probably want to verify that the logging is actually happening. Open Console.app on your server and look at “All Messages”. While looking at the logs go to another machine (I used my MacBook Air with a wireless connection to the AirPort Extreme) and open System Preferences and then Network. Select your network adapter and ask for it to renew the DHCP lease. You should see some activity in the log.
Another way to verify the logging is to turn wifi off on your laptop. You should see a message like this:
8/9/11 8:43:09.000 AM 80211: Disassociated with station 60:33:4b:2c:de:c0
When you turn wifi back on you will see something similar to this:
8/9/11 8:43:10.000 AM 80211: Rotated TKIP group key. 8/9/11 8:43:21.000 AM 80211: Associated with station 60:33:4b:2c:de:c0 8/9/11 8:43:21.000 AM 80211: Authenticating station 60:33:4b:2c:de:c0 to RADIUS. 8/9/11 8:43:21.000 AM 80211: Installed unicast CCMP key for supplicant 60:33:4b:2c:de:c0 8/9/11 8:43:21.000 AM natpmp: Binding added for udp, 173.164.164.17:32770 to 10.0.1.104:4500 with lifetime 7200 8/9/11 8:43:21.000 AM natpmp: Binding added for udp, 173.164.164.17:32771 to 10.0.1.104:5353 with lifetime 7200
That’s it. You now have syslog data being captured on your Mac OS X Lion server from your AirPort Extreme base station!
Setting up my Snow Leopard Ruby 1.9.2, Ruby on Rails 3.0, Nginx, Passenger development environment
November 14, 2010 | Comments Off
Snow Leopard ships with Ruby 1.8.7 installed and an older version of Ruby Gems. I am planning on doing some projects with Ruby on Rails and wanted to setup a current environment. My requirements were:
- Ruby 1.9.2
- Rails 3.0
- PostgreSQL 9.0
- Nginx
- Passenger
You should download and install the Mac version of PostgreSQL 9.0 from the folks at EnterpriseDB. You will need to register on the site in order to do the download. Be sure to download PostgreSQL 9.0.1, not one of their Plus packages. It is a nicely packaged installer for the freely available version of Postgres.
Once you install this software you should have a file called pg_env.sh in the /Library/PostgreSQL/9.0/ directory. This file should be added to your /etc/profile. Here is an example of what mine looks like:
# System-wide .profile for sh(1)
# This has to be set to something in order for path_helper (below)
# to update it with paths found in the /etc/manpaths.d directory.
MANPATH=/usr/local/share/man; export MANPATH
# Setup the PostgreSQL environment.
. /Library/PostgreSQL/9.0/pg_env.sh
if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
fi
if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then
[ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc
fi
Be sure to log out and log back in before continuing with these instructions. This is important to make sure your PostgreSQL environment variables are set properly.
One of my goals with this setup is to keep everything independent of the default tools that ship with Snow Leopard. To do this I decided that all of my Ruby on Rails setup will be located in the /usr/local/ror directory tree. Here is a script I developed to setup my Ruby on Rails development environment.
#!/bin/bash # Get and extract a copy of LibYAML curl http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.3.tar.gz > yaml-0.1.3.tar.gz tar xvf yaml-0.1.3.tar.gz # Build LibYAML ( cd yaml-0.1.3 ./configure make sudo make install ) # Get and extract a copy of Ruby 1.9.2 curl ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org:21//pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz > ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz tar xvf ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz # Build Ruby 1.9.2 ( cd ruby-1.9.2-p0 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ror --with-arch=x86_64 --enable-shared make make test sudo make install ) # Update Ruby Gems sudo gem update --system # Install Gems sudo gem install rails sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby sudo gem install pg sudo gem install passenger # Configure Passenger for Nginx (downloads Nginx and PCRE automatically) sudo passenger-install-nginx-module --prefix=/usr/local/ror --auto-download --auto
Download the script, un-tar it and place it in any directory you want. I call the script doit.sh, but you can name it anything you like. Run the script using the command shown below.
$ sh ./doit.sh
Once the script completes you need to add /usr/local/ror/bin to your path. I did this by editing my /etc/paths file. Here is a copy of the file on my machine:
usr/local/ror/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin
One more logout/login and you are done. Have fun playing with Ruby on Rails on your Mac!
MacBook Pro Development Environment
October 1, 2010 | 6 Comments
This article covers the steps I went through to setup my MacBook Pro for Google App Engine (GAE) development. I am using the Python runtime in GAE so the focus here is on a Python development environment.
