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  • Remove GoBoingo to fix MacBook WiFi pauses, stutters, hiccups, latency, delays

    I recently upgraded our router to the Linksys WRT320N router. I set the router to only transmit on 5GHz and the performance has been awesome because all our neighbors are still on 2.4 GHz, our 2.4 GHz cordless phones don’t interfere with our WiFi anymore and because 5GHz is better at getting around corners and going through walls.

    Awesome… except on my personal MacBook.

    Earlier today  I was on a 3.5 hour skype call (!!!) and every few minutes I’d get a 1 second delay before the other side’s conversation continued. They told me the same would happen with my voice. I also use SSH on my MacBook which requires a real-time response from the server. Every minute or so I’d notice a 1 to 3 second pause in my internet connection. The WiFi didn’t drop, it just paused as if it was busy doing something, and then continued as normal.

    If you’re browsing or streaming something that pause probably won’t affect you because browsing usually has a second or two delay while DNS lookups occur etc, and streaming isn’t affected because it usually has a few seconds of content buffered. But with Skype and SSH it’s a real pain in the ass.

    After tweaking the hell out of my router’s settings including Beacon Interval, RTS Threshold etc. and trying to disable things like Interference Robustness on my MacBook I finally found the culprit.

    A little piece of software called GoBoingo was causing the problem. I launched Activity Monitor (under Applications / Utilities ) and stopped the GoBoingo process and voila! No more hiccups every 1 minute.

    I’ve seen a few reports of other background MacBook apps that monitor your WiFi that cause this exact problem. So if you’re getting stutter, hiccups, pauses, latency or delays every minute or so, kill these apps and check if that’s fixed your connection quality.

  • Home remedy to de-skunk your dog, FAST!

    Our 4 year old aussie cattle dog Joey just got skunked. My sister in law feeds left-over chicken to the local skunks and a big one arrived. We accidentally left Joey outside. Next thing the neighbor knocks on the door saying “Your dog is outside and he’s been skunked!”

    I’ve never smelled skunk before. It’s BAAAAHAAAAD!!

    So we found an old home remedy that worked unbelievably well. I’ve heard from people have tried soap, tomato juice, baking soda, vinegar and a whole bunch of other stuff and none of them work as well as this recipe.

    When you’re done, please post your skunk story in my comments!

    This recipe is for a 30 to 40 pound dog. Adjust it for your dogs weight. (For an 80 pound dog use 2 quarts peroxide etc..)

    • 1 Quart of 3% Hydrogen peroxide.
    • A quarter cup of baking soda
    • A Tablespoon of liquid soap (the kind you do the dishes with).
    • Rubber gloves and old clothes for everyone involved to wear. Seriously, if your dog got badly skunked you’re going to get some on you.
    1. Put on your old clothes and rubber gloves
    2. Mix the peroxide, baking soda and liquid soap in a small bucket. Don’t worry it won’t react or foam or anything.
    3. Wet your dog thoroughly with warm water.
    4. KEEP A SMALL AMOUNT OF SOLUTION before completing the next step.
    5. Gradually work the solution into the doggies fur. Keep it away from eyes, ears and mouths.
    6. Once you’ve worked the solution into your dog, let it stand for about 4 minutes. Your skin may itch slightly from the peroxide. Use your own comfort level to gauge how your dog is feeling – if the itching on your skin turns to burning, your dog is probably feeling the same and it’s time for the next step.
    7. Then rinse your dog off with warm water.
    8. Now sniff your dog from nose to tail. If you still smell a few stubborn spots, rub dry baking soda into that spot. Then work some of the solution you kept into that spot. then rinse it off. The water should remove the smell from the stubborn spots.
    9. Once your dog has no more smell and has been rinsed, wash him with your favorite dog shampoo and rinse it all out thoroughly. This last shampoo step is to remove any leftover peroxide which can burn your dogs skin if you leave it on.
    10. Towel dry your dog
    11. Give him or her an awesome treat! [Joey tells me he prefers Ribeye steak]
    12. Throw away your rubber gloves, put those smelly clothes in the laundry and take a shower.
    13. Post your skunk story in my comments. Thanks! 🙂
  • Advice to a new Seattle entrepreneur

