Download libcurl

Compiling a Sample SMTP Program with Authentication and Transport Security

g++ smtp-tls.c -o smtp-tls -lcurl

Modifying the Sample to Work with GMail

I modified the following lines in the smtp-tls program to make it work with GMail.

First, I changed the following FROM, TO, CC variables from

#define FROM    "<sender@example.org>"
#define TO      "<addressee@example.net>"
#define CC      "<info@example.org>"

to the following.

#define FROM    "<myemailaddress@gmail.com>"
#define TO      "<myemailaddress@gmail.com>"
#define CC      "<myemailaddress@gmail.com>"

Then I changed the following line setting the URL from

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "smtp://mainserver.example.net:587");

to the following.

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "smtp://smtp.gmail.com:587");

I then commented out the following line

//curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_CAINFO,"/path/to/certificate.pem");

since I kept receiving errors about certificates and wasn’t sure how to fix this. (If this isn’t done properly, please let me know otherwise!)

Afterwards, I simply put my e-mail address and password

    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_USERNAME, "myemailaddress@gmail.com");
    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_PASSWORD, "PASSWORD123");

The console looked in the following manner:

* About to connect() to smtp.gmail.com port 587 (#0)
*   Trying 74.125.53.109... * connected
* Connected to smtp.gmail.com (74.125.53.109) port 587 (#0)
< 220 mx.google.com ESMTP q10sm8033678pbb.10
> EHLO unknownc42c0304eee8
< 250-mx.google.com at your service, [99.53.224.80]
< 250-SIZE 35882577
< 250-8BITMIME
< 250-STARTTLS
< 250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
> STARTTLS
< 220 2.0.0 Ready to start TLS
* SSL connection using RC4-SHA
* Server certificate:
* 	 subject: C=US; ST=California; L=Mountain View; O=Google Inc; CN=smtp.gmail.com
* 	 start date: 2011-11-18 01:57:17 GMT
* 	 expire date: 2012-11-18 02:07:17 GMT
* 	 common name: smtp.gmail.com (matched)
* 	 issuer: C=US; O=Google Inc; CN=Google Internet Authority
* 	 SSL certificate verify ok.
> EHLO unknownc42c0304eee8
< 250-mx.google.com at your service, [99.53.224.80]
< 250-SIZE 35882577
< 250-8BITMIME
< 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XOAUTH
< 250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
> AUTH PLAIN a3VyaXlha2lAA21haWwuY291AGt1cml5YWtpQGdtYWlsLmNvbQBHTUF0b3MyNzEzdB==
< 235 2.7.0 Accepted
> MAIL FROM:<myemailaddress@gmail.com>
< 250 2.1.0 OK q10sm8033678pbb.10
> RCPT TO:<myemailaddress@gmail.com>
< 250 2.1.5 OK q10sm8033678pbb.10
> RCPT TO:<myemailaddress@gmail.com>
< 250 2.1.5 OK, duplicate recipients will be consolidated. q10sm8033678pbb.10
> DATA
< 354  Go ahead q10sm8033678pbb.10
< 250 2.0.0 OK 1329280154 q10sm8033678pbb.10
* Connection #0 to host smtp.gmail.com left intact
> QUIT
< 221 2.0.0 closing connection q10sm8033678pbb.10
* Closing connection #0

I checked my e-mail, and there it was! If you wish to modify the contents of the e-mail, simply modify the payload.

Let me know if you encountered any problems.

Hiking near Seattle

I’ve always meant to share with you all the interesting things I read around the internet and here it is (even pictures I’ve taken before!). They mostly come from browsing Hacker New‘s RSS feed.

Featured Articles

A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students – Awesome advice for those seeking tech internships. My advice? Start as early as you know you are interested in the tech industry as positions are available for people of all levels of skill. Don’t be afraid of failing interviews as every experience makes you stronger. Also, prepare early!