Python
Setting Python 2.5 as Default
My MacBook Pro is running Snow Leopard. I am planning to host my projects on Google App Engine and it requires Python 2.5. Snow Leopard ships with Python 2.6 as the default. You can switch to Python 2.5 using a few simple commands, as follows:
$ defaults write com.apple.versioner.python Version 2.5 $ sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.versioner.python Version 2.5
After issuing these commands you should logout and login, launch a Terminal window and issue the command
$ python --version
It should report Python 2.5.4 as the result. If it still says Python 2.6.1 then your change did not take effect. To troubleshoot the problem start with man python. It includes information on how to switch the default version of Python on your system.
Additional Python Modules
Google App Engine expects that the ssl module is installed. This is so it can verify the identity of the GAE servers when trying to deploy your projects. Install it like this:
$ curl http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/ssl/ssl-1.15.tar.gz --output ssl-1.15.tar.gz $ tar xvf ssl-1.15.tar.gz $ cd ssl-1.15 $ sudo python setup.py install
If you want to use the GAE image manipulation classes while running on the local development server you will need to install PIL using the following command.
$ sudo easy_install pil
The following will be necessary for building some other python libraries later in the process.
$ sudo easy_install docutils
The following modules are necessary if you choose to install IPython (see next section). If you are planning on skipping the IPython installation these can be skipped as well.
$ sudo easy_install readline $ sudo easy_install nose $ sudo easy_install pexpect
IPython
The IPython interactive interpreter is a good addition to your Python development environment. It does not come pre-installed on Snow Leopard. You can download the latest stable version using this command:
$ curl http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/0.10/ipython-0.10.tar.gz --output ipython-0.10.tar.gz $ tar -xzf ipython-0.10.tar.gz $ cd ipython $ sudo python setup.py install
Google App Engine SDK
The Google App Engine SDK for Python is available at http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html. As of this writing you can use the following command to grab the latest version:
$ curl http://googleappengine.googlecode.com/files/GoogleAppEngineLauncher-1.3.7.dmg --output GoogleAppEngineLauncher-1.3.7.dmg
Once you download the dmg file open it in Finder and run the installer. It will place all of the necessary files on your machine. Once complete locate the GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app icon in Finder and double-click on it. This application provides a nice UI for managing your GAE projects.
Source Code Management Tools
Git
I am planning on managing the source code for my projects with git and will store my master repositories on http://github.com. Apple does not include a copy of git on the machine by default. An installer is available at http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/. While you are at it also create an account on github if you don’t already have one. It is useful for social coding in the wider open-source community.
Mercurial
Some of the Django open source software I plan on using is maintained using a distributed source control management tool called Mercurial. An installer for this is available at http://mercurial.selenic.com. Download and install the software.
$ curl http://mercurial.selenic.com/release/mercurial-1.6.3.tar.gz --output mercurial-1.6.3.tar.gz $ tar xvf mercurial-1.6.3.tar.gz $ cd mercurial-1.6.3 $ make PREFIX=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5 all $ sudo make PREFIX=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5 install $ hg version
Django-nonrel
I plan on implementing my web applications on top of the Django framework. Some modifications are required in order for this framework to run properly on GAE since Google uses Big Table for data storage instead of a relational database. Everything necessary to get Django working in GAE is included as part of the Django-nonrel project. Specific instructions for GAE are available at http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/djangoappengine.
Use the commands listed below to install copies of all the necessary components onto your machine. Everything will be stored in a folder called DjangoStuff under your home directory.
$ mkdir $HOME/DjangoStuff $ cd $HOME/DjangoStuff $ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-nonrel $ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/djangoappengine $ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/djangotoolbox $ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-dbindexer $ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-testapp
Now, pick another folder where you want to setup a practice application. I am calling mine cs-practice since this is also the name of my Google App Engine application.
Use the following commands to configure the practice application for Django-nonrel development.
$ mkdir $HOME/cs-practice $ cd $HOME/cs-practice $ ln -s $HOME/DjangoStuff/django-nonrel/django django $ ln -s $HOME/DjangoStuff/djangoappengine djangoappengine $ ln -s $HOME/DjangoStuff/djangotoolbox/djangotoolbox djangotoolbox $ ln -s $HOME/DjangoStuff/django-dbindexer/dbindexer dbindexer $ cp -r $HOME/DjangoStuff/django-testapp/* .
Once you have the practice folder setup you need to edit the app.yaml file and change the application name to reflect the Google App Engine application name you selected when registering on http://appengine.google.com.
