I’m happy to see TechNation keeping up its regular posts on Austrlian tech startups. An Australian specific tech blog is long overdue before TechCrunch’s Arrington became a star. Something caught my eye the other day, it’s another Australian’s first - startupcamp. Railscamp has had 3 successes already and barcamp also has 3, since 07.

I would love to do it, but I have my wedding coming up and if anyone has gone through one, it’s rather stressful..
Especially when I’m doing a startup at the same time.. There’s always a next time for these things, but not for a wedding. So I’ll have to skip this one. Kudos to Bart Jellema as well, for setting up startup-australia.org, it’s got a good list of Australia startups on there. It’s really gathering steam now.

Here’s the details I quote:

1. The first StartupCamp Australia will be in Sydney only and will be a small event (numbers are limited so make sure you sign up early)
2. The date has been changed to the 5th-7th September because…
3. Geekdom has kindly made their boardroom available on those days.

As you may know I work from home, I’ve actually been able to watch alot of the games this time around. It still feels like its finished in such a short time, maybe because I’ve been so god damn busy. The success of this Olympics has made me very proud of the Chinese as the host nation as well as top country in the gold medal tally. There’s also some new things I’ve learnt from this Olympics.

• Its very classy watching the Olympics muted with classical music
• Yao Ming is the best Chinese Basketball player
• I’m starting to hear metaphors like “The Michael Phelps of rubyfu” just like saying “The Michael Jordan of table tennis”
• If Australia has the same population as China, they should get 784 gold medals
• If you liked the artistic beauty of the Opening and Closing ceremonies, directed by Zhang Yimou, you should visit Hangzhou’s Impression Westlake or Yunan’s Impression Lijiang

Here’s some Chingrish humor when I was in Hangzhou:

Saw this on ABC’s MediaWatch just last night as well. How poor is the Australia online streaming of the games!? Yahoo7 streams 2hrs out of 24 hrs vs CBC Canada’s website, for example, where you could find live coverage of up to nine events at a time.

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2346180.htm

The Australian appetite for viewing live streaming has not reached the penetration of the US or Canada.

— Email from Kath Hamilton (General Manager, Media, Yahoo7) to Media Watch, 22nd August, 2008

I’ve been using git in my new projects these days, just because it’s cool — and it’s FAST! We use unfuddle to host our projects but some of our clients prefer to have their own accounts. You can only associate one ssh key pair to each unfuddle account. So thats fine, you can setup multiple ssh key pairs, github has some good explanations.

Here: http://github.com/guides/multiple-github-accounts

Basically you tell your ssh to use different keypairs for particular hostnames in ~/.ssh/config like so:


Host rorcraft.unfuddle.com
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa
Host ankoder.unfuddle.com
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa_ankoder


NOTE: If you’re using passphrase and you’re on OSX Leopard or if you’re using ssh-agent. You have to kill your ssh-agent process first.

Leopard has keychain integration built-in for ssh key passphrase by using ssh-agent. This will stop your configs working. Either don’t use passphrase or don’t store it in keychains.


ps xa | grep ssh-agent | grep -v grep
1240 ?? S 0:02.36 /usr/bin/ssh-agent -l


Took me a bit of time of figure this out.. but I still love git.

Finally I squeezed some time to finish reading “getting things done” by David Allen. When I first heard of this book 1-2 years ago, I thought to myself I already knew how to manage my time, so I wasn’t very keen to spend time learning about this. Since then, my nature of work has changed from full time programming to managing my new startup venture. I need some new inspiration to how to manage my time properly. This book did give some advice, but in my opinion it is not the very complete.

My view on time management is all about priorities, do the things that needs to be done and skip doing the things that can be deferred. It is this constant deferring of things that puts stress on the person while trying to keep these tasks in the brain. This book’s main point is to find a system that you trust and rely on and off load all the to do items from your brain to this system. It has similar idea to extreme programming concepts with TDD and story cards which also tries to take the stress out of the developer. There’s mentions of 43 folders - having 12 months + 31 days folders - which holds memos for future references. I personally don’t think it is that helpful for me unless I have a secretary managing it.

To practise this concept, the book’s website has some recommendation for some GTD software, but I haven’t found anything that suits me and that I feel has fully grasped the concept in the book. One thing I hate about most todo list software is that after checking the task as complete, it’ll almost always keep that item in the list rather than removing it. Why isnt there a simple to-do list that keeps track of the todo item while not cluttering the interface.

Another thing that I felt was missing from the book was how to deal with interruptions. He basically said knowledge workers should be able to deal with interruptions and prioritising their time themselves. I feel that if there wasn’t interruptions that stuff up our planning, we probably wont be seeking solutions for time management. I’ll like to see someone explaining the dynamics of interruptions and how to deal with them efficiently.

I knew this would have never happened, you just can’t rely on government, especially NSW Labour! I was proud to tell people in HK back in late 2006 that Sydney will get free wifi by 2009. Not anymore! I almost missed this news as well on smh “Free city broadband quietly shelved on day of boating crash” Luckily, I got a ‘three’ mobile broadband in Dec 07 and it has been working well so far. Although it seems to have stale connection after 1.5 hrs or so. I almost wanted to wait for NSW gov to roll out the free wifi. Although HK government isnt exactly as trustworthy, but soon after announcement of the program, there’s already proper website and information about the program.

On the topic of NSW government, I’m really sickened by what they’re doing with the Lane Cove tunnel and Epping Road. How stupid would it be to spend more money narrowing the road from 2 to 1 lanes and dedicating a 24 hr T2 lane on the freeway. It is bad enough for the government to waste money, it is just unacceptable to waste money to make life worse than before.