Category Archives: Technology

Get your product/service into CeBIT's Webciety Showcase – FREE!

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CeBIT is happening in a month and a bit in Sydney, and this year they’ve decided to focus the eyes of the tens of thousands of show visitors on a new showcase section, called Webciety. Webciety is going to showcase a dozen of Australia’s hottest web-software companies, and if you think your company deserves to be there, you can enter a competition to win the wildcard Webciety spot.

CeBIT is Australia’s biggest technology trade show, and it is on for its 10th year in Australia this May, between the 12th and the 14th. I’ve been involved in CeBIT in Sydney for a number of years now, and I even managed to squeeze in a visit to the original big-daddy CeBIT in Hannover, Germany in 2006.

As a tradeshow, CeBIT has a pretty broad range. While checking out the latest gadgets and marvelling at the ever-increasing size of flat panels each year has been pretty impressive, I’ve sometimes felt like software – particularly the web software space where I’ve always played – is a little bit scattered and doesn’t pack the punch it should.

This year, however, things are going to be different with the Webciety showcase.

The Webciety part of the show is designed to showcase how web-based technologies, products and services play an increasingly important part in our lives. After debuting in Hannover in March this year to an incredible response from visitors, the Australian organisers have decided to make the Webciety feature a centrepiece of the Australian show.

CeBIT is a pretty incredible event, with around 35,000 people attending Sydney’s show last year. In these tougher economic times, people are hungrier to find better ways to work, and if the experience at the 2009 show in Hannover last month is a guide, there should be a large number of high quality and very interested attendees heading down to Darling Harbour in May for this year’s show.

If you’re keen to get your company and its product/service included in the showcase, the good news is that CeBIT has set aside one of the Webciety spots as a “wildcard” entry. By nominating your company, you could find yourself included in this prestigious showcase, completely free! Entries close on Wednesday the 22nd of April 2009, so get in quick!

Warning: .cn domains lost within 72hrs of expiry

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My company, Internetrix, has been expanding into the Chinese market gradually over the last year or so. Part of this has led us to register a couple of .cn domain names.

As a result of some plans we made a year ago, we registered a .cn domain name, in this case through GoDaddy. The domain name expired at around 11am on the 5th of March, so depending on the time zone, which would be only 30 and 54 hours ago.

Unfortunately, by the time I logged onto GoDaddy to renew the domain, it was too late. While domains I have decided not to renew from back in February were there asking for me to renew them, the .cn domain wasn’t.

It looks like when domains in .cn expire, they expire almost immediately. There is no way to renew them, and getting the domain back just now – around 2 days after expiry – cost me an additional US$50 in a redemption fee on top of the registration cost.

The very helpful operator from GoDaddy also told me that if I’d waited until tomorrow to call, they wouldn’t have been able to get it back for me. This means a domain could be irretrievably lost to squatters less than 72 hours after expiry.

This might be different for different registrars, and whoever GoDaddy use is particularly fierce with their suspension, but either way, I’d strongly recommend anyone starting to dabble in the .cn namespace be very, very careful and dilligent about their renewal handling processes.

Mike Arrington's Time Out and the decloaking the mob with Torches & Pitchforks

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I wasn’t that surprised to read Mike’s post today about some really bad stuff happening over the last 6 months.

I didn’t know the details until I read them on TechCrunch, but I knew something was up when I messaged him to let him know I was going to be in the Valley for a couple of weeks in November. To my surprise, he told me he was going to be out of the state, at his parents place, and this was with months of advance warning. The Mike Arrington I know doesn’t make many plans that far in advance, and he’ll the first to admit that being right in the middle of Silicon Valley has as much to do with Techcrunch’s success as the many other factors. Being out of town – and the state – for months didn’t seem right.

I thought it might have been family stuff – I knew where he told me he was going to be was his parent’s place – and was hoping it wasn’t bad news or health stuff with him or his folks, and instead that he just needed to get out of the Valley to get out of the echo chamber for a while.

Of course, little did I know it was work related, and he was trying to get away from it, but instead of another Vulture piece from ValleyWag or a hatched job from the clearly jealous and much less talented writer, Betsy Schiffman, it turns out someone with a felony, and gun and an axe to grind was stalking Mike and his staff.

I’ve lived as a house-guest of Mike’s on a number of occasions, initially for 3 month stint in early 2006, when TechCrunch was less than 6 months old, and during that time I felt like I got to know the guy really well. We chatted about times before Techcrunch, women and relationships, lessons from previous business ventures and more. Those were personal conversations, and they’re going to stay that way.