Attending iOSDevCamp 2010 – Building Meet4Drinks
August 19, 2010 | Comments Off
I am attending the yearly iOSDevCamp event this weekend in SanJose, CA. This is a great event where iPhone/iPad software developers and UI/UX designers come together for a weekend of coding and exploration of ideas around how to use iOS devices. The event organizers hold something called a Hackathon where attendees form ad-hoc teams around shared application ideas and spend two full days designing and coding like crazy to build something cool. Everyone has a great time and meets like-minded folks in the developer community.
Earlier this year, in April the event organizers held a special iPadDevCamp. That was my first exposure to this great event format. You can read more about that experience over on the Powered By AMP blog. For that event I was on a team with some co-workers from Auctiva. We built a prototype of an e-commerce sales management tool for AMP sellers.
This time I’m attending solo, without a cadre of other Auctiva designers and developers. I want to explore developing location-aware applications for the iPhone and put together a basic idea for an app. It is called Meet4Drinks, and you can read more about it at http://www.meet4drinks.net.
If it sounds like something you would enjoy, it’s not too late to register today. The event starts tomorrow (Friday) evening and goes through Sunday evening. Visit http://www.iosdevcamp.org to register.
Look for updates on Meet4Drinks next week, once my head is back above water after the event. Hope to see you there.
iPad as Technical Book Reader? Absolutely!
May 1, 2010 | Comments Off
I have been lugging around technical books for the last 20+ years as part of my profession. The pace with which technology changes means there is a constant stream of new topics to study and that usually means buying books. The thing about many of these technology books is you don’t read them like a pleasure book. You tend to use them as a reference while you climb a new learning curve. It goes kind of like this:
- Microsoft, Apple or someone else releases a new operating system or application. => More books
- Open source tools like Subversion, Git or whatever gains in popularity. => More books
- Start developing in a new language (Ruby, Python, Objective-C, …) => More books
The end result is that my garage is always full of books that either describe out of date technology or are still current but not relavent for the projects I am working on at the moment. Worst still, the books I am currently using usually end up weighing many pounds and take up a lot of room.
The difference between carrying around a bunch of paper books and an e-book reader is huge. This stack of books weighs in at 31.8 lbs. Compare that with an iPad that has most of the same books loaded onto it and weights just 1.8 lbs. I know which one I am going to be carrying in my backpack.
Early last year when Amazon released the Kindle2 I purchased one hoping to get rid of this problem by switching to e-books instead of paper books. I did a survey of the technical e-books available and it looked promising. Most of the books I was either currently using or would likely be interested in were now available from Amazon in an e-book version. Amazon made it possible for the Kindle to also read the mobi format so that meant I could also get books from The Pragmatic Programmer and O’Reilly.
You know what they say about the best laid plans and all that. The Kindle worked as advertised. I switched almost exclusively to e-books on the Kindle. The problem was, many of these technical books include figures or illustrations that are in color and the Kindle did an awfull job of displaying them. To make matters worse, you couldn’t change the orientation of the Kindle (no landscape mode) so images that didn’t scale well could not be viewed by rotating the device. This was almost enough for me to go back to paper books.
Flash forward about a year and the rumors were flying about Apple building a tablet/slate of some sort. Would it be a book reader, a netbook computer, a movie viewer or what? No one knew for sure but everyone was speculating. Then the announcement came that Apple would hold a special event to announce “Something they have been working on”. My Kindle2 went up on craigslist that day (about a week before the special event was held) and I sold it the next day. I love craigslist; it just works! The ironic part is I sold it to a software engineer who works for Apple.
We all know what happened next. Steve told us all what we needed (an iPad) and when we would be giving him our money. I listened, reserved one for pickup on the release day and the rest is history. Apple ships the iPad with an e-book reader called iBooks and they have an on-line bookstore where you can purchase e-books. Amazon shipped a Kindle reader for the iPad that uses wifi to sync with the Kindle on-line bookstore.
Here is a picture of my new 1.8 lb iPad that makes an excellent technical book reader.
All of my existing Kindle books transfered over to the iPad without any trouble. The Pragmatic Programmer books I had were all in the mobi format which the Kindle software on the iPad cannot read. No problem – I just downloaded the epub format of the same books from the Pragmatic Programmer on-line bookstore.
Publishers sell their e-books in one or more of the following formats:
- PDF – Adobe format that permits publishers to lock the content down with DRM. In some cases they can be very restrictive about which applications you are able to read the books in. My advice is to avoid purchasing e-books from publishers who use this format unless they are DRM-free and also offer one of the following formats. There just isn’t any reason for you to be locked into PDF when the iPad is such a great reader.
