Tech Stuff

One of the things I have found annoying with GMail is that it would automatically create contacts based on my email activity.  I have ended up with a full contact manager that has some people in there many times.  Well the GMail team announced today that you can now turn off the auto create function in your address book.  Now I can go back and clean up my contacts.

GMail has announced that they have rolled out stricter criteria for verifying emails from eBay and Paypal to ensure they are really coming from them.  eBay and Paypal are now signing all their email with DomainKeys.  GMail used to just display a message above the email warning you that the message may not be from the send that it claims and now they won’t even deliver the message if it is from eBay or PayPal when the DomainKeys don’t authenicate.

Have you ever forgot to logout of your GMail account while on someone elses computer?  Do you have some “interesting” emails that you would rather people not see?  Do you think someone else has access to your account?  Well Google just rolled out the Remote Signout and the ability to see what recent activity has been on your account.  This includes the IP address .

GMail announces that you can now turn on new experimental features. Currently there are 13 available to activate. Some are a lot more practical than others and one is just there for fun like game “Old Snakey”.

Yes I do suck at the game.

Amazon announces that they are making another type of EC2 instances available.

These instances have proportionally more CPU resources than RAM (compared to our Standard Instances) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications such as rendering, search indexing, and computational analysis. These new instances include High-CPU Medium and Extra Large Instances – the Extra Large Instance includes 8 virtual cores to meet your computing needs.

The specs look pretty good.

High-CPU Medium Instance
* 1.7 GB of memory
* 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
* 350 GB of instance storage
* 32-bit platform
* I/O Performance: Moderate
* Price: $0.20 per instance hour

High-CPU Extra Large Instance
* 7 GB of memory
* 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
* 1690 GB of instance storage
* 64-bit platform
* I/O Performance: High
* Price: $0.80 per instance hour

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.