After a long break it is about time I got back to writing these blog posts. I’ll start with a review of last nights the Hive event.
This was my first event of 2009. I was in Sri Lanka getting married when the February event took place. Last nights meet definitely seems to have taken off from where 2008 finished.
I got to the Order of Melbourne bar a little before 7pm. I had not been to the bar before and it is a nice big space. I learnt from a friend who stayed there that it used to be student digs; 10 students living in office cubicles with a shared bathroom (5 without windows!). Apparently because it is so close to the RMIT art school it was predominantly arty types who used to live in it.
It was great to catch up with a few mates and to find new contacts. This is always the way at the Hive events. You end up learning new things and speaking to ‘your mates’. I think this is what allows the event to be more relaxed and ensures that the speakers open up. People seem to be very happy to open up at the Hive.
This was definitely one of the biggest Hive events I have been too. I estimate there must have been about 200 people in the bar and they were all there for the Hive - I hope this attendance level is maintained. It was also nice to see the new sponsors - although they weren’t really visible, just getting a mention before Brendan spoke. If sponsorship is the way to keep the Hive events free I am all for it!
The main event was the talk by Brendan McKeegan - you can read his bio on the hive website. He was open and friendly and pretty informative. He said he hadn’t prepared anything for the talk. However he managed to keep the audience engaged throughout. I think at a couple of points he started to wade into the technical aspects of his current bottled oxygen and credit card businesses, which while I followed I could see some people fading away. I think if you are going to talk about tech stuff in answering a question at these events it is best to ask the person who asked to come up and speak to you afterwards.
He spoke about his boredom after 7 years working for a corporate - the famous 7 year itch. And how he realised if he wanted to affect anything it was no good staying in a large organisation. He spoke about his time at Hitwise and how he helped to grow it into an international entity in 3 years. He also spoke about several other businesses including a clothing/shoe line and his entrepreneurial consultancy NinetyDays.
I have tried to extract his main points for entrepreneurs (and provide my analysis):
- Adaptability - you need to be ready to change yourself and your business.
- Timing - Success is about timing and being in the right place at the right time. A little bit too much like luck for my liking.
- Maturity - This is something that flowed through his talk, he seemed to be saying that the best entrepreneurs are those that have been around and worked in other organisations. The newspapers are full of stories about young start-ups - but perhaps these are the exception rather than the rule. I do wonder if the people that are most successful as an entrepreneur have a plan rather than just a cool technology.
- Opportunity - You need to be able to have a clear vision of the future where your product exists. The path there can be slightly blurred but the commercial vision should be clear.
- Exit - Always have an exit in mind. You don’t have to have it all decided but do have some good ideas. I think you should have critically thought about your desired exit plan.
He was also asked about what he thought of as critical factors for a good entrepreneur/start up business:
- You have to be able to turn technology in to product.
- Don’t go to any trade shows unless you are carried there by a large player.
- Tell people about the problem you are solving.
- Don’t perfect the technology - launch and develop through feedback.
- Ensure you have disciplined due diligence and documentation - really makes you look professional and together.
- Forecast your financials - use Excel - you don’t need to pay an accountant.
- Employee few people - he said one person can do all the ‘CXX’ roles. The downside is your believability suffers with customers (especially large). You can counter this with high quality people.
- Remove any passengers - especially people you are paying - this is something which comes with experience.
- If you have to decide between intellectual property (IP) and the business choose the business!
Overall I think it was a very interesting talk and the hour flew by. He definitely seemed like one of the more grounded speakers that the Hive has had talk. It was also nice to have a proper speaker system so everyone in the bar could hear.
What did you think of the event? Leave your comments below.
(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10)
Loading ...Tags: Brendan McKeegan, Business, critical factors, Entrepreneurs, Experience, The Hive
Today is my wedding day. Nadisha has left for the Cinnamon Grand Hotel, her time to leave the house was 9.35am. I am now waiting for Chandika to come and pick me up and take me to the hotel.
