Tech Stuff

DocuSign

Jason — Sat, 19 May 2012 02:46:56 +0000

I recently got to work on a pretty cool project for a client. They needed to have their employee’s electronically sign their time cards which were generated by a SSRS report exported as a PDF. To accomplish this we used DocuSign which has a really good SOAP API and was really easy to work with. Looking forward to doing more integrations for the client with DocuSign.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Jason — Sat, 19 May 2012 02:18:36 +0000

Earlier this month Amazon announced that you can now use RDS with SQL Server. I have been using RDS for MySQL about 9 months now and really like. It automates many of the administrative tasks, but gives you a backup within an availability zone. This will allow me to suggest AWS as a hosting option for some of the high availability .NET apps that I work on.

Cloudberry Backup Desktop

Jason — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:26:08 +0000

I recently started using Cloudberry’s Backup Desktop edition as my Carbonite (Online Backup) subscription is running out. In their newest version 2.0 they have added the ability to backup to a local folder or network share. With storage space so cheap now I would much rather backup my music and videos locally. I just bought a 2TB external eSATA drive for $100. The plan is to backup documents and other smaller files to Amazon S3. So far this is working out really good. The only thing that it is missing is version control for the local backups. It maybe there someone in the options, but just haven’t found it yet. I have been really happy with Cloudberry’s products and at the speed that they keep up with new functions that Amazon rolls out for S3 or Cloudfront. I have come to rely on Clouberry S3 Explorer for managing my CloudFront distributions.

Google App User and 2 Step Verification

Jason — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:11:17 +0000

Google announced last week that they will start rolling out the ability of Google App Administrators to require a 2 step verification process for logging in. Many of us are used to this with company VPNs when using a RSA SecurID. Google is offering many options for the 2 step which is great. The best option as I see it is the application that you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device.

Amazon EC2 – Micro Instances

Jason — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:16:36 +0000

When you thought it couldn’t be cheaper to start running a server on EC2 Amazon announced micro instances. You can get the micro instance for windows ($0.03/hr) and linux($0.02hr) with 613 MB of RAM. If you get a reserved instance the price drops even lower.

PayPal Soap API

Jason — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:54:47 +0000

I got to “play” with the PayPal SOAP API last week for a website I was building on. It was very easy to work with and I was surprised at how quick I could could get a checkout page going in ASP.NET/C#. It could have been quicker but some of the documentation on the PayPal site was either out dated or confusing. Luckily with a quick Google search I could find the correct way to create the main SOAP object. If anyone needs an example of how to do a Direct one time payment let me know.

Amazon CloudFront Invalidation Feature

Jason — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:23:19 +0000

At the end of August Amazon announced that CloudFront now has an invalidation feature which can clear the files from the edge locations before the expiration period. The other day I got to try out this new feature when I had a file I needed to update and didn’t really want to wait the 1hr TTL that I had set. I downloaded the newest version of CloudBerry Explorer which supports the new feature and gave it a try. It didn’t seem to be instantaneous, but the roughly 10 minutes I had to wait was much better than waiting the hour. Not sure if this time delay is what everyone else experiences or if it was something on my computer caching it longer.

Amazon Cloudfront 1hr TTL

Jason — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:45:48 +0000

I just recently read that you can now set the TTL of an object on Amazon’s Cloudfront to 1 hr instead of the 24 hr minimum that it used to be. I only found this out because I was reading through the discussion forums looking to see if there was an ETA of when this could be done. Didn’t know this had been around since April. Since Amazon didn’t include it on any of the monthly announcements of new/improved features I figured I would share.

The default for an object is still 24 hours, but you can use the HTTP Header Expires to set a different expiration. If the time is less than an hour, Cloudfront will default to 1 hour. I still wish there was a way to expire a given object at anytime, but this is a big step forward. However, it would be nice if there was a tool out there that would allow me to set a default expires time period when I upload an object to S3 based on the content type. In my case, I can usually have my images set to a 24 hour TTL, but there are some HTML, CSS and Javascript files that I would want at only an hour. Right now I use S3Fox and Cloudberry to manage my S3 buckets.

Amazon Wireless Website

Jason — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:24:02 +0000

Amazon has rolled out a new website specializing in cell phones and wireless service plans. The site offers great deals for new activations and upgrades. Click here to check it out.

Amazon Product Advertising API

Jason — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:37:46 +0000

I have been using Amazon’s EC2, S3 and Cloud Front a lot over about the last 9 months. Last week I just started looking at Amazon’s Associates program for some display advertising. While looking the info I discovered the Product Advertising API. In my quest to improve my ASP.NET/C# skills I decided to put together a little website that was powered by the web service. The result of a few hours is http://searchforgiftsonline.com/. The site allows the user to search by keyword and category the Amazon inventory. The search results are displayed on the site and then linked to the product description on the Amazon site. There is also a list of the major categories from Amazon. When the user clicks on a category they get the Top Selling, Most Gifted, Most Wished For and New Releases. The API is pretty easy to work. Now I just need to figure out new things to do with it.