Why Every Professional Should Consider Blogging – For those wanting a little bit of encouragement (it helped me) to share their findings with your fellow peers of the interwebs, this is a good read. Talk Binary generates enough income to support itself and keep my hobby going.

For Facebook ‘Hacker Way’ is Way of Life – For those working on projects, learn to hack. Build products quickly and always have a working demo every step of the way no matter what. It’ll help you test and ask other people for input.

Other Noteworthy Mentions

Microsoft, Apple, and Google: where does the money come from? – Are you surprised?

Mark Zuckerberg’s 6 Ingredients For Success – My take? Don’t wait and take action. Follow your passion.

Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else – Don’t like the unified experience Google is bringing? Well, you aren’t alone.

Zynga Shamelessly Rips Off ‘Tiny Tower’ With Canadian Release of ‘Dream Heights’ – Using ideas from one game to create another is nothing new in the gaming industry, but blatantly making an exact copy is a little shocking.

Why crimes on Skype leave witnesses but no evidence – How would you allow for Skype to gather evidence? It would be too much data and too much of a legal fuss for Skype to handle. What about on the client side? You’d have similar problems.

Cars kill cities – It’s interesting to see how people rely so much on transportation. I’m shocked at how much space a city dedicates to parking as well. If only LA could have a better transportation system…the 405 wouldn’t be hell.

Bill Gates on his last visit with Steve Jobs – Are we ever going to have another duo of tech titans battling against each other across many years?

Find anything interesting? I’d love to know what you think!

* This is not intended to portray all the interesting articles that I read on HN that I feel are most important. They are just a small collection of articles I thought I should share with everyone. If I missed something, please let us know below!

I found an awesome tip in the following post, Strange lines appears during sprite movement, in the Cocos2D forums. Depending if the problem occurs due to the background or foreground, you either have to extrude or add padding to your sprites.

When you extrude, you simply repeat the same pixels around the tiles without adding them directly to the sprite. Extruding actually helped me fix my problem. Padding seems to just separate the sprites from each other. If you notice sprites leaking nearby sprites on the sprite sheet, padding should solve this problem.

After learning about this, I fired up Zwoptex, selected all my sprites, and added about 1px to the Extrude option.

After that, I started my game and was able to see that strange line effect gone!

If you use Texture Packer you have the same option.

Resource – Strange lines appears during sprite movement

I started by simply grabbing a book. The following are some good ones: Cocos2d for iPhone 1 Game Development Cookbook
(Official), Learning Cocos2D: A Hands-On Guide to Building iOS Games with Cocos2D, Box2D, and Chipmunk, and Learn cocos2d Game Development with iOS 5 (one I started with). If you don’t mind spending money on a good resource, try it out and you could have your first game within reading the first few chapters (1-3hours!). You could even start with Cocos2D Programming Guide if you aren’t convinced and don’t want to spend money yet.

The thing is, the books only cover so much and really don’t go in depth with other things that might arise in your game development journey. A lot of unprecedented things occurred in mine such as how to find the right team, idea for a game, community to give opinions about my project, how to set up deadlines and complete them, amongst other topics.

That is why I decided to share with you all the things I’ve learned along the way in making my game such as all the things I’ve hated, loved, and even code samples for how I got things done within a game such as level creation/editing, collision detection, how to make a hero, etc. If there is anything in particular you want me to cover, please let me know and I’ll do my best to either answer in the comments or even make a post about it.

If you are interested in following my current marketing efforts become a fan of Feed the Dragons on Facebook. It was barely set up a few days ago so be patient for now. If you want to know the gist of my game, it’s simply Multiplayer Snake for iPad (up to 4 players). If you ever played Nibbles, then you have an idea of where I got my inspiration. I’m basing the gameplay off that game by having a couple of friends either cooperatively or competitively playing a game on one device. It may sound difficult, but trust me, it’s a blast and we hope you believe the same when we decide to publish our game in the next few months.

Our next post will probably be something like “So can I start making video games, and how?”. I’ll be covering how much you really need to know, the things you should consider, and how to start!