My point is, however, that I got to get to know a person, a man I regard as my friend, thankfully for me at a time when he still “assumed most people were essentially good, and assumed that an individual was trustworthy until proven otherwise”. I saw someone who’d always take a contrarian position and get you to justify it. I’d watch – and cop – him taking the piss out of people, but we’d give as good as we got. I reckon he’s got more than a small potential to become an honourary Aussie: he didn’t care for status/authority, is direct, and loved to stick it to the man, which in his industry, is the incumbent media outlets. Pure Aussie in my books.

I also saw up close just some of the untrustworthy people, the types who lie even when the truth will do just as good a job, who’ve tainted his perspective. I’ve been frankly stunned that such an insightful and intelligent guy could be so trusting of people who’ve since screwed him over. And still he didn’t raise a finger in anger or retribution using his extensive online influence.

I’ve watched from afar as one storm or another has erupted online as people struggle to realise that just because its easier to click a mouse button, it doesn’t make it any less of a fight, and reflected that, with the exception of the stouch with DEMO, none of those fights were of his making. Sure, he’s no shrinking violet – he’s an attorney who loves a fight as much as the next lawyer, but more for the challenge than for the desire to stand upon the head of a lifeless opponent – but frankly, the vast, vast majority of the attacks and abuse levelled at Mike over the last couple of years have been way off base.

So, what’s the deal with these attacks? Given we’re talking about real world threats and attacks, its really worth having a look at them, and potentially shining a bit of light on the attackers. I believe they fall into one of three categories:

  1. Jelousy and Self-Interest – this one is the de rigueur attack motivation for the journalists out there covering tech. Many of them represent old-media, who see the competitive pressure of TechCrunch to be more than a little intimidating. The story I read on SMH today over lunch almost made me choke: headlined “Tony Soprano of Bloggers Faces Death Threats“, and in a piece that characteristically didn’t link to its sources, feature quotes taking shots at Arrington, including the one used in the headline, from other traditional, dead-tree media, who’ve got a pretty clear self-interest in taking him down. I thought this was a bit rich given most tech stories I’ve seen in SMH Tech News lately have been rehashes of TechCrunch pieces with a 12 hour delay and no links to sources. Moving away from traditional media to the other tech bloggers, a decent amount of the attacks are motivated by jealousy. And in the cases where they’re really legitimate differences of opinion, rather than just hit jobs, things are resolved amicably, and mostly in person. I enjoyed lunch with Mike and Dave Winer not two months after this comment’s little dust up, and there were no hard feelings at all around the table in Palo Alto.
  2. Bitterness of Rejection – there’s been a few recent posts about how stupid it is for startups to pin all their hopes on success, interest from VC’s and the implicit legitimacy of a positive review on Techcrunch. I can see how a want-re-preneur might get angry and upset about getting passed over, but if their key to success was a favourable Techcrunch post, I’d argue they don’t really have a business, just a fantasy of rock-star success and a Tesla in every garage. This sort of bitterness is just sour grapes (ok, enough taste metaphors already). The guy who did the spitting might have been responding to the bitterness of rejection, or he could have just be someone acting out the next point…
  3. Tall Poppy Syndrome – anyone who’s spent any time with Mike knows he isn’t a geek, programmer or deep technologist. To my knowledge, he’s never pretended to be. He does business analysis of businesses that just happen to be in the tech scene. Most of the flames I see posted in comments are either from people bitter after being rejected, or just pissed off that some guy who doesn’t know Perl from Python commands so much attention in the tech world. If you’re some random hater who’s rejoycing that Arrington is ‘out’ because you don’t think he knows tech enough, my suggestion is to think about what you’re going to do when you get pink-slipped because the business bit that pays for your lifestyle doesn’t work out, and hope that XKCD remains free so you can at least have some humour.

Anyway, the key point I’m trying to make here is that Mike’s a great guy: within 10 mins of meeting me and my business partner in Palo Alto, he offered us his house for as long as we needed it. All this stuff about Tony Soprano is just plain bullshit peddled by people with their own agenda, and if we let the bitter, jealous and tall poppy types continue with their baseless tirades without any accountability, we’re going to loose more and more good people.

Lets hope the serious stuff of the stalking ends, and for personally, I hope those enjoying the specatle of watching one of their biggest competitive threats bow out (hopefully temporarily) wake up with a nasty hangover tomorrow when they realise their rehashed and late stories, with little analysis, depth, opinion and conviction, supported by a business model more conflicted that Arrington’s ever was, is crumbling around them.

