Got a newsletter from AWS this morning, two great improvements that were holding me back from using it for production servers:

• “elastic IP’s” = static IP’s linked to your account, so you can move them amongst instances
• Availability zones = geographic high availability

Nice – we can use this for more than just development/staging now. On the fly production environments without resorting to hackery.

Gmail keeps bouncing mail that I’m trying to send via the web interface, immediately:


Received: by 10.141.74.5 with SMTP id b5cs448688rvl;
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.140.226.14 with SMTP id y14mr4038995rvg.24.1206498734646;
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <>
Received: by 10.140.226.14 with SMTP id y14mr6157234rvg.24;
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <000e0cd151de04494de080248e28f2e@googlemail.com>
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem
To: xxxx@gmail.com
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:32:14 -0700 (PDT)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

xxxx@xxxxx.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 550 5.7.1 Email rejected due to sending server misconfiguration - see http://www.ordb.org/faq/#why_rejected


Googling, Ordb.org seems to have gone offline in 2006. Wtf.

[Update 20:15] Seems google is a lazy user of ordb.org Long-Dead ORDB Begins Returning False Positives

At the beginning of February we needed some extra laptops at the office so I called up a local Mac store to pick up the last macbook air they had in stock, sacrificing my higher powered macbook pro to developers. Yup, taking one for the team. The transition wasn’t 100% smooth and I wouldn’t recommend it for non-technical people:

-the macbook air kept dropping our office wireless connection, a Netscreen 5GT Wireless. This is a pretty sweet little router so it was quite surprising. Add in that I didn’t have an ethernet adapter yet and it was pretty frustrating.
-it however did work fine with a flashed linksys at home, and an airport express + Time Capsule.
-Initiating a wireless transfer of my user account from my old laptop to the new kept cutting out after 5 minutes

I ended up transferring all my docs via a usb external hard drive. I started from scratch on the Air in terms of my applications/settings.

The weight is awesome, it’s sexy, good enough for a business user who lives in the shell as well. I have it backing up to the Time Capsule at work via ethernet (this took a long time as it’s only 100 Mb with the adapter). It has however made many hard drive “clicking noises” while Time Machine is working. Very scary.

All in all – not recommended for non-technical users and not what I would have expected as an “Apple experience”.

It sure is pretty though….