- mobi – A mobile electronic book format that was very popular when the PocketPC and Palm were in their hayday. You can read mobi files with the Kindle device, but not with the Kindle software on the iPad.
- epub – Modern electronic book format. Supported in the Apple iBooks application. This is the best choice for an open format on the iPad right now. I favor epub over other formats. A very nice feature of the iBooks applications is the ability to search through books.
- Amazon – Proprietary format from Amazon. The Kindle reader software for the iPad is excellent so if a book is only available from the Kindle store I go ahead and purchase it there with no regrets. The only downside right now is the lack of a good search feature in the Kindle software. Hopefully they will be correcting this in an update.
As an aside, everyone should make their e-books available like the folks at PragProg do. When you buy a book from them you get it in three formats (PDF, mobi and epub). This means you can read your book on basically any electronic device of your choosing. O’Reilly is almost as good.
To round things out here are a couple pictures of the user interface of iBooks and Kindle Reader for iPad.
This first two images are of the iBooks software. The image on the left illustrates the support for color and the nice page turn animations help you forget that this is not paper after a while. As is typical of most Apple user interfaces, this one has excellent usability. On the right you have a look at the search feature as implemented in the iBooks application. I have found that it works well, but is a bit slow. I would like to see Apple improve on the performance in an update.
The next image is of the Amazon Kindle for iPad software. Here I am showing you what the controls are like for selecting a font size and adjusting the background color and brightness. As I mentioned earlier, the main thing missing from the Kindle software is a search feature.
I would really like to have all my e-books in a single reader. Being forced to keep some in iBooks and others in the Kindle application really sucks, but I’m not holding my breath for a solution anytime soon.
Technical books are often used as references. Neither of the e-book reading applications do a good job with letting you keep multiple books open and rapidly switch between them. It would really improve the usefulness of the applications if you could keep more than one book open and use a multi-touch gesture to switch between them.
If you don’t have an iPad yet, run (don’t walk) to your nearest Apple store and pick one up. You won’t regret it.
iPad Review – First 24 hours
April 5, 2010 | Comments Off
My experience with it so far is mixed. Like you I tried to touch-type on the keyboard and that really didn’t work at all. I have tried to do the two finger plus thumbs approach and am not that fast typing like that. The keyboard is big enough that I find it kind of weird to hold it in one hand and type with the other. My hand has to move too far to get all the keys unlike on the iPhone where everything is much closer together. I have not tried to hook up a bluetooth keyboard yet either. I expect that to work much better for things like typing e-mails.
I ended up purchasing the 64GB version instead of the 16GB version. The change was based on a recommendation I heard on MacBreak Weekly. They mentioned that based on their preview use (had it for about a week before April 3rd) they feel that if you are going to use it to read books then you will easily fill the 16GB and then have to pick/choose which items to sync to your iPad. With the 64GB version you can just dump all the books/PDFs you want on it and not worry about running out of space.
I have the Kindle for iPad application on it and pulled down all my Kindle books. Very cool! It just works! I also downloaded the iBooks application from the App Store. That application reads the ePub format. I have purchased a number of technical books in the past few years from Pragmatic Programmers. All of their books are available in ePub format so I downloaded that version and loaded them into the iPad too.
So far I really like having all of my technical books in one place like this. I have not tried reading out in full sunlight, but expect it will be an issue. For reading indoors it works fine. Not as easy on the eyes as the Kindle, but it shows all of the technical illustrations in the books in full color which is much better.
I purchased the Pages, Numbers and Keynote applications from Apple also. They really show off the sort of things you can accomplish with the iPad, but the crash a lot. I feel more like a beta tester of these apps than just a user. Sort of a let down, but then I have been here before with other Apple products. Eventually these will be great applications.
With the iPad I also purchased the Apple case for the iPad. I was really surprised when I opened it up at home. The quality of the case is really bad. It only cost $39, but it sucks compared to the case that Amazon sells for the Kindle. After about 2 hours of using the iPad in the case I got so annoyed with it that now I am using the iPad without a case. I am shopping for a different case now.
I have had Safari crash on me more than once now on the iPad. It seems like the crashes were always on very long (lots of scrolling) web pages so maybe it is a memory issue. I’m not sure, but the end result is you are just reading along on the page and all of a sudden you are back to the menu of icons wondering how you got there.