My chat about #nocleanfeed with Sharon Bird, MP

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A month or so ago I was prodded by @pat on Twitter to take some direct action on the #nocleanfeed issue.

For those wondering what the hell #nocleanfeed is all about, check out http://nocleanfeed.com. From their website:

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.

What started as an election promise by the ALP during the 2007 election campaign to make a voluntary “clean feed” managed by the ISP available to households (as a counter the Howard Government’s initiative of funding the licence cost of software managed on your home computer) expanded into a proposal for a national, compulsory filter that no internet user would be able to opt out of.

While the compulsory list would be less of a nanny and would filter less content out, it would still mean every Australian would be subject to a filter, the likes of which is only found in places like China and Saudi Arabia. Worse, the super-evil list wouldn’t ever be made public (for fairly understandable reasons) so as a free country, we’d be being censored without any transparency; thoughts like 1984 and Big Brother then come to mind: after all, who watches the watchers?

Anyway, taking @pat’s prod, I emailed my local member, Sharon Bird, Member for Cunningham (ALP), and asked if she’d be prepared to meet me for a chat about it. Thankfully she was very open to a chat and keen to learn more, and we had an hour long discussion today.

My approach was to try and put aside the discussion about censorship, and I think it worked pretty well. In fact, trying to separate the merits of censoring some of the dark corners of the internet – since people have a range of views along – and declaring that the censorship debate right and appropriate, but putting it aside and talking about the problems with the filtering proposal, is a good approach for everyone interested in stopping the compulsory filtering of Australian internet access.

Instead, having defused the debate about whether it was right or wrong to restrict access to some material, I turned my attention to the two big problems with the compulsory filtering, which I saw as:

  1. Filtering web traffic will slow things down; for a new government that stood and won on a broadband enhancement platform, this seemed like a strange thing; and,
  2. Filtering web traffic won’t achieve their censorship or child protection objectives; it’s impossible to create a definitive list of dodgy stuff, filters are easy to get around with Proxies and VPNs, most of the dodgy stuff getting around the net travels via P2P or Email, and lastly, I’d be more worried about a kid being groomed by a real world paedophile in a chat room or on a social network, than I’d be about them searching out porn.

So, how did it go you’re probably wondering?

Overall, I was really impressed with Sharon’s grasp of the way the internet works. She’d been briefed to an extent before Christmas, but that was more about where the pilot was up to. She had read the Crikey article from this week about the Filter and appreciated that internet != web browsing, and that Peer-to-Peer plays a big part in how content gets around the world.

We talked in general terms about the objectives of the proposal to filter the internet, and boiled the motivations down into three groups:

  1. The government is trying to make it harder for baddies to get up to no good, such as browse kiddie porn;
  2. Parents want to make protecting their children from online nasties the government’s responsibility; and/or,
  3. The government made a political pledge in a campaign where they needed to court traditionally conservative voters, and being seen to do something about unsavoury content on the net was a necessary part of getting elected.

We then talked about how these three motivations were (mis)served by the concept of a compulsory national internet filter, and I pointed out:

  1. People doing nasty stuff don’t use websites. They use private P2P networks, they use VPNs and they do a range of other things to cover their tracks. If this was really the Government’s priority, take the hundred million plus they’re committing to the filter and give it to the AFP instead; they can then pose as kiddie porn traders and take the creeps down in a sting (like they do quite well from time to time already)
  2. The most dangerous thing for a kid isn’t looking at some porn; its being groomed in an online forum, social network or other place where people interact virtually, and for them to be manipulated to the point where they give out details like addresses, phone numbers, or God forbid, agree to meet someone in person without telling their parents. Sure, parents don’t like the idea their kids are looking at porn, but I reckon they’d be much more scared of them being physically or psychologically abused. The filter isn’t going to make any of this less likely, and if parents build a false sense of security that the government has made the internet safe for kids, so they don’t bother supervising, then the filter makes the internet a more, not less, dangerous place for kids.
  3. This motivation makes the most sense, but I pointed out that the ALP went to the election promising an opt-in clean feed for households, funded by the government. While many people think any sort of filtering is a bad thing, I really just object to it being compulsory. When it’s compulsory, my internet connection slows down. My business is less competitive. And then the government – perhaps a future government – has a tool to stifle free speech. If the Federal Government wants to waste hundreds of millions on a project of negligible use, I’m not going to start a movement: us Aussies are too laid back and we’re used to our Government’s wasting money – don’t get me started on the $10B bogan cash bonus fiscal stimulus package to prop up retail sales for products we just imported anyway – to get upset about them funding a voluntary feed.