    Google Groups archive of the STS mailing list isn’t working reliably, so I’m archiving a few emails I’ve sent to the STS list here. One day when I have too much time I’ll create a reliable threaded archive of the whole list. I sent this as a reply to a “getting started” advice request from a Seattle entrepreneur:

    Alfredo,

    I’m sure you’re going to get a lot of advice from the good folks on this list. I’m going to give you my three cents:

    Firstly, welcome to the very difficult but very rewarding world of creating a business out of nothing. It’s people like you who are the foundation of this country’s economy and prosperity. If you succeed you will be providing job security for hundreds, possibly thousands of people and you will have created a useful product or service.

    You are joining the entrepreneurial ranks at an interesting time. Things are changing. Two years ago, if you hired a few developers on elance, created some useful software in an interesting sector and got a few hundred thousand people using it it was quite likely that you could sell your company to a bigger company without actually having to earn any money.

    Today it’s a much harder environment. It’s more difficult to find investors and you can’t “build to flip” (build a business to sell it) as easily. But things aren’t as bad as they might sound.

    People with great ideas who live in places outside the normal technology centers have been creating businesses every year that earn good old fashioned cash. People who are in the traditional technology centers like Silicon Valley are now catching on to the idea of having their businesses earn cash too.

    That’s a good thing because it makes things much simpler. It’s a lot like running a lemonade stand: You create something that is worth more to your customers than the price you charge them for it. Perhaps you create a cup of lemonade that is worth a whole lot to a customer because it tastes so good and they’re darn thirsty, so they pay you 25c for it.

    Rule 1: Create a business that brings in cash.

    People think that running a business is complicated and that you need to do all kinds of preparation before you can even start actually doing the things that are going to make you money. They’ll tell you that you should incorporate, that you should get trademarked, that you should get office space etc..etc. Usually these are the same people that will make money out of you every time you do one of these things. The only thing you need to figure out is how to bring cash money through the door to pay yourself and grow your business.

    Rule 2: If you are doing something that isn’t helping your business bring in cash, see rule 1.

    So don’t worry about incorporating for now. Don’t worry about funding. Don’t worry about legal fees. Just start doing the thing that is going to make you cash money. Work fast because every day you work full-time on this business is a day you’re not earning a full-time salary. Once you have a company that is earning money you can worry about getting the legal protection that incorporating gives you, getting office space for your new employees and about protecting your now valuable trademark.

    Entrepreneurs don’t often realize how hard it is to create a profitable company because they look around and see everyone creating or running a startup. But most startups, especially in technology centers like Seattle are not profitable. They are burning through investor cash or founder cash and will eventually go away and be replaced by other startups that are burning through investor cash and confusing entrepreneurs. That wouldn’t be a problem, except that every time one of them goes away, it leaves an entrepreneur in its wake with 4 wasted years and usually poorer than if he or she was earning a regular salary.

    To get an idea of how hard it is to create a profitable company, think about creating a company that earns you $200,000 per year. I don’t mean go out and get a consulting job and work 14 hour days. I mean create a real business that earns you slightly more than you would earn at a regular job. Sounds a little harder now doesn’t it?

    The good news is that it’s almost as hard to create a small profitable business as it is to create a big profitable business. In fact if you create a small profitable business that can scale, then you’ve actually solved much of the problem of creating a big profitable business. And once you have a small profitable business that works, it’s easy to find investors to help you grow it. In fact you might not even need investors to grow your small profitable company and you can keep 100% of your company for yourself.

    So my advice to you so that instead of getting investors to buy you a few years to test one idea that is very likely not going to work, why not start off small and take an approach that lets you try out many ideas until you find one that works.

    Rule 3: Your first goal in creating your new cash generating business is to pay your own salary.

    If you can pay yourself and still have money left for the business then you’ve solved a very very hard problem and they only thing you need to do is to scale that business. But it’s very important that you don’t cheat and make the business completely reliant on you. So you can’t get a consulting job where you’re selling yourself.  You must create a business with multiple customers in which an employee can replace you at any time without any disruption to the business.

    Rule 4: Create a business that can scale – with multiple customers and in which you can be replaced.