The Facebook Hackathon consists of three online rounds with their finals taking care at Facebook’s headquarters in California. Each online round will be on three separate dates of January 28th, February 4th, and February 11th with only a certain number of contestants allowed to move forward if successful with the challenge.

Last year’s questions are located here. From the gist of it, it seems you should be familiar with dynamic programming and graph theory. So if you don’t have the slightest clue what they are, time to start studying before the date if you choose to enter!

Are you willing to try it out? Aside from having that great prize, its most likely you’d possibly land a job at Facebook. Facebook has been competing with other tech companies for the best talent around and a hackathon seems to attract the type of people they are looking for.

Heck, it’s 2012. If you haven’t been in a Hackathon now’s the best time to try it out!

Announcing Facebook’s 2012 Hacker Cup

I was meaning to switch to an even cleaner layout for Talk Binary and recently (just today!) came across to doing so.

I haven’t completed added all the functionality I wanted to yet to the site, so sit tight! For example, I need to fix up the navigation and determine what should go on the sidebar. Do you have any suggestions? Anything you might find helpful? Our previous layout had the featured posts dead center and I’m thinking of placing simply links in the navigation this time around.

I also am reducing the amount of advertisements. I figured a cleaner layout with less distraction should make the user more welcome. I would get rid of advertisements all together, but they have been paying the server bills at GoDaddy, which hasn’t made me happy since they back up SOPA.

I know I wasn’t that great at updating the site much this later part of the year. To be honest, I was wrapping up my Masters at UCLA. Since I finished with courses this past Fall, I just have to finish my Masters project which should allow me to also focus on other things before I officially graduate this Winter quarter.

I plan on sharing more of my iOS project I’ve been coding using Cocos2d and several other awesome tools. If you want to be updated with how far along I’m doing with my game, subscribe!

Also, I watched Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol and I recommend everyone to go see it! It’s fun!

Happy Holidays!!

You simply sign in with either Facebook or Google and are the presented with a list of challenges with point values corresponding to their difficulty. Each challenge comes with a description, sample input/output, and instructions for submission. You are scored based on the number of test cases your program passes and aren’t penalized for the number of submissions.

You also have access to their leader board which shows the current top Hacker at solving 18 questions with 52 submissions.

Once you have finished at least five problems you are eligible to apply the company of your dreams. If you are looking for a job soon, then this is an excellent way to prepare yourself for tough interviews as well as getting noticed by companies through Interview Street.

Photo by Alex E. Proimos

Curriculums for Computer Science usually include your typical Algorithms, Operating Systems, Security, Networks, Databases, Computer Organization, and among other classes but it’s truly lacking one critical course in my opinion, Careers 101.

This course would include most of the things that aren’t taught in regular courses such how to stand our from the crowd when applying for jobs, how to build a network, how to make yourself valuable as an engineer, and such. If I would’ve had been taught all these things before I started my career, I would’ve been a lot more prepared.

Recently an article called Don’t call yourself a programmer, and other career advice discusses lots of interesting points:

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)

It’s quite long, but trust me, it’s worth the read if you plan on becoming a successful engineer.

Don’t call yourself a programmer, and other career advice

Organically, Google and other services removed my site from their blacklist, so everything is good now! How did it happen? I have no idea. This just showed me that this can happen to anyone (since it happened to me)!

Since a few friends of mine and I have been interviewing in the past, I’ve also decided to start including a few interview type questions followed with optimal solutions. That way, it would be an awesome way to stay sharp for when the time comes. If you have any questions you’d like to share, feel free to share it through our Contact page.

I’ll post one soon so stay tuned. I’m also very active on Twitter so feel free to follow me.

What happens to their online presence after that? Facebook allows you to Report a Deceased Person’s Profile which only allows friends to view the deceased one’s profile and keep viewing and posting on their wall. I’m not aware of what other sites do, but if you do, let us know in the comments.

The following video from Ted Talks discusses this topic in more detail.

Source – After your final status update