All in all, Sharon was very interested, quite informed on the basics, and appreciative of our arguments and where we’re coming from. While remaining appropriately uncommittal, at the end of our chat I felt like she had a good understanding of the issues and consequences of putting in compulsory filtering technology.

This government has been very very strict on not breaking promises so far, and asking them to abandon the concept of a clean feed at an ISP level, funded by taxpayers is going to be an uphill battle. The solution looked pretty obvious to Sharon and I at the end of our chat: for the Federal Government to fund an optional clean feed for people to opt into, possibly supplied by a subset of ISPs who will take on additional technical complexity in return for government largesse, and to return the idea of a compulsory nation-wide feed to the “that was a stupid idea, wasn’t it” bin.

Other noteworthy parts of our chat included:

  • Sharon suggesting that a better interface between the Minister and Industry might be a good thing; given the ALP have put on the record how important the feel internet infrastructure is to our economic future, the idea of a specific internet subcommittee in Infrastructure Australia could have merit
  • When we talked about what it would take to filter P2P traffic, and we discussed Deep Packet Inspection, Sharon grasped the concept quickly and remarked “that would be like the Government filtering every single phone call people make”, with the obvious inference that that sort of thing would not stand.
  • In Sharon’s office at least, they’re getting about an even 50/50 split between people who support the filter vs those who object to it; when we talked further though, those who support it are really arguing the merits of censorship, where those arguing against it are taking more of the line above – arguing the specific weaknesses, failings and collateral damage of a mandatory filter.

So, in summary, I came away from my chat with Sharon more impressed than I expected to be; those of us in technology fields are used to politicians who don’t have a background in them trying to make decisions and laws about them: and generally making the wrong decisions. On the contrary, Sharon was cognizant of the fundamentals, and was willing to learn more and explore the consequences of the proposed plans.

I’d encourage anyone reading this to get in touch with their own local members. Feel free to use the approach above as a template if you’re interested. If you have success, please post a note in the comments explaining who you got a positive/negative hearing from. Before legislation goes before Parliament, it has to be discussed and voted on in Caucus, so if we can build a list of MPs who understand the issue, and support the principle of the ALP delivering an optional, opt-in filtered feed, if they’re going to waste our money on filtering at all, then we stand a much better chance.

Facebook's domination of Christmas Day

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Uncharacteristically short post this time: Dan Whitworth has an article at BBC’s Newsbeat site about Facebook being so popular it accounted for almost 5% of all page views on Christmas Day.

I’ve got three theories for why this might be:

  • The Facebook generation have enough of their families early in the day, and want to catch up with what their friends got up to on Christmas Eve more than if they weren’t hanging out with the folks
  • There just isn’t anything else going on on Christmas Day. News papers shut down. People trying to make news don’t say anything cause they think no-one is watching, or if they are, there’s no working journalists or outlets to report and publish it anyway
  • With the cost of SMS messages – the most recent way to wish your friends a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – coming in at around $1,000,000 per GB, Facebook just plain makes sense.

Either way, Facebook is a phenomenon. When my mum starts asking about it, and my mate’s mum asks to be my friend, its gone as mainstream as you can possibly imagine. And for an advertising based business, mainstream = $$$.

Using FoxyProxy and a spare US Web Server to unlock Pandora

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I first discovered Pandora as a houseguest of Mike Arrington’s back in early 2006, and was immediately hooked. Unfortunately a year or so later, back in Australia, Pandora started blocking access since I wasn’t coming from a US IP address – all over about music licencing territories and a dispute over internet radio royalties that played out until late 2008 in the US alone. While I can’t blame them for picking their battles and deciding the rest of the world could wait until they’d saved their business, I was pretty disappointed as an avid user and fan.

After reading Mike’s latest “Products I can’t live without” post, I thought I’d put 20 mins of work into getting access to Pandora back again. Getting first time access to Hulu and other sites that block international users is on the agenda too, but I’ve got Pandora back now, and I couldn’t be happier. Here’s how I did it.