It sounds like Nadisha is excited we managed to get a suite for her to get dressed in and before her mother left she said that Hannah (my sister) and Nadisha were running laps! I think I will be in a regular room. But then there aren’t about 6 people needed to help me and the grooms men to get dressed.
My plan is to go to the hotel and take a swim in the pool then have a little food (not too much as I can feel my stomach is a little unsettled) and get changed. I think we have to be ready at 3:30pm for the photos before the ceremony at 6pm.
Leading up to the wedding it has been very busy and up until yesterday I was working with the Creately development team to get the latest production Creately environment live. All went well and you can read more about the new release on the Creately Blog. Thanks also to Charan for mentioning the wedding. I’ll get photos on the blog as soon as possible.
(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...I have been working on the Creately email and made quite a few discoveries which I thought I would share. These days with the growing number of free web based email users and systems and the growing number of spammers there is a growing trend to mistrust email SMTP severs.
We launched (1st Jan 09) the second iteration of the Creately private beta and with that we are sending out automated emails to users to confirm their email addresses and notify them of their account creation or notify them of their addition to the beta waiting list.
All this obviously means that we need a reliable email delivery mechanism one that doesn’t suffer from outages. It also means that we can not afford for our email to be put into peoples SPAM folders or delayed in transit. Two of the most annoying things on the Internet is when a website says it has sent you an email and you check your mail only to find it hasn’t arrived or has been placed in the SPAM folder. It delays you and frustrates you.
In order to determine what is happening to your email it is a good idea to watch the server logs on the machine that is actually doing the final delivery of the email via SMTP to the users SMTP server. This will allow you to see delays and the error messages being returned by the users SMTP server. I have to say that Yahoo mail servers seem to be the most strict and cautious. Yahoo obviously gets a lot of SPAM sent to its users and they are their actions try to reduce this.
There are a couple of things that I have found will give your email server a and email a fighting chance of being able to avoid the delays and misclassifying of your email. I read about them on several different websites but no one place seemed to list them all.
- Try to use an IP address for your mail server that isn’t part of the PBL database. The PBL database is a DNS based database that is maintained by Spamhaus and lists all the IP addresses which are know to be dynamic IP addresses - it is a little more complicated than that but the effect is the same. This means that certain email services (notably Yahoo) check the PBL and if your mail server is in that list they will automatically reject the email. You can ask Spamhaus to remove an IP from the PBL database but it is safest not to be in the list in the first place. This is because if you get a removal but later get reported for sending spam (true or not) your IP will go back into the PBL and cause further delay to your email.
- Make sure your mail server’s IP address has a correctly set reverse DNS entry. For example if you use a mail server for your outbound email of mail.example.com which has an A record of 123.1.2.4 then make sure the PTR record for 123.1.2.4 resolves to mail.example.com and not some dynamic looking name (a name with an IP address in it).
- Make sure you are using only one (real or virtual) email sending location. This means that if you have some web servers and application servers which all generate emails to users make sure that they all have use your main outgoing mail server as a relay server. They should not attempt to deliver the email themselves directly to the final destination. This give you more control and versatility with your email control. It also means you have one open sending port and not lots - reducing your firewall and security headaches. It also makes the future steps easier.
- Run a secure and efficient MTA (mail transfer agent). Gone are the days when Sendmail was the only and best MTA. There days I prefer Postfix, it is small, efficient and easy to configure. Now after you have installed it lock it down. If it is running just to accept and relay the web server or application server generated email to the out bound mail server it should only be listening on the localhost IP address (127.0.0.1), it should also not have any configuration for relaying. You need to configure the ‘relayhost’ to be your out bound mail server. This allows all your email to be forwarded to the outbound email server.
- As soon as you think you have configured your servers correctly you must test your servers, especially the out bound (public) server, to make sure none of them are open mail relays. You might get the configuration wrong accidentally so you should test. It needs to happen quickly because it only takes a second for a spammer to scan your IP and find your unsuspecting open mail relay and to start hammering it with spam. Perform a test!
