VillageToolbox Blog

Things have been a little slow on the development front for the last couple of weeks.  I’ve been pretty busy working on the next revision of the Supergroup application for Condition30, and also on a project for MarbleMedia.  Both of which are a bit behind on tight deadlines. 

The time I have had has been spent working on a the flash-based Ad Creator, and also on a submission for the TechCrunch50 conference.  I decided at the last minute that I really should pull together a video for submission, and I was determined to film it in the park with kids playing in the background, but the weather lately has been nothing but thunderstorms. I finally managed to film it Wednesday night, one kid (Thanks Mitchell) obligingly skated round the wading pool while I filmed. I have a much greater respect for actors now, since discovering how hard it was to make it though my lines.  Even then, once I edited, I found my best takes were interrupted by thunder in the background.

Ah well, the end product (I thought) was good enough.  A bit more amateurish than I’d like, and the camera does add 100 pounds (right?!?), but I think it’s a decent enough elevator pitch.  Wish me luck.

The last week has been a whirlwind of activity in Sunny Acres. Last Saturday was the annual park party. We probably had a couple of hundred people there, lots of food, lots of really good music (all from the neighbourhood) and lots of games for the kids.  We raised almost $400 for the BBQ installation. We also had someone approach us who works at a local company who thinks he can convince his company to provide all the materials, and possibly weld it for us!

Wednesday night, we had a BBQ planning meeting to come up with designs for the barbeque, and I think we’ve now got a pretty good idea what we are looking for.

Then, Friday night, we had Alma and Jessica come from GIRC to get the neighbourhood started on a drought resistant garden project that is looking like it’s gonna be pretty cool. Followed by a movie night.  We showed a series on animated shorts, then Tin Tin.

This Saturday is the annual park party is coming up this Saturday, and we have something to celebrate.  We have received a list of conditions from the city that we need to comply with to get our community barbeque, and every last one is totally do-able.  We’re puling together a working group now to design the bbq, and source materials.  I’m hoping we’ll have it installed within a couple of months.

Apparently you can fight city hall (or at least work with them nicely).

I’ll admin that I am of those people that has a list of reasons to dislike Microsoft.  In fact, we have something called ‘The Giant Pumpkin List’ which patiently waits for the day when we have a surplus of Atlanta Giant Pumpkins and the use of a helicopter for a week.

Anyway, Hotmail’s been pissing me off lately. First off, there is the general crappyness of the service, combined, and the archaic load balancing solution they use.  But what’s really been getting to me has been my inability to get any of my emails to anyone with a hotmail account.

A typical mail message get through to yahoo, gmail, and pretty much every other mail service without incident. But Hotmail?  No, Hotmail feels the need to just discard my emails completely. No warning, no attempt for check them against user defined whitelists. Just BAM! See ya buddy.

Now, my server set up consisted of using a python bridge to send emails from PHP, through the local JAMES smtp server. Worked pretty well, except for hotmail.  Well, after much effort put into checking spf records, rDNS, DomainKeys, changing every variable, one at a time, we have something that seems to work.  I gotrid of the python intermediary, switched to SwiftMail to talk to the JAMES smtp, and that seems to work. I can at least get into the Spam folder now.

But why does Hotmail have to be such a whiny little bitch?