Stronico – Steroids for Networking We help the world’s best salesmen build better networks

The Problem: All email that you send get’s bounced back with the following message:

Subject Line: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Message: Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
user@domain.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected user@domain.com (state 14).

The Cause: There is no “mail.domain.com” in the dns system.  In my case I was sending the mail via an alias (it was a notification email from the web server).  The receiving mail server sees the email as forged and bounces it.

The Solution: Go to the dns system and create a mail.domain.com and point your MX records to that.  It’s a bit silly, but it has to be done that way.

photo credit: derrickkwa

Popularity: 1% [?]

Last Wednesday I attended the StartUp Atlanta March event (on the web at StartUpAtlanta.org, @StartupAtlanta on Twitter) where about 60 or so members of the Startup community mixed, mingled, and listened to 5 presentations by new Startups in Atlanta.

The community was quite nice (I saw a number of familiar faces, and met some new people too), and the Georgia Tech was nice enough to loan out the Georgia Tech Research Institute facility auditorium. I had a great time meeting everyone and Mike Schinkel and his volunteers moved things along well. It is impossible to overstate how important it is to keep these events running on time.

And now, the contestants! We listened to the presentations, and voted via twitter for our favorites, here were mine, recorded here for posterity. I judge startups by the following criteria, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better). I thought I would share it here for the first time.

1. Problem Solving - It can be a cool product, but does it make anyone’s life easier?
2. Actual Customers - I am defining the customer as someone with both problems and money.
3. Simplicity of Pricing – can the fees be described to anyone, do you need more information about the prospect before you can offer a quote?
4. Chicken and Egg Problem – does the product require a lot of Customer A before Customer B becomes interested, and vice versa? This applies a good bit to middleman/broker type companies like E-Bay.
5. Remarkability – that is to say, can someone who heard a quick presentation about it describe it to someone the next day, and have it be understood?

Note, I do not judge the passion of the founders, quality of marketing, execution etc. That’s too hard to judge based off of a short presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve been bogged down with client work, and then StartupAtlanta took a chunk out of the week too.  Look for the writeup of that soon.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Problem: You make changes to your Silverlight Application, but you do not see it reflected when you debug or run the solution.

The Cause: While the web project portion of the solution is being compiled and run, the Silverlight project is not being built.  This just happened to me recently.  Visual Studio crashed and somehow the Silverlight project portion of the solution decided to remove itself from the build list.

The Solution: Right-Click on the solution, then select “Configuration manager”.  Make sure that the “Build” checkbox is selected for both projects.  That’s it!

photo credit: Mooganic

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Problem: You upload your wonderful Silverlight application to a new server and begin to get all sorts of strange errors, most notably something like this

Message: Unhandled Error in Silverlight 2 Application An exception occurred during the operation, making the result invalid.  Check InnerException for exception details.   at System.ComponentModel.AsyncCompletedEventArgs.RaiseExceptionIfNecessary()
at StronicoMain.ServerUtil.AddressTypeListCompletedEventArgs.get_Result()
at StronicoMain.Page.proxy_AddressTypeListCompleted(Object sender, AddressTypeListCompletedEventArgs e)
at StronicoMain.ServerUtil.ServerUtilClient.OnAddressTypeListCompleted(Object state)
Line: 1
Char: 1
Code: 0
URI: http://www.servername.com/Silverlight.js

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve always wanted to join a secret society.  Membership in an organization like minded people of diverse backgrounds (key features of any worthwhile group in my opinion) devoted to some specific purpose could be quite handy to belong to have.  The “secret” angle of everything is in place to keep it small, and exclusive, which is the key to getting (and keeping) good members.  A small group can also stay focused over time.  It’s a matter of quality control rather than criminality. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

I think of way too many ideas for my own good, far more ideas than I have time.  I have committed to the Stronico idea as my start up venture, but I’m going to post new ideas for companies and products here, under the “Free Ideas” category for others to use, or me to come back to in several years.  Expect the first one to follow.

As an addendum, please read the seminal Derek Sivers blog post -Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.  The first business idea will follow soon.

Addendum – one requirement of all of these ideas is that I would buy them if I had they did exist at a reasonable price.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I just watched an interview with Jason Fried of 37 Signals and he and I share the notion (first said by me in 2001) that people in prison are the most effectively creative people in the world (in their escape attempts), and that constraints are good for creativity.  He says that  bootstrapping forces companies to think about what their product, instead of just running around spending money.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Problem: There is no way to start a program minimized in the system tray

The Cause: The correct event is the Shown event, which is not intuitive (to me anyway).

The Solution: Just add in the following code:

private void MyForm_Resize(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (FormWindowState.Minimized == WindowState)
{
Hide();
}
}

private void MyForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
this.Hide();
}
private void MyForm_Shown(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized;
Hide();
}

and you’re done!  You can then the start the program and it will automatically minimnize itself to the tray.

Popularity: 2% [?]

While pondering installing Visual Studio 2010, as well as thinking how all software is moving to a subscription basis, I had the thought – why not do two predictable releases a year?  The first release, say in January, would be whatever new features were in place by that date.  The second release, say in July, would be a pure performance and usability release, as the development team would spend half the year optimizing and tweaking the code, as well as fixing all bugs.  Any new “Features” would have at least six months to cook in the minds of the developers and would be implemented on a much stronger code base. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]