    As I mentioned before, every day you work full-time on this business is a day you’re not going to be earning a full-time wage. So you need to work fast. You need to get from zero to the day that you can pay yourself as quickly as possible.

    Most business ideas fail. Many of them seem like great ideas before they become real, but once they’re created as businesses in the real world they turn out to be hopless. The way you solve this problem is you try out as many ideas as you can as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Take $4,000 that you were going to spend on legal fees and use it to get cheap offshore developers to create 8 websites that you can test. If it costs too much to create fully fledged products then create pretend products that you can use to gauge customer interest. As quickly as you can, figure out which onces the customers love and, more importantly, which one they will pay for. And then do that as fast as you can.

    Rule 5: Rapidly try out ideas until you find one that is highly likely to work.

    If at any time you find out that your new business is not going to work out then stop wasting your time and money on it and move on to the next idea as fast as possible.

    Rule 6: Fail fast because wasting time on a business that will fail wastes money and opportunity.

    Once you find a business that you know will bring in cash, focus all your energy on getting that business as fast as possible from that starting point to the day it can pay your salary and earn enough money to hire your first employee.

    Remember that companies like Twitter may look glamarous and exciting, but they aren’t yet profitable and there are plenty of people making millions in profit picking up garbage and fixing plumbing – even in the online world. [Why does GoDaddy come to mind]

    The last piece of advice I have for you is to do something you love. You’re going to be spending many late nights and early mornings working very hard and that love for your work is what will keep you coming back.

    Mark Maunder

  • The Two Universes

    I posted this today to the Seattle tech startup mailing list. A few folks liked it, so I’m reposting it here. It’s in response to a NY Times article talking about VC’s not caring about a business plan.

    In my experience the most interesting things to a prospective valley based technology investor in descending order are:

    1. Traction and (rapid) growth to date
    2. Team and their history
    3. Product

    My view is that there are two universes you can exist in with distinctly different laws of investment and business physics. There’s the Universe of the Valley and there’s the Universe of the Real.

    In the Universe of the Valley the laws are something like this:

    • Investors are interested in traction, team and product
    • They aren’t very interested in your business plan, revenue projections or even where that revenue will come from
    • They are more interested in your rapid growth
    • They’re also interested in your track record, team and the strategic relevance of your business
    • They’re interested in whether your business could pose a significant strategic threat or opportunity to a potential buyer
    • If your business does go the revenue route rather than being acquired, the view is that, like Google, a revenue model can be bolted on to a business that has scaled massively by really smart folks who will be hired at that point to solve that particular problem. (Like Google did and like Twitter will.)
    • In this universe, most investors have an attitude of go big or go home. They have a large appetite for risk and of course reward and they are generally relaxed and fun to work with and are fairly hands-off your business.

    In the Universe of the Real the laws are something like this:

    • Investors are interested in exactly how you plan to make money
    • They want to know how long it’s going to take to achieve certain product, growth and revenue milestones
    • They also care about traction, team and product, but as it pertains to revenue and it’s timescale
    • They care about many of the things the other universe cares about, like network effects that make your business more defensible, but in order to defend that current or future revenue stream.
    • If you change strategy or product mid-stride, they want to know why and how much (more) money it’s going to bring in and if it’s going to happen sooner
    • In this universe investors play a more active role in your business and like to be regularly reminded of progress towards the revenue they’re so interested in.

    The Universe of the Real is filled with companies that build oil rigs, real-estate developers, Kinko’s, Ben & Jerry’s and similar companies. Many of the stars in this universe remain nebulous but some manage to coalesce into stable businesses that burn bright and give off lots of energy for a long time.

    The Universe of the Valley is filled with stars like Twitter and Facebook that have enormous gravitational pull and that may some day turn into giant supernovae or implode into black holes.  There has been speculation recently that the Universe of the Valley may itself implode, but whether or not that sad day will come remains unclear.

    It’s up to you to decide which universe you want to live in. If you can, try to get an investor from the Universe of the Valley to cross over and help you build your business in the Universe of the Real.