Ingredients:

  1. Firefox web browser
  2. FoxyProxy plugin
  3. Someone else’s Proxy Server or an Apache Web Server on which you can configure mod_proxy

Method:

  1. I’ll assume you’ve got Firefox. If not, step 3 is probably going to seem a bit tough.
  2. Install FoxyProxy. You might see a warning about the plugin being unsigned. This is common for open-source plugins, and since Mozilla recommend this one, I reckon you’re fairly safe, so choose OK.
  3. When FoxyProxy first loads (following a restart) it will probably ask you whether you want to configure it to use TOR (The Onion Router). If you don’t know what that is, choose no.
  4. From the FoxyProxy options (which will be open by default on first run, but which can be re-opened by clicking on the “FoxyProxy” link in your status bar (the bit at the bottom of your browser), you need to configure a your rules so that attempts to go to Pandora go through your (or someone else’s) US based Proxy Server, as described below in “Configuring FoxyProxy”.

What is a Proxy

In the sense we use it here, a proxy is a computer that makes requests for web pages, images and other we content on your behalf to another server. So, you make a request of the proxy, and the proxy then makes the request to the destination server on your behalf, and when it gets a response from the destination server – in this case, Pandora.com – it receives it and then passes it back into your browser.

In default mode, Firefox (like most web browsers) can only run with one proxy server configured at a time; this is problematic because while I want to use my Proxy to access Pandora, I don’t want all my traffic crossing the Pacific (twice): it would slow things down a lot when I’m browsing Australian websites.

This is why you need FoxyProxy: it allows you to apply logic and rules to what traffic you send via the proxy, and which you let go through normally (usually directly). You can even define different multiple proxies, each of them having their own rules or patterns that bring them into play.

Before configuring FoxyProxy, you’ll need to have a proxy server to use. Here, you’ve got two options: you can try using a public open proxy, or if you’ve got a web hosting account that gives you access to Apache’s configuration files, you can make one yourself.

Using a Public Proxy Server

Using a Public Proxy Server is pretty easy, although there’s no promises as to the reliability of the servers you want to connect through: remember, Pandora is streaming radio, which means if the Proxy your using is being used by a lot of other people, you might not have enough bandwidth to suck the music stream down through.

I did a quick Google search, and the xroxy.com list ranked pretty well. I can’t vouch for it or any of the Proxies it lists, but it looked OK. If you don’t have access to your own Apache server in the US, this is what you’ll need to use.

Making Apache a Proxy Server

If you’ve got access to an Apache server, you can make your own Proxy in a few quick minutes. I’ll take you through the steps now.

  • Open httpd.conf, or a file that httpd.conf includes, often found in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf or somewhere similar, in your favourite editor.
  • Scroll down the file, and look for a LoadModule directives that mention “proxy”. There are two we need to make this work: mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http. If they’re there, then you’ve got the prerequisites you need.
    • NB: If the line that mentioned them has a # at the start of this, that means they’re currently disabled: remove the # at the start of the line to enable them the proxy functionality in Apache.
    • If you can’t find these directives, it might be that your hosting company doesn’t let you edit your core httpd configuration file. This isn’t uncommon, particularly in shared environments. If you’ve got the ability to edit at least some configuration files, you might get lucky and find that mod_proxy is enabled already, so keep perservering cross your fingers.
  • Now we’ve established that you have proxy (or we’re hoping you do), its time to configure the proxy. My configuration (with the IP address for Allow from changed) is below:
ProxyRequests On
ProxyVia Off
<Proxy http://*.pandora.com/*>
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
</Proxy>
  • The block of code allows people from the IP address listed in the Allow from line to access http://www.pandora.com, streaming.pandora.com or any other prefix of pandora.com, as well as allowing those people to access files and subdirectories of *.pandora.com. MAKE SURE YOU PUT YOUR OWN IP ADDRESS IN THE ALLOW FROM DIRECTIVE. You can find your IP address from the aptly named WhatIsMyIP.com site.
  • When you’re done, do an apachectl configtest and if Apache is happy, do an apachectl graceful to reload the configuration files.

Once this is done, it’s time to configure FoxyProxy so that your browser actually makes requests to your new proxy when you’re trying to go to Pandora.

Configuring FoxyProxy

Configuring FoxyProxy wasn’t too hard, but if you’re not familar with the terminology, its easy to feel confused. Here’s a step by step.