Even more surprising than the crashes of apps on the device is the crash I experienced this morning of the Xcode development environment on the desktop. Apple released an update to Xcode that includes all of the iPad development tools yesterday. I was working on a sample application this morning, following the instructions on how to build an app when all of a sudden Xcode just up and crashed on me. This is very unusual. Earlier versions of Xcode have been very stable for years.
Over all I think purchasing one as a developer at this point is a good move, but for basic consumers it is probably more sensible to wait about 3 months before jumping on the iPad bandwagon.
HOWTO: Answer the question “Is {some site} up or down?”
June 28, 2009 | Comments Off
I just stumbled on a very cool service that helps you answer the question “Is {some site} up or down?” It couldn’t be simpler. Visit http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com and you will see a very simple form that looks like this:
Enter the name of a site and the folks running the site will go check and see if it is possible to visit the site from their location on the net. If the site is reachable you will see something like this:
If it is not reachable you will see something like this:
Better than Google: Real answers for Programmers, System Administrators and IT Professionals
June 7, 2009 | Comments Off
Technology is more complex now than ever. It seems like the diversity of topics a programmer, system administrator or IT professional must have some familiarity with grows exponentially. In the office it is all to common to hear someone say “Did you google it?” or “I found a post that looks like it might be related on google.” when trying to sort out complex technology issues.
Google is good, but real people working together, sharing their experience with each other and documenting the results for others to take advantage of works even better. Two sites that should be in every technologists bookmark list are stackoverflow and serverfault.
You can think of these sites as social networking communities with very focused areas of interest. Anyone can post a question to a site, anyone can provide an answer, and everyone votes on the best answers. Comments can be added to questions or answers, folks develop “street cred” by providing useful answers and eventually become recognized by their peers as knowledgeable on specific topics.
Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for
programmers – regardless of platform or language. It’s 100% free, no
registration required.
Server Fault is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for system
administrators and IT professionals – regardless of platform. It’s 100% free,
no registration required.
Nokia places Qt under LGPL License – Sweet!
January 14, 2009 | Comments Off
I have been a big fan of the Trolltech Qt Framework for a number of years. It is a fantastic way to build high quality cross-platform desktop applications in C++. For the past six years it seems like every project I work on has included a rich desktop GUI application of some sort. Each time this need would arise I would start the process of selling the idea of using the Qt Framework for the project. The biggest hurdle was always the per-developer cost for the commercial license of the framework. I would hear things like
Just use MFC. It’s free and we don’t really see a need for the application to be cross-platform anyway.
or sometimes I would hear
Use the GPL version of Qt and just keep it under the radar until we are sure the application will be released to our customers.
It was always frustrating to try and make the case that Qt was a better solution than MFC for UI, was more comprehensive for general development than other frameworks, and that it was worth planning for the possiblity of releasing the applications for Linux or Mac as well as Windows. In the end each project did adopt the Qt Framework, but it really was a distraction to try and justify the use.
Thankfully with the purchase of Trolltech by Nokia we are seeing a change in the licensing terms for the Qt Framework. Starting with the 4.5 release it looks like the framework will be placed under the LGPL license making it much easier to adopt as part of commercial development efforts.
Here are a couple links that discuss the development further:
and you can read the news directly from Nokia on the Qt Licensing Terms page.
This new development on the licensing front and the recent inclusion of WebKit into the Qt Framework make me very optimistic about a long and prosperous future for developers who know the Qt Framework! Thank you Nokia!
Software Design: Want vs. Need
January 13, 2009 | Comments Off
I am always surprised at how short-sighted some folks are who design software. It seems like there is no shortage of people who feel that you just have to listen to your customers to build great software. In my experience, if all you do is build what the customer says he/she wants then your software will likely be obsolete in a year (maybe even less time) and your customers will ultimately be very unhappy with you.
To build great software you have to listen intently to what the customer is saying so you can identify the pain and suffering that usually lies unexpressed just below the surface of comments like “All I need is a widget that does X.”
Check out what BusinessWeek magazine had to say about this phenomenon:
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
– BusinessWeek, May 25 1998
Probably my favorite quote about building great software came from someone on the team that built the NeXT computer. I think they really understood what it takes to build quality systems (software and hardware) that last.
“It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.”
– Someone on the NeXT Team
It all comes down to making a decision to apply your knowledge and understanding of technology to address the immediate problems for the customer and to push beyond so you can give the customer a system they can grow with. The ultimate measure of success is when a user says “Hey, now I need to do Y with the widget.” and you can reply with something like “Okay, this is how you do that with the system we built.” If you find yourself replying with something more like “Hmmm, we could add that to the software but it will cost you.” then you are doing it wrong!
