Google Cloud Servers

Google is now offering cloud server hosting services under the tradename Google Compute Engine.  Its currently limited to Linux Virtual Machines.  The pricing is comparable to that of Rackspace for the same specs.  But for entry-level VM's, Rackspace still comes out a bit cheaper.  And Rackspace still offers companies more OS options.

Where Google is known to excel is in scalability.  So companies looking for massive scaling solution and high-performance computation of "BigData" should look into this.  I do not know about Google support though compared to dedicated hosting companies like Rackspace or Softlayer, who have solid track record for excellent support.

Jelly Bean on my Galaxy S III

My Samsung Galaxy S III downloaded the latest Android OS (Jelly Bean) and firmware by itself.  It just prompted me if I wanted to install it already.  The installation process went very smoothly except for a minor inconvenience -- it complained that my external SD is damaged.  I've suspected before that I might have removed it improperly as a USB device so it did not get ejected properly.  I had to reformat it to make it usable again.

The new OS seem zippier (or maybe its just my imagination).  For one, I am happy that they re-positioned the Bluetooth icon in the pull-down menu to be accessible on the first screen.  With the previous OS version, I had to do an extra swipe to the right just to be able to access it.

There is also a multiple window support now.  I'm sure this is handy with a tablet but I don't know how useful it is for a Smartphone with a small screen anyway.  Splitting your screen further into multiple windows does not really give you that much real estate left.  It is kinda cool to see both Facebook and GMail on a tiled layout within the same screen though.

The "desktop" already support folders similar to iOS.  So multiple icons on the same screen can be grouped together into a "folder".  Clicking the "folder" will expand it to what's contained inside.

Installing Microsoft SMTP on IIS

If ever there was an "SMTP for Dummies" solution, it would have to be Microsoft's SMTP implementation for the Internet Information Server (IIS) of its flagship Windows server products.  The product comes free with Windows Servers and just needs to be installed and configured, as it does not normally come pre-installed by default.

I recently migrated my servers to the "cloud" and was faced with the prospect of having to run my own SMTP service as the data center does not offer a centralized SMTP service.  Linux is normally a much more robust solution, but my skills in setting up SMTP date back to more than a decade ago. I'm so out of touch already with going down that route so I considered the easier way out -- Microsoft IIS.

Installing the SMTP service only takes about a minute.  One just has to follow these steps.  Setting it up is also just a matter of pointing-and-clicking for the most part as described here.  In no time at all, the SMTP service was up and running!

Sending Email via GMail SMTP using C#

I recently availed of a cloud server over at Rackspace.  Since the company does not provide a public SMTP server for their clients, I  had two options -- install my own or, as my brother-in-law suggested, use GMail for outgoing SMTP.  The latter sounded a lot more appealing as maintaining an SMTP server is not a simple task.

I searched around the Internet for sample code and it turned out to be much simpler than I expected with .NET because the System.Net.Mail class structure already has all the stuffs needed to implement the security stuffs.  It just looks something like this:

System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient client = new System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient();
client.Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
client.Port = 587;
client.EnableSsl = true;
client.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("dick.chiang@gmail.com", "mypassword");

System.Net.Mail.MailAddress from = new System.Net.Mail.MailAddress("dick.chiang@gmail.com", "Dick Chiang");
System.Net.Mail.MailAddress to = new System.Net.Mail.MailAddress("someguy@yahoo.com");
System.Net.Mail.MailMessage message = new System.Net.Mail.MailMessage(from, to);
message.Subject = "Sample GMail Message";
message.Body = "Hello world from GMail!";
client.Send(message);


Telnet Client for Windows 7 and 2008 R2

I've been trying to debug something for the past couple of days and I just realized that Windows 7 does not have a telnet client installed by default unlike previous versions of Windows (dating back to version 3.11 as I recall).  Doing a quick Google research, I found out it can be installed by doing the following:

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2. On the Control Panel Home page, click Programs.
3. In the Programs and Features section, click Turn Windows features on or off.
4. If the User Account Control dialog box appears, confirm that the action it displays is what you want, and then click Continue.
5. In the Windows Features list, select Telnet Client, and then click OK.

Windows 2008 R2 also does not have it installed by default.  The following instructions seem to do the trick:

1. Start Server Manager. Click Start, right-click Computer, and then click Manage.
2. If the User Account Control dialog box appears, confirm that the action it displays is what you want, and then click Continue.
3. In the Features Summary section, click Add features.
4. In the Add Features Wizard, select Telnet Client, and then click Next.
5. On the Confirm Installation Options page, click Install.
6. When installation finishes, on the Installation Results page, click Close.

More on Finding Large GMail Attachments

I previously mentioned this great tool called FindBigMail which scours through your GMail inbox and tag all large attachments.  While the service is free for personal use, you  have to pay to use it for GMail for Domains accounts (aka. Corporate GMail).

But thankfully, it looks like the GMail engineers picked up some ideas and implemented the size search within GMail itself.  Try typing "size:10m" or "larger:10m" to find emails larger than 10MB.

Aside from the "before:yyyy-mm-dd" date search filter, you can now also type something like "older_than:1y" to retrieve email more than a year old.  By mixing this with the "size" search filter, you can now search for old, large email and delete them to free up space!

Halloween 2012

The three kids went out trick-or-treating (well, Conner just stayed inside the car the whole time).

Halloween 2012