  1. Inside the FoxyProxy options box (you can get to it using the instructions described above), you want to click on “Add New Proxy” on the right hand side.
  2. On the next screen, under the “General” tab, give your Proxy a name. If you’re using a public proxy, use the name from the listing website; if you’re using your own, give it a name like “MyProxy”.
  3. From the “Proxy Details” tab, enter the address of the proxy. If you set up your own proxy, this will be your server’s hostname or IP address. You also need to choose a port: if you set up your own server using the Apache instructions above, it will likely be 80; if you used a public proxy, look for the number after the : in the address if they don’t specify an explicit port number. Also, if you created your own Proxy using Apache, leave the SOCKS box unticked.
  4. The “URL Patterns” tab is where you tell your browser to use this proxy whenever you’re going to Pandora.com.
    1. Click on “Add New Pattern”
    2. Type a name for the pattern that makes sense to you, eg, Pandora
    3. Type the following into the URL pattern box: http://*pandora*/*
    4. Leave the default radio buttons (whitelist and wildcard)
    5. Click on OK to save the Pattern, and then OK to save the FoxyProxy settings, and then close.
  5. Now, you need to enable FoxyProxy. Simply right-click on “FoxyProxy” text in the status bar, and choose “Use proxies based on their pre-defined patterns and priorities”.
  6. Try going to http://www.pandora.com – this is the real test of your Proxy server, and whether it will let you pass traffic through to Pandora. The following results might give you an idea of what where a problem lies:
    1. 403 Forbidden Error: the Proxy isn’t letting you get through to Pandora.
      1. If you’re using a pubic proxy, then they don’t like you, or don’t like Pandora. Either way, choose another proxy.
      2. If you’ve set up your own Proxy using Apache, you’re either coming through from a different IP address than you thought (check for typos on the “Allow from” line), or you’ve typed in your “<Proxy>” directive incorrectly; check there for typos too.
    2. If you get the “restricted” page from Pandora telling you your IP address is outside of the US, then one of the following has occured:
      1. If it shows you your IP address, then you either haven’t turned FoxyProxy on (make sure you do Step 5 above), or you’ve made a mistake when setting up your URL Pattern: go in and have another look.
      2. If it shows you another IP address, like that of your Proxy, then Pandora doesn’t think the Proxy is in the US. Use another Proxy.

These are a few instructions that worked for me: they’re not going to work for everyone, and they don’t take into account the myriad of different ways you can set up Apache servers in particular.

Hope you’ve found them useful – if you’ve got questions, please post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Telstra's Letter to Shareholders – a lot of talk, no real explaination

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Last week, Telstra got booted from the National Broadband Network process, where the Australian Federal Government will be spending about half the amount of money they (wasted) on the bogan bonus to fund/subsidise an improvement in Australia’s broadband capacity down to the last mile.

Telstra, the largest telco in the country, apparently didn’t like the concept that some Govt money in the process might mean the new network actually involves competition between the network, wholesale and retail divisions of the value chain: one network with cost recovery, then a number of wholesalers, and then lots of retailers. You know, competition on a utility.

Anyway, they submitted an incomplete report, and the Govt kicked them out of the process for non-compliance. Their share price then copped a hiding, double digit losses even in a rising market, since it is pretty clear this new network is going to be “where its at” for the next generation of Australian fixed-line internet access. The government will need to legislate to ensure the successful builder gets access to the copper and other Telstra infrastructure, and it would have been much better for them to have been in the game. But they had a dummy spit, and now the pressure has been on for them to explain their incompetence to their shareholders, including yours truly.

Here’s the letter. A lot of talk, but no explaination. What a disappointment.

Continue reading →

The Perils of Credit (cards)

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On a recent trip that included China, half a dozen stops in Europe, and some time in New York and San Francisco, someone skimmed my corporate credit card. My bank, Bankwest, has a pretty impressive fraud detection system, and when someone (I think based in China) made a $1 transaction (so as to test whether the number was valid, before either selling the details on or coming back to try and clean me out), the bank’s team caught it and gave me a call.

Unfortunately, I was in the US at the time, and for some reason they didn’t see fit to leave a message, so all of a sudden, my card stopped working, but it was at the tail end of the trip, and I decided I’d look into it when I got back, thinking it might have just been a normal effect of running out of credit limit or something.

After getting home and calling the bank, I was told all about the fraud, that the card had been deactivated, and that they’d send me a new one.

With a number of automatic transactions with suppliers now rejecting, there was only a little bit of hassle involved with telling them the new number. Everyone except TPG internet.

With the new number in hand, I dutifully logged into their web control panel and updated the details. The system accepted them, but a short time later sent me an email and told me that the card wasn’t valid. I logged in again, thinking I must have mistyped a number or two, but again, after a while, an email came through rejecting things.

