Spam emails are getting better

My wife has received a couple of emails in the past days or so, claiming to be from Ikea, informing her that the delivery has been shipped.

And the email looks genuine too. Except… we haven’t ordered anything (ever) from Ikea, so this has to be spam.

I wanted to post this on here so that in case you get such an email, you’ll know it’s rubbish, and is probably a phishing email - here’s screen-shot:

Obviously, using the official logos isn’t a new trick, but getting the English words spelt properly, however, is. Although, on inspection, they have misspelled my wife’s first name, which is odd, as one would assume that somehow these would have been harvested from somewhere.

Either way, if you get one and you know that it’s not real, please just delete it and do not click any of the links within. Don’t reply either, as that’s just as bad.

Publish to Microsoft Azure… faster!

If you have, like me, an internet connection with a slow download speed and an upload speed that’s hardly worth being there at all, then publishing a large website or Cloud Service to Microsoft Azure can take ages.

I’ve found that I can achieve the same goal, but in about 16 seconds, thanks to using a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine!

What I mean, is that on my home development PC, to upload my current project to Azure takes about 25 minutes, due to my appalling speeds, due mainly to where I live and not being able to have fibre broadband as yet.

But… if I fire up an Azure Virtual Machine that can build and publish my code, this all takes about 16 seconds to upload, mainly due to the lightning fast internet speeds that the Microsoft have, and possibly due to using the A8 VM, with it’s very fast networking facilities.

The Virtual Machine I am using is one that I have picked from the Gallery in the wizard when first creating the virtual machine. It has Visual Studio 2013 Premium and SQL Server 2012 pre-installed.  When picking the type of VM to use, I chose the A8, as this comes with 8 cores and 58 GBs of RAM, which is very fast.

This should cost me about £1.52 per hour, but this is all using the free credit to MSDN subscribers. Admittedly, when I’m not using this VM, I shut it down immediately through the Azure Portal as to not waste the credit.

Once fired up, the A8 VM is very quick at opening Visual Studio 2013, and soon downloads my code from Team Foundation Service.  A quick check to make sure all is well before publishing to Azure, and the upload takes about 16 seconds to upload.

For me, this is fantastic. My slow internet connection speeds are not a limiting factor at all in using the Azure virtual machine, and I get the best of both worlds!