Please consider the environment before printing this …
A few days ago I have received an e-mail that was ending with:
As you probably know paper is used excessively in offices and most time is waste. Documents are printed for a few minutes use and the paper is then thrown away. If we could somehow reduce paper usage we will reduce our expense and we’ll help the environment.
Maybe the amount paper you save will not be impressive but if this attitude is adopted by many people the results will definitely be visible. It is a simple action that can be made without negative side effects.
Even more, the whole message including the “picture” is just text so it can be included almost anywhere. The first character is letter “P” (capital P) of the Webdings font and the rest of the message is a text with a font you choose. Text color should be green (I used 0,120,0 or #006600 ).
Also the message can be customized for other purposes like: “… printing this page”, ” … printing this document” etc.
I will use it in my e-mail signatures and, I think, that will appear also on the footer of this website.
Windows Azure Application Architecture
Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.
A service hosted in the Windows Azure fabric implements one or more roles. A role is a scalable component built with managed code. A service may run multiple instances of a role. Within the Windows Azure fabric, running instances of a role are replicated across multiple physical machines to implement all or part of the functionality of a service. Each role runs in a virtual machine that has following predictable resources allocation: 64bit Windows Server 2008 OS, 1.5-1.7 64 bit CPU, 1.7 GB RAM memory, 100 MB/s network and 250 GB storage space (only 50 available in the CTP). So basically the developer creates the application as being used by one user and, in the cloud, many instances of it are created to support multiple clients.
The Windows Azure fabric currently supports two types of roles:
- Web Role is an application accessible through HTTP and/or HTTPS endpoints. A web role is hosted in an environment designed to support a subset of ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation technologies.
- A Worker Role is a background processing application. A worker role may communicate with storage services and with other Internet-based services. It does not expose any external endpoints. A worker role can read requests from a queue defined in the Queue storage service.
Because workers do not have some public endpoints some architectural considerations must be taken. How can a worker process external data? How web roles and workers exchange information? Why do we need workers?
Web roles can send/receive data to/from workers using the Storage Services. Storage Services include Blob, Queues and Tables.
- Blobs are sets of binary data; they are similar with files from your local windows storage. Blobs are organized in catalogs that are similar to folders.
- Queues are just message queues. They are FIFO (First In First Out) data structures that can hold messages up to 8kb each.
- Tables provide structured storage in the form of tables. However this is not a relational database system! They are just some tables that hold data with no relation between them.
Of course, web role or worker role can make any external HTTP/HTTPS request. Also blobs, queues and tables can be accessed from outside the cloud through HTTP(S) requests. I will focus today on the internal could application architecture and not on the outside requests.
What I read/write
Happy New Year!
Everyone has some favorite places on web – games, communities, forums, blogs. Today I want to share the Top 10 websites/forums that I follow, write on or just find useful:
1. Google
I bet this is the first time you hear about it. This is the place where you should start anything ;)
2. PdfChm
From here you can download almost any technical book.
3. Geek Hero Comic
Geek Hero is a comic about Randall (friends call him Randie), a hardcore geek with the sweetest heart.
4. Assembla
Assembla provides tools and services for accelerating software development. They offer tools for collaboration and management of software projects. Also, for student projects they offer free tools. There are tools like: wiki, SVN repository, tickets, milestones, etc.
5. CHIP.RO Forum
The first forum on which I have wrote. I am still writing there. (Is a Romanian web forum)
6. docs.torrents.ro
A torrent tracker with tutorials, videos and e-learning stuff. The content includes many domains: PC, medicine, architecture, history, biology etc
7. Reuters Pictures
The most impressive pictures and they are updated daily. I think they can be sent by anyone and people from Reuters choose the best.
8. Microsoft How Do I
Microsoft’s Video Learning Center. A lot of video tutorials about Microsoft technologies.
9. Windows Live
Microsoft’s Live suite that includes mail (Hotmail), storage space (SkyDrive), online document repository (OfficeLive), calendar, events and more.
10. MSDN Regex Forum
I just like regular expressions :)