- When generating the email and sending it from the web server or application server make sure that you are setting the from address of the envelope to a real email address. Do this even if you don’t want a reply. If you don’t set the envelope address and just rely on the “From: ” address many servers will reject your email and you will get high SPAM scores. Some mail servers will check in DNS to ensure that the envelope sending domain exists. So if it is a local address or a fake domain the email will never be delivered. The envelope address is the address of the ‘user’ sending the email. So for example if Apache is sending email as the web server the envelope address might end up being apache@a.web.server.123-1-2-4.example.com while the ‘From: ” address will be no-reply@exmaple.com. You can set the envelope address by using the Sendmail ‘-f’ switch (this switch is supported by the majority of other MTA including Postfix).
- Generate a DomainKey and DKIM signature for your email. You can use Mail-DKIM and DKIMproxy to sign each piece of email that your out bound mail server is sending. This basically allows the receiving mail agent to confirm that the sending mail host takes responsibility for the email and basically sent it knowingly. The idea is that sending mail hosts will not sign email for which they are not responsible and because of private/public keys being used only the sending mail host that is responsible for a domains email can correctly sign the email. The sending mail host uses a private key to sign certain elements of the email and the receiving mail host can fetch the public key from DNS and check the signature is correct. Follow these instructions for installation help. You can also check your DNS entry to ensure it is correct - be patient DNS can take up to 24 hours to fully propagate.
- Add an SPF record in to DNS so that receiving mail hosts can tell which servers are allowed to send email addressed from your domain. For example, if mail.great.com is allowed to send email claiming to be from example.com then in the DNS entry for example.com there should be an SPF record indicating that mail.great.com is allowed to send the email. Use the SPF wizard to help create a correct SPF record for your DNS.
After you have done all the above go back to your out bound mail server logs and see what messages you are getting. You should notice less delays and no rejections.
I recommend you again test your out bound server to make sure it isn’t an open mail relay. If it is shutdown the MTA and reconfigure it before retesting it.
Finally in order to see all the above is working for your email you can generate a couple of test emails from your web or application servers and watch the mail logs on your out bound server to see the mail arrive from the web/application server, then go through the DomainKey and DKIM process and then be accepted by the receiving mail server. Use the command:
sendmail -v -fno-reply@example.com testemail@gmail.com<return> From: no-reply@example.com<return> Subject: Testing<return> .<return>
After you type the ‘.’ the MTA will deliver your email and you can follow it. Remember to replace no-reply@example.com with your “From: ” address and replace testemail@gmail.com with a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc account that you can check and easily view the email message header.
In the headers of the received email you will see the following:
Gmail:
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of no-reply@example.com designates 123.1.2.4 as permitted sender) client-ip=123.1.2.4;Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of no-reply@example.com designates 123.1.2.4 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=no-reply@example.com; dkim=pass header.i=@example.com
Yahoo:
Authentication-Results: mta223.mail.re2.yahoo.com from=example.com; domainkeys=pass (ok)
Hotmail:
You probably won’t see anything but the email shouldn’t end up in the SPAM folder.
If you see the above your DomainKey/DKIM and SPF records are working and your email shouldn’t suffer from the same delays and rejections as it did previously.
(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...I spent the best part of the days before and after Christmas applying for Nadisha’s de-facto spouse visa. We have been together for more than 12 months now and so in order to get Nadisha the best deal and ensure she can stay in the country we thought that now I have PR and can sponsor her it was about time to apply.
Nadisha is currently in the immigration system applying for a subclass 485 visa which is a graduate skilled visa. The plan was always to get her on to the spouse visa but with me getting PR we decided to do it early.
The spouse visa is subclass 820/801, it is two visas combined. You apply for them both and the 820 starts first as a temporary visa for 2 years. After 2 years they re-assess the relationship/marriage and assuming you are still together they grant a permanent visa.
The application eventually ran to about 150 pages. Including about 70 pages of emails between ourselves over the past three years.
It felt great to get it handed in to the department. We had a scare when they said they would give Nadisha a bridging type C this visa has two conditions - no work and no travel. This as not a good situation to be in with Nadisha currently working for the EPA. If the bridging type C ever does come into effect Nadisha will have to apply for permission to work.