  • Great elder care resource launched today

    Congrats to Chris Rodde and Jay Goldstein, two fellow Seattle entrepreneurs and friends for launching http://seniorhomes.com/ today. If you’re looking for a great resource forassisted living, memory carenursing homes and independent living homes for an elderly relative or friend, be sure to visit the site.

  • Smashed iPhone

    Update: According to my live traffic feed, busted iphones are hip. My bro posted this to reddit.

    Update2: @chrisrodde Just reminded me that this will be my third iPhone – I drowned the last one on a fishing trip with him.

    Update3: Just visited AT&T. The conversation went like this:

    AT&T guy: Um yeah, so lets see if we can do anything for you here today.

    Me: Great! So maybe I can get a discount on a 16G iPhone? [Thinking I can pay less than the $199 replacement cost]

    AT&T guy: Um no I don’t think so. You’ve only had the phone for 7 months.

    AT&T guy: So that’ll be $299 for the new phone.

    Me: Um. WHAT? The phone only costs $199 to buy! On Apple’s site they’re advertising it for $199.

    AT&T guy: Well you can go to Apple and try.

    Me: What does that mean?

    AT&T: Well Apple might sell you an iPhone that’s $199 but if they know it’s a replacement with no upgrade then they’ll probably charge you $299.

    Realizing that this guy was just part of the corporate meat grinder and really didn’t know WTF he was talking about I called Apple and they’re going to sell me a replacement handset for $199. Looks like AT&T need to realize that they’re just providing the pipe and don’t have a monopoly on handsets on their network anymore.

    Original smashed iPhone post:

    In one last selfless act of recursion my smashed iphone has taken a picture of itself taking a picture of itself taking a picture of itself…  for your enjoyment:

    I’m off to the Apple store to buy a new one this morning. So:

    • Get a cover for your iphone because if you drop it so it pancakes screen down on the ground, it’ll smash
    • The screen is real glass and smashes like real glass
    • It also cuts and splinters into your finger like real glass. I’ve pulled two splinters from my index finger already checking my email.
  • Why those Microsoft ads make Steve so happy

    This is an internal video of Steve Jobs at NeXT in 1991. Skip to about 4:30 in the video:

    Those MS ads you’ve been seeing recently that keep mentioning Apple are exactly what Steve Jobs wanted with NeXT – that every customer of the market leader also considered his product. And Microsoft just made that happen for Apple.

    Congratulations Steve! Now that your competition has leveled the marketing playing field for you, all you need to do is keep building a better product.

    Thanks to VentureHacks for this tweet that pointed me to this video.

  • How to upgrade your server BIOS on Linux without a floppy drive

    This is another thing I just couldn’t find no matter how hard I googled. Here’s the story behind this post. Scroll down if you want to get at the useful stuff.

    I run a cluster of Dell 2950’s and I just ordered second CPU’s (Intel XEON E5410 64 bit) for all the machines. I test upgraded one of them and the LCD on the front came up orange with an error message and the chassis cooling fan cranked all the way up to high. Of course I ignored the instructions that came with the CPU’s that said UPGRADE THE BIOS AND BMC BEFORE YOU INSTALL THIS.

    ATTEMPT #1: I tried to create a Bootable USB flash (pen) drive using various utilities from HP and elsewhere but I couldn’t get my Dell 2950’s to boot into the drive. I even bought an HP Flash Floppy Key and I couldn’t get my workstations to boot into it when switched into floppy mode. I didn’t try it on the Dells because by then I’d discovered the method below. Interestingly, once I upgrade my Dell 2950 Bios’s I noticed it actually REMOVES the option to boot into a USB device from the BIOS menu. So using the method below with Linux and Grub is definitelly preferable – and it probably boots slightly faster because hard-drives are faster than USB 2.0.

    ATTEMPT #2: I got hold of a USB floppy drive, made a DOS bootable disk and upgraded the BIOS and BMC. A week earlier I was in Fry’s joking with my wife holding up a box of 1.44″ disks saying “Who uses these?!” Now I know. The problem was the BIOS upgrade and BMC upgrade was very very slow from a floppy disk. It took forever to load the BIOS upgrade software into memory. And that meant a lot of down-time for our users while I upgrade the whole cluster.

