Survival: sending mail using telnet

This is useful, and I'm not able to learn the command sequence correctly... so I'm writing this post for the next time I'll need this!!!

1. Open a telnet connection to a mail server:
telnet mail.domain.ext 25
If the server is reachable and ready, it should reply something like:

Trying ???.???.???.???...
Connected to mail.domain.ext.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.domain.ext ESMTP Sendmail ?version-number?; ?date+time+gmtoffset?

2. Now let's define the domain from which you'll send this email:
HELO local.domain.name
It's better if you use you exactly qualifid domain name. The answer should be:
250 mail.domain.ext Hello local.domain.name [loc.al.i.p], pleased to meet you

3. Now your email address:
MAIL FROM: mail@domain.ext
Should yield:
250 2.1.0 mail@domain.ext... Sender ok
If not, there could be possible problems.

4. Now let's give the recipients address:
RCPT TO: mail@otherdomain.ext
This Should yield:
250 2.1.0 mail@otherdomain.ext... Recipient ok
If not, there could be possible problems.

5. To start composing the message issue the command DATA:
DATA

6. If you want a subject for your email type
Subject:-type subject here-
then press enter twice.

7. You may now proceed to type the body of your message

8. To tell the mail server that you have completed the message enter a single "." on a line on it's own.
The mail server should reply with:
250 2.0.0 ???????? Message accepted for delivery

9. You can close the connection by issuing the QUIT command.
The mailserver should reply with something like:
221 2.0.0 mail.domain.ext closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

Survival series - Sql Server, Stored Procedures with non mandatory parameters

With this post I begin the "Survival Series", i.e. some post with answers to little recurring problems that recurringly make many people waste a lot of times "reinventing the wheel".
Really little things, but useful, that I encounter in my programming life :-).

Let's start with this: How can I have a stored procedure with sime parameters that are actually "non-mandatory" ?
Well, this is really easy... but often I see people crash their heads on this "easy" subjects.
Let's see an example: I have the need to call a "search" stored procedure, that accepts 3 parameters (2 varchars and 1 integer) and based on these 3 values must query some tables and return the corresponding resultset; but from the calling app I can have only one, or two, or three values on these parameters.
What I write is (say we have a "Pubs" table):

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.SearchPub
(
@txtCriteria VARCHAR(30),
@txtYear VARCHAR(4),
@idArgument INT
)
AS

SELECT *
FROM Pubs
where 1=1
AND (@txtCriteria IS NULL OR Content like '%' + @txtCriteria + '%')
AND (@txtYear IS NULL OR PubYear = @txtYear)
AND (@idArgument IS NULL OR Argument = @idArgument)
ORDER BY PubYear desc

GO


As you can see in the Where part, with the three "OR" I can easily manage calls like:

EXEC dbo.SearchPub NULL, NULL, NULL
EXEC dbo.SearchPub NULL, '2006', NULL
EXEC dbo.SearchPub "searching for this", NULL, 3


Hope this can be useful... Bye

Search engines with graphic snapshots: PageBull and Snap

Recently I read about this snap.com and pagebull.com.
Both this two search engines show a preview of the page returned by the search, a graphinc one. A sort of snapshot.

This is interesting; sure they will not become my main search engine, but I'm sure that I'll use them quite often. I work in the web development field, and having a fast way to compare different sites, or to have a fast look at competitive sites could be a quite good resource.

pagebull has less "textual" information and fills the entire browser window with snapshots; snap is more "traditional" and shows a links list (with textual info) on the left, and a single graphical preview (related to the focused result) on the right.

http://www.snap.com
http://www.pagebull.com

Google Master Plan

This is really fun: the zoomable Google Master Plan

Also have a look at this list of "ideas" read out of the Plan: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-11-27-n21.html

Doppler: podcast (rss) aggregator for Mobile

Doppler is another rss aggregator for Windows, both Desktop and Mobile. Actually the Mobile version is in Beta right now, but since it looks promising, I'll keep an eye on it.
Today I installed the Beta 3 reease and it works, but it has some problems: it goes nuts with posts containing images - it starts rendering, then after a wile it goes random refreshing over and over the screen.
Anyway, here's the link to the download page: http://www.dopplerradio.net/dopplermobile-beta.

I'll post again any news on this software.

.Net Framework 3 released

.Net Framework 3 has been released,
read here.

need free software?

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

every day a commercial licensed software package - only for 24 hours...
uhm... I like presents, I think I'll give a look :-)

mozilla minimo, browser for windows mobile

From http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/ you can download Minimo, a Mozilla porting for Windows Mobile devices.
I have it, and actually I use it a lot (even if I still have IE as the default browser).
What I like about it:
- tabbed browsing
- some sites are rendered in a better way than IE (for example the google adsense site, on IE I cannot login...)
- a better use of the display space.

Looks a bit slow on the first startup... but it's a good app.

HubDog

I'm using HubDog from some time, and I'm quite happy with it.
It delivers a sort of RSS feed reader, with a good user interface, it's stable, and it can consume also audio/video *casts.

Hundog is "hubdog - centric", in the sense that you must have an HubDog account to have it working, and the list of your feeds is (actually it "can be") shared with others. And this is both a bad and a good thing.
A bad thing because maybe you're not happy to have HubDog know about your chisen feeds - a good one because you can search between other HubDog users feeds, thus discovering new interesting feeds you didn't know about.

Any way, HubDog is now at the 2.0 release. Link: http://www.hubdog.com/

vxUtil: this is a great utility

If you need to run some network utilities, like ping, ping sweep, DNS lookup, port scanning, and others, give a look at vxUtil, free for personal use: http://www.cam.com/vxutil_pers.html.

Really good!

WM5 Network Analyzer Power Toy

Useful: a network analyzer tool, from Microsoft. It runs some basic network test and produces a log file. Here's the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=081c6401-49d4-4506-a03b-c41bc76c2f51&displaylang=en

game - syberia for windows mobile

I know that this is an "old" game - but I didn't play it on pc. Instead, I bought it for my i-mate k-jam, end I have to say that this game is really amazing.
Hours and hours of well planned and wonderfully designed gaming. Worth the $24.95.

Go have a look at the game site: http://www.tetraedge.com/syberia/