We discovered that the 485 application stays in the system until it is decided. So we were able to get a bridging type B on the back of the 485 application. This was a huge relief as I almost thought Nadisha might not be able to make it to the wedding or not been able to get back into Australia. Both of course would have been a disaster!
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Tags: Australia, de facto spouse visa, Marriage, Nadisha, PR
Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you had a great time and had a good party.
This New Year I had a quite one. The impending wedding means I can’t think about big events. We went early to a sushi restaurant in Melbourne Central called Tomodachi. They have great tempura and sashimi but the rest is really mediocre.
Afterwards we went home and watched The Full Monty - a great British film. At 11:30pm we went down to Birrarung Mar and watched the fireworks over the river. They went on for about 15 minutes and were fantastic. I would have got a picture but for some reason I forgot how to operate the camera on my phone. I think the pressure of fireworks rendered me stupid.
Needless to say the fireworks were great! They always put on a great show. I do think though that one day it would be nice to one day go see New Year in Sydney with the fireworks over the harbour bridge.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Tags: birrarung mar, fireworks, happy new year, Melbourne, melbourne central
I was just performing a whois search using geektools.com and got this very unfortunate Captcha word come up.
I’m sure these systems should have away to block or exclude rude or offensive words.
(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...We moved apartment over the weekend. I now completely agree that this is one of the most stressful things you can do. I can only imagine that divorce would be worse.
Luckily we were only moving downstairs. Our old landlord is selling the unit and so for the security we decided to move before being asked to leave and before the wedding. We did the move ourselves over the weekend and with a little help from a friend. It was a really long day but that is probably because when moving such a short distance you don’t put full effort into the move. We were moving little bits at a time and that is why it took so long.
I booked two guys from Man With a Van to help move the large and heavy items on Monday morning at 8am. In the end they only had the book case, fridge and washing machine to move. It took them all of 20 minutes 
But they charge a minimum of an hour 
anyway well worth to save me from having to lift them.
I also booked the cleaner for Monday. We decided that it was better to pay someone to come and clean the unit and steam clean the carpets rather than do the cleaning ourselves. For the time it would take us our time was better spent in other ways rather than cleaning. So I booked the moving out package from Super Cheap Cleaning. They did a pretty good job and it was cheap.
Last night Nadisha and I spent an hour getting the marks off the walls (it was an extra that wasn’t included in the move out package) I have just had the final inspection. The agent came around and spent about 5 minutes looking around the unit. It was really just a glance, didn’t even want to see the cleaning receipt. Anyway we got the whole bond back.
I asked the agent what she looked for when doing a final inspection. She said:
- Previous history of the tenant - ie. has the tenant been a good payer and no trouble
- Does the unit appear clean when you first walk in?
- Are there any signs of damage?
Basically if there are problems they will then start to look in more detail otherwise you should be able to get the whole bond back.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Tags: Bond, Final inspection, Moving Out, RTBA
After my PR I went straight to the Virgin Mobile store and got my new iPhone I have been waiting for this for so long! I was on the 3 network but as they don’t carry the iPhone I had no issues moving networks. They don’t offer any real incentive for sticking around. Also Virgin Mobile offer 1GB of data in the plan.
So far the iPhone has been brilliant we will see what happens in the coming weeks. But I don’t expect any issues.
One of the first apps I installed was the official Wordpress app so I can now edit my blog from anywhere
You can look forward to lots more posts!
P.S. This was posted from the iPhone in case you didn’t guess.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Yesterday I finally got my permanent residency. I applied in early March 08 for independent PR based on my study time in Australia. On Monday I had a call from the Immigration Department. I had put my status as engaged on my application but not included Nadisha on the application. The lady who phoned was asking why.
Wednesday morning I checked my email and I had the automatic notification from the department saying my visa had been granted 
It was the best news in a long time. It now means I can come and go from Australia as I like and I am on my way to getting citizenship.