    Here’s the solution:

    –USEFUL STUFF–

    If you’re running any flavour of Linux using Grub as your boot loader and you need to upgrade your BIOS from a floppy drive, and you don’t have a USB floppy drive or you don’t want to use one because they’re so damn slow, then here’s the trick. This is taken from David Backeberg’s page at MIT which seems to be offline at the moment. I had a very hard time finding his advice so I’m echoing much of it here. I’ve removed steps to compile memdisk because they’re unneccesary and I also don’t use autoexec.bat because I prefer to manually launch the bios upgrade on each machine so that I can shut it down immediatelly afterwards in order to upgrade the hardware.

    1. Go to FreeDOS floppies and download the OEM bootdisk. (NOTE: I’ve tried to use the 2.88 Disk that FreeDOS provides but it doesn’t mount with dosemu)
    2. Unzip the file you downloaded: unzip FDOEM.144.imz
    3. Rename the image to something useful: mv FDOEM.144.img dell_bios_floppy.img
    4. Setup the loopback device (Try /dev/loop0 if loop2 doesn’t exist): losetup /dev/loop2 dell_bios_floppy.img
    5. Install dosemu. Instructions for Ubuntu: (apt-get install dosemu)
    6. Edit /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf and add (or edit the floppy_a line) to say: $_floppy_a = “threeinch:/dev/loop2”
    7. Check where the c_drive is in your dosemu.conf. It’s usually at /root/.dosemu/c_drive
    8. Copy your BIOS flash executable to the fake C Drive and give it a 8.3 style name: cp PE123456789.EXE /root/.dosemu/c_drive/BIOSUP.EXE
    9. Start dosemu: dosemu
    10. If you start Dosemu and you see a blank screen, try typing ‘cls’ and hit enter.
    11. Feels good being in a DOS shell on linux doesn’t it? Don’t ask me why – nostalgia maybe.
    12. Copy your BIOS exe from C drive to your A drive image: copy C:\BIOSUP.EXE a:\
    13. Type exitemu to exit dosemu
    14. Unloop your loopback device: losetup -d /dev/loop2 (or loop0 if you used that)

    You now have a floppy image you can boot into that contains your BIOS exe file. If you are also upgrading your BMC or other components that require booting into a floppy and executing files, you can try to fit those files on the floppy using the above steps. If they don’t fit then you need to create a second floppy image using the above steps and add a second entry to your menu.lst file in the steps below.

    Now you need to set up Grub to give you the option to boot into your new floppy image when you reboot your machine:

    1. First install memdisk. If you’re running Ubuntu, memdisk is in the syslinux package: apt-get install syslinux
    2. Copy your dell BIOS floppy into /boot: cp /root/dell_bios_floppy.img /boot/
    3. I like to put a copy of memdisk into /boot:  cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/
    4. Edit Grub’s menu.lst file. On Ubuntu it’s in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Add the following lines – and change (hd0,4) to whatever your harddrive setting is – look at other entries in menu.lst to figure it out.

    title DELL Bios flash 1
    root (hd0,4)
    kernel /boot/memdisk
    initrd /boot/dell_bios_floppy.img

    That’s it! Reboot. Hit ESC when you see the grub menu. There should be a new option labled “DELL Bios flash 1”. Select it and boot into FreeDOS. Run your bios update.

    Please add comments if you have any tips for other flavors of Linux.

  • Ever wondered how a pumpkin feels?

    Took this tonight. Sister carving. Her new Canon G10 lowered inside a sloppy punkin.

  • 7 Reasons why it's a great time to be a Tech Entrepreneur!

     In 2002 Warren Buffet sent this stark warning to his investors:

    “In our view […] derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”

    Bill Gross was rumbling about the looming crisis in November last year.

    Marc Andreessen predicted the “oncoming nuclear winter” on April 18th in Ning’s D round announcement when they raised $60 Million.

    And here we are. Our biggest banks are failing. California (the worlds 5th largest economy) is running out of money. Two weeks ago our economy did almost collapse. Valley layoffs are starting. And every entrepreneur I know has that thousand yard stare.