Not I thought they might have had something wrong on their end, as I’d been buying fuel for the car and paying other vendors successfully with it, and I made a note to come back in a day or two to try again.

This went on for a little while, until I got a call from the bank after I’d made a number of large transactions internationally in a short period of time. While confirming the transactions were legitimate, I happened to ask the caller from the bank whether she could see if there was anything wrong with the card that would explain why TPG’s transactions were failing.

She looked back through the records, only to see that TPG was trying to process my card with an expiry date of 20/22, ie, a month much greater than 12 in the year 2022.

When I got my email reminder from TPG accounts the next day, I replied and explained in some detail what I’d discovered, and asked if someone could give me a call or reply via email with an update on what’s happening at their end.

Later that day, upon getting to my home office, I tried to log on, only to find I’d been disconnected. I called through to their phone number on the bottom of their accounts email, and selected accounts, only to find I’d called 10 mins after they’d closed for the day. Of course, they then hung up on me. So I rang again pressed 2 for tech support, thinking I’d play dumb about my connection not working, and hope they’d take my credit card over the phone and reactivate or unblock the account. Instead of being placed in the support queue, however, I was just told they couldn’t help me right now (presumably too many people in the queue, but the system didn’t say that) and promptly hung up on me. Customer service: FAIL.

Giving up, I called the next morning, and after 15 mins on hold for accounts, I told my story to an outsourced phone support person. I tried to explain my situation with some difficulty because of language issues, and she tried to take the CC payment over the phone. Again, it failed. She put me on hold, and then 10 minutes later, hung up on me. Repeating the process, and now getting having been at it for almost an hour by this time, I am finally asked some details about the card, like the bank it is with. “Oh, we’re sorry, we’re having problems with some Bankwest cards”.

So, while on one hand I’m frustrated by the scammers who nicked my details and made this all necessary, I’m actually more frustrated with TPG. Their system had a problem, and they then disconnected me and made me jump through hoops to try and diagnose and solve it, and even with the accurate information, it still took an hour to have someone recognise it.

They’ve now demanded I give them a different credit card, or access to draw money out of my bank account, but I’ve told them to get stuffed – they should fix their system, and email me when they’ve done it. No one else I’m working with is having any problems, and given the quality of their website – design last touched in 1997 or something I think – and their poor quality customer service, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were massively cutting corners on their payment processing gateway: there’s some things you just shouldn’t scrimp on.

If they do this again, I’m off to Internode, who I heard nothing but great stories about while at OSDC last week.

1800 and 1300 Numbers in Australia

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I’ve been doing a bit of research lately on phone setup for my new startup, Hiive Systems. Part of the establishment work is around phone numbers, and I’ve learned a few things I thought might be worth sharing.

Firstly, I’ve learned that – in Australia anyway – VoIP services haven’t yet come of age. Even after iPrimus came and gave a presentation at the Australian Telecommunication Users Group about their new VoIP services (and how their roll-out for Rebel Sport saved a lot of money and made them much more efficient), the presenter admitted that it is really about point to point type services where you’ve got multiple offices.

Secondly, I’ve learned a bit more about the 1300 and 1800 phone number system. We’ve had a 1800 number with Internetrix for a while, and we got it as part of a long distance plan through AAPT some time ago. In setting things up with Hiive, I wanted to have another look at how it all works.

Turns out, there are lots of companies out there that specialise in these sorts of services. Generally, you pay a monthly fee, usually with no committment, and then you pay a price per minute to receive calls. The prices of two companies, AllTel and Telcoworx are included in the attached spreadsheet, which you can see by clicking here.

These companies will route your call to any landline – or, for a higher cost, mobile – number you like, which makes sense. What surprised me the most, however, is that the difference between 1300 (cheaper, because the caller pays something) and 1800 (free to the caller) is bugger all. So, given 1800 numbers look a bit better/more professional/generous, we’ll be getting one of those.

The other thing that was new info is how the numbers are allocated. Since this is a national namespace, it works a bit like domain names, and some numbers – which can spell your company name on the handset – cost more than others. There’s a Federal body responsible for auctioning off numbers that are more in-demand, usually because they use a lot of repetition – called SmartNumbers which appear to be a part of the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

What surprised me was how they price these numbers. By going to the search form on the SmartNumbers website, you can do a search for the phone number you want, and they’ll tell you if it is a premium number, which they’ve determined will have a reserve price at an auction; the more repeating numbers, the higher the reserve it would appear.