The next step is to get PR for Nadisha. We are currently researching options.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Tags: best news, Immigration, Permanent Residency, PR
In January 2009 I will be getting married to Nadisha. I thought I would provide a post about what we have been through in the run up to the wedding including the planning and other arrangements. I hope this might help someone else who is either getting married to a Sri Lankan or getting married in Sri Lanka or both. I have broken the whole story down into several blog posts. Providing you with easy chunks and me with more content.
Asking Permission
The whole thing obviously started when I proposed to Nadisha. I had already asked both her parents and my parents if they approved of us getting married. I was very nervous when I phoned Nadisha’s parents and asked for her hand in marriage. I thought it best to ask because when you are not sure how to proceed it is best to go with tradition, you can’t be held up for doing the wrong thing if you are following tradition.
Luckily for me they approved of me and had no issues with our marriage. Nadisha’s mother even thought I had already proposed - but I think the line was bad and I wasn’t clear. I then spoke to my parents and told them that I was planning to propose to Nadisha. They said they were happy and my mother said she thought that we would end up getting married.
Planning
I had started to think about proposing 5 months before hand. I planned to take Nadisha to Tasmania for a holiday and had booked a stay at the Freycinet Lodge while we were there. Freycinet Lodge is a up market cabin complex based inside Freycinet National Park on Tasmania’s East Coast. It was never meant to be the place I proposed but things changed in my head as we got closer to January 08. I hadn’t told Nadisha about the lodge booking (she obviously knew we were going to Tassie).
Choosing the Ring
In December I started to feel like the time was right for marriage. I started to look in jewellery stores for engagement rings. I had decided that I wasn’t going to set a firm budget but that I preferred to find something that I liked and thought Nadisha would like. I also wanted something that sparkled a lot. During my visits I learnt a lot about diamonds and how they are grading depending on cut, clarity and colour. I also learnt that the cut seems to be the most important for the best sparkle. When you get into the highest levels of clarity and colour the changes are not noticeable to the human eye - especially the untrained human eye. However the cut can greatly affect the amount of light reflected back out of the diamond and therefore the sparkle. Diamonds are supposed to be all about the sparkle so that was the most important point for me.
I finally found a ring I liked for a good price in a store willing to hold it until I picked it up just before I needed it. I didn’t want to be carrying around something so expensive if it could be locked in a safe in the jewellery store.
Proposing
I had called Freycinet Lodge ahead of our arrival and told them that the reason for the trip was to propose. So everyone there knew. They arranged for champagne and chocolates to be in the room on our arrival. This was a nice surprise and something Nadisha wasn’t expecting.
Actually on the way to Freycinet Lodge we encountered a bush fire blocking the main road down the east coast and there was one point when I thought we might not make it to the lodge. Luckily a bunch of the cars that were stopped by the fire got a guide vehicle to take us through the back roads around the fire.
The day I was going to propose I took Nadisha for a walk around the national park. We walked up to Wineglass bay look out and then down to the bay. I had planned o proposing there but it was too early (i wanted to propose over lunch) and there were too many screaming kids around. So we splashed around in the water and carried on to Hazards beach on the other side of the peninsula.
We stopped for lunch on the rocks at the end of the beach and started to eat. Nadisha was getting some bread ready as I was fumbling in my camera bag for the ring box. I was pretty nervous. As I turned around and dropped precariously onto one knee on the sloping rock Nadisha stuffed a piece of bread and Turkish dip into her mouth. So I asked ‘Will you marry me?’ and she couldn’t reply. I think she nearly choked on the bread and I had to wait about 20 seconds for an answer - a very long time.
Nadisha said ‘YES’. She was very happy and the ring looked great.
When we got back to the lodge the staff had placed a bottle of champagne in the room - although we were too tired to drink it.
That night we had dinner in the lodge restaurant and again the waiting staff knew - Nadisha was surprised that everyone seemed to know before her.
This plan worked for me. I’m sure that when you are ready to propose you will know. In my opinion it is about setting up the right moment and making the occasion very memorable.
Next time I’ll write about picking the best date for the wedding.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Tags: engagement rings, freycinet lodge, Marriage, Nadisha, Planning a Wedding, Proposing, Sri Lanka, sri lankan, Tradition
