Tech Stuff

Gmail has rolled out new emoticons to choose from when words just can describe what you are feeling.

Gmail announces a new Lab feature for Advanced IMAP Controls.  These new options will allow you to better control your IMAP experience down to the label level.

Today Amazon anounced new tiered pricing for the S3 service.

For the United States: 

Storage — Current Pricing (thru October 31st)

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Storage — New Pricing (effective November 1st)

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
• $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Do you have a tendancy of sending emails late at night that you really shouldn’t?  Maybe after a long night out drinking?  Well the Gmail team has just rolled out Mail Goggles which may come to the rescue.  Once activate Gmail will prompt you with a couple simple math problems before an email can be sent.  By default this safeguard is only in place late at night on the weekends when we all know we are most vulnerable to this. However, you can adjust the time frame to meet you needs.  Now if there was only something for that cell phone.  Maybe the new Android OS will have this option.

The other day I was trying to help a client connect to the Console Session on a Windows 2003 Server from their XP computer.  For some reason connecting via mstsc.exe /console they were not getting connected to the console.  What was odd was that from my XP laptop I had no problems.  I was ready to pull out my hair when I found an article on the Terminal Services Blog.  If you are using a remote desktop connection from a Window XP SP3 machine the /console is silently ignored.  Now you need to supply a /admin instead of /console.

Amazon has announced that later this fall that they will offer the ability to run Windows Server and SQL Server in the EC2 environment.

If you were not aware of it today is Talk Like a Pirate Day.  To help ensure that Pirates can search for the content they are looking for online Google has added support for the pirate langauage to their search engine.

This week Gmail made availible in the Labs one of the more helpful options, the Forgotten attachment detector. Atleast twice a month I seem to forgot to attach a file and it always seems to be one of those more important emails.  Hopefully this will help.

Amazon announced that it is expecting to roll out a Content Delivery Network before the end of the year.   As a user you will store your files on S3 and then make an API call and get a new domain name to use for your web pages.  This is different from the functionality already availible in S3 because when the website visitor accesses your file they will be routed to the nearest edge location.  This will allow for latency and the highest data transfer rates.  Below are Amazon’s goals for the content delivery service:

• Lets developers and businesses get started easily – there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use. 

• Is simple and easy to use – a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content. 

• Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use. 

• Has a global presence – we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location. 

Google released a comic book to help explain Chrome.