As a result, changing the leading digit at the beginning of the number I’m looking for – I’ll keep it a secret for the moment until I’ve won the auction – changes the price from being a reserve of $500 to, in one case, a reserve of $12,500 – that’s a 25x increase in reserve!

Also like domain names, it would appear that once you’ve got one of these numbers, you become the “Rights of Use” holder; I think this is a bit like a lease on a domain name; you never own the domain, but you have the rights to it exclusively.

I remember a Fourth Estate Domain presentation some time ago with the (younger) Jack Singleton, who runs/ran Phone Names, and was trying to tap into this gold rush aspect. While it looks like the Feds have wised up with an auction system to stop companies “claiming” the rights to thousands of names, just to on-sell them like domain squatters, the more open nature of the process now should make people in business think about reserving a number that matches their business name.

OSDC Sydney 2008 – a wrap

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I was lucky enough to spend the better part of last week at the Open Source Developers Conference, or OSDC, held in Sydney between Wed 3rd and Fri 5th of December.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from my first OSDC conference – they’ve been running for five years, and we’ve had at least one rep from Internetrix, and now Hiive Systems, head along since the 2nd one.

Users, not contributors

From a business perspective, I’m a big fan of Open Source Software. As the provider of a range of hosted, software-as-a-service style offerings, however, I’ve been a little constrained in what I’ve been able to have our talented team of developers put back into the Open Source community; so far, it has just been participation and help in forums and such.

While it is a legitimate refrain from members of the Open Source community to ask businesses to Open Source their applications and make them freely available, the service/hosting nature of our business makes this impossible. For example, we’ve already had a Chinese based company knock off our entire website design, and if we shared our code verbatim, we’d likely have knock-offs appearing everywhere and destroying any chance we’ve got to recover our significant, sunken investment. For the clients that licence our software to run on their own servers, however, we provide them with access to the source code; partly its a peace of mind things given some of our clients are very large, and partly its about giving them control of their own destiny. They of course undertake not to redistribute it.

So, given we don’t open-source our apps, I wasn’t sure if I would be burnt at the stake or derided as a leech who takes and doesn’t give anything back when I arrived on Wednesday.

Open in more than code

As it turned out, while the community quite rightly has a level of religious zeal towards everything being free and available, there was a much stronger sense of support between participants in the community. The desire to provide mutual support to others that came through much more strongly than I’d ever seen at a conference, in both the presented sessions by day and social activities of an evening. In this sense, the emphasis was much more on the free and open exchange of ideas and suggestions, and there most sessions I participated had presenters asking for tips and suggestions on how to improve their own approaches to solving problems.

Making our contribution

One of the sessions that surprised me the most was a business session run by MySQL guru, Arjen Lentz from Open Query. Arjen’s previous two scheduled sessions were full of great advice and tips – at both a high and at a detailed level – on how we can build a better business with MySQL. Needless to say I had high expectations coming into his third presentation on the Friday afternoon, which continued the concept of architecting for success, just in case. Arjen said straight up that he didn’t expect to have three talks accepted to the proceedings, and that the session would be much more of a forum style chat about business things. Unfortunately, the content wasn’t very good, and it seemed to highlight somewhere we may be able contribute and give something back: in the business sphere of things. Hopefully, the siliconbeachaustralia.org initiative will help provide a welcoming, friendly environment for excellent technologists to deepen their entrepreneurial and business skills, and I’ll be looking for any ways to contribute there.

From a code contribution point of view, we have already picked at least two ways we can contribute; things that we think may be useful for the broader community. One of them is a real-time query format translator between MySQL formatted queries – which rely on built-in functions like CONCATENATE and different ways of using LIMIT – and MSSQL server. The other is a more ambitious project, to leverage our exposure to Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, and our own internal needs to integrate more closly with the whole Google Apps ecosystem, and contribute the Perl code we write to interface with GData sources back to CPAN. We’ve also now made personal connections with a number of the luminaries in the Australian Open Source community, and with people to talk to about contributing, who can give us access, we’re much more able to play a part.

Stand by for some updates in a month or three as some of these contributions take shape, and thanks again to the organisers who manage to run such a professional, well attended event for what is a seriously (comparatively) low ticket price.

Update: Stephen Edmonds, one of the nicest prolific photographers ever at these sorts of things, took the following photo; some of the Hiive crew with Larry Wall, Father of Perl. Worth the price of admission 😉

Larry Wall and Hiive

Larry Wall and Hiive