    All is not lost. If you, like me, run a technology startup, then you are in a better position than most to weather, and even profit, from the coming recession. Here’s why:

    1. No more false economy!

    For years there has been a false economy created by VC backed companies giving their services away for free to “go for growth”. The money gets consumed, the company goes away. But ten other promising startups in the same sector didn’t have the same runway and could not generate revenue to survive because the VC backed startup had forced everyone to give away the service for free.

    As Wall St profits dry up and losses are incurred, many VC fund partners are unable to deliver the money they committed to their funds. So the amount of money sloshing around the Valley and other tech hotbeds will decrease.

    With the venture capital glut removed we now have something closer to a free market among tech startups.  Bad ideas will be given less runway. Good ideas will get their just profits because pricing will be market driven by realistic supply and demand curves. At the end of the day the same number of startups may actually make more money.

    2. Efficiency of execution will matter again

    This false economy has caused an entire skill set to be ignored. There are many folks out there who are very good at running a high traffic website or a complex business with very little money, people and resources. In the false economy their skill has counted for diddlysquat. If you are one of these people, your time has come. If you’re competing in the same business side-by-side with an old school false economy entrepreneur who needs his team of 50 and and his 200 server cluster just to get off the ground, you’re going to eat them for breakfast and ask for seconds.

    3. The relative risk of investing in a startup has decreased

    The problem on Wall St and the global banking industry right now is one of trust. An economist will tell you that asymmetric information has led to adverse selection. That means that people lied so people got screwed and now no one trusts anyone lest they too get screwed.

    If you’d like to know exactly how bad this problem is in real-time, check out the TED spread on Bloomberg. It tracks the inter-bank lending rate. It’s the closest way of tracking the credit crisis in real-time. Notice how the “bailout” has had zero effect on the bank lending rate. It did nothing to improve trust. In the week before the bailout the Fed injected roughly an additional $300 Billion into the global economy and that also had zero effect. Apparently you can’t buy trust.

    Startups were just as risky before and after the credit crisis. Investors are still investing in a great idea and a great team and nothing more. In our world we don’t have credit rating agencies who have lied about bad CDO’s in order to drum up more business from other banks. Our credit worthiness started of as really bad and it’s still just as bad. And our potential return on investment is still just as enormous as it was.

    While VC funds may have less money sloshing around from sources they’re accustomed to, this relative decrease in risk may attract new investors who now see us as far less risky since the alternatives are so much more risky.

    4. It’s going to become easier to recruit great talent

    Large companies are already shedding huge numbers of staff and many of them are talented people who were simply underutilized. With jobs being scarce and now that even large established companies aren’t a sure bet, it may also persuade risk averse folks who would not normally work for a startup that we’re not such a bad bet.

    5. We don’t need credit anyway!

    The commercial paper market is a huge credit marketplace that very stable, well capitalized companies with huge asset bases use to borrow money for short periods of time. They use the money to pay their staff and for their day to day operations. Unfortunately the commercial paper market has just about frozen. It’s become very difficult for even reliable companies to borrow the money they’re accustomed to have access to. Even the state of California is going to have to borrow from the government because they can’t raise money for their regular operations from the commercial paper market.

    If you’ve ever tried to get a line of credit as a loss making startup with no history, you’ll know it’s near impossible. We didn’t survive on credit then and we don’t need credit now. And anything that causes the incumbents to struggle when we don’t have to is a competitive advantage for us.

    6. Times of change create a greater need for innovators

    As costs increase and spending decreases the incentives to find a way to do something better or cheaper become huge. If you can give Coca Cola a way to figure out that only 10,000 of their 30,000 people who have Microsoft Office licenses actually use the product, then you’re in the money. And if, because of inflation, the price of MS Office has gone up from $300 to $400 then  you’re saving them an extra $100 per user and you can charge more for your service.

    7. A weaker dollar means you make more money

    If the US economy truly is toast, that probably means the value of the dollar will fall. That means that every Pound, Yen and Euro your website earns either in direct payments or via ad clicks will be worth more. If 25% of your website traffic is from the USA, that means the net result is more money without you lifting a finger.

    Now that you know how good you’ve really got it, and while everyone else is still crying down at the bar, go get caffeinated up and grab yourself a piece of this great opportunity!

    ~Mark