Tech Stuff

The other day I was working with a program that runs as a windows service on a client’s server. One of the files that the program needs to access is on a mapped network drive. I had tested the program while I was logged in as administrator and everything worked fine, but when it run on its schedule it kept failing. It took me a little while to realize it was because when it ran as the windows service user there was not mapped drive. To solve this problem I had to switch the references to the file to UNC format. The format looks like: \\server\share\file_path

The other day a friend sent me a link to the below comic strip. I think this is the best one on the site, but there are definitely some other ones that will make you laugh.

Today Google announced they have opened up Google Apps so that anyone can signup.  They also released the planned pricing for people who exceed the free quota.  However, they are not yet offering the ability for developers to purchase additional resources.

$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour

$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage

$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth

$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

I am curious how the CPU core-hour is going to be defined.  Will it be like Amazon where it is the time you instance is running whether or not your instance is actually processing anything.  Or will they just charge for the cpu used while processing requests to your application.

Google also announced that a new image manipulation API is available.  This is the same infrastructure that is used for the Picasa Web Albums.  The other new one is the Memcache API which is a high performance caching layer.

I received my invite to use the Google App Engine last night. Time to learn some Python now as they don’t currently support PHP.