Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

If you develop for the Azure cloud platform, it helps to keep track of cost & service updates: Azure Service Updates    Azure Pricing Calculator   Scott Guthrie's blog    Azure SDK Breaking Changes to be continued...

MySQL, the open source database which has been acquired by Oracle seems to be losing favor to PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is an open source object-relational database system that runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. Its limits are pretty impressive - Limit Value Maximum Database Size Unlimited Maximum Table Size 32 TB Maximum Row Size 1.6 TB Maximum Field Size 1 GB Maximum Rows per Table Unlimited Maximum Columns per Table 250 - 1600 depending on column types Maximum Indexes per Table Unlimited PostgreSQL is used as the primary database by the following : Instagram Disqus Yahoo! Skype IMDB  Reddit OpenStreetMap, a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world Sony Online multiplayer online games US State Department MusicBrainz, open online music encyclopedia. Apple Sun xVM, Sun's virtualization and datacenter automation suite - Sun bought MySQL a

This Week I Learned: Microsoft Azure SQL Database has introduced two new service tiers, Basic and Standard, to join Premium, which is already in preview. The Web and Business editions will be retired in 12 months. Deutsche Bank in India has nearly 20,000 iPhones running on its network and has created 40 internal apps for its mobile workforce. Siemens has 30,000 iPhones in the country and has deployed over 50 internal apps for its executives - ET ...what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear, only Marion knows the answer: "Words of comfort." Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats are often described as “healthy fats”. Former Prime Minister of India, H D Deve Gowda has moved the Delhi high court offering to settle pending dues claimed by the Indian Air Force for the past 18 years . The IAF is demanding nearly Rs 2 crores from Deve Gowda for the use of its aircraft for non-official purposes during his stint as the Prime Minister of the country - Times of

Paint.NET is a free graphics editor originally created by a college student, Rick Brewster , using the .NET Framework. I've been using Paint.NET on & off, since 2005 for basic image editing. I have always marveled at the utility of this Windows freeware & often wished I could explore more of its features. It looks simple on the surface but it has scores of functions. You can selectively color parts of an image using Paint.NET Though I'm not an absolute beginner, when Packt Publishing offered me a review ebook copy of Getting Started with Paint.NET by Andros T. Sturgeon & Shoban Kumar, I lapped it up to read & explore the features I've never tried. The book was an easy read. It has all the attributes of what I think makes a good technical book . Though there is the official Paint.NET documentation and plenty of tutorials online, this book does a good job of consolidating vital information & explaining how the image editor's features can be

Template-Engine-Chooser maintains a list of JavaScript Templating libraries:

I'm a fan of Kindle ebooks . These ebooks can be read on the desktop as well as mobile devices and this makes the ebook format more widely accessible that other formats. The really impressive "social reading" feature is the ability to see what other book lovers liked and highlighted in the books they read. Publicly shared Kindle highlighted passages  and notes can serve as a zeitgeist as well as let book lovers discover unknown books. This quote was highlighted by over 5000 Kindle users - “I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." Also see:  The trouble with Kindle is...

If it is long time since you shared folders over the network for your colleagues and you don't remember the path now to remove shared access, here's how to find the physical path: 1. Use the macho way to reach Computer Management - type "compmgmt.msc" in the search box 2. In Computer Management window, jump to Shared Folders and select Shares to view shared folders in the right pane. 3. Right click on the Share Name and choose Stop Sharing from the context menu.

This Week I Learned: Starting in March and April 2014, Google Sheets users creating new spreadsheets will be automatically directed to the new Sheets . All previously created spreadsheets will remain in the older version of Sheets for now. If you need to create a spreadsheet using the old Sheets, you can do so at g.co/oldsheets Google's automated systems analyze "your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored." S Anand's comic strip text search is very fast Jon Galloway has a  nice PowerShell script to download Channel 9 videos . According to Kaspersky's Cyberthreat Real-Time Map , India is the third most infected country. Russia & Vietnam take first and second places while the US is at #4. According to University of Michigan researchers, more than 1 m

Among all the Microsoft Azure services , I like Azure Web Sites as it simplifies hosting & empowers developers.  Look at the advantages: It dramatically cuts costs. A single standard tier hosting plan lets you host up to 500 web-sites along with Auto-scale, traffic management, backup, staging and Web Jobs features at no additional cost. Smaller/less-sophisticated web applications can be hosted in the new “ Basic tier ” option at 25% lesser cost. Scott Hanselman hosted a two day Virtual Conference for $10 back in April 2013. It lets you scale up or down dynamically. Web Sites can also auto-scale either on a schedule or based on load. Web-based Management portal makes it easy to make your website interact with other Azure services - all at one place. You can setup  Azure Traffic Manager to route customers in Europe to a European instance of your app, and customers in North America to a US instance of your app Continuous integration and continuous delivery can be implemented

To know when a  Skype contact was last seen online (in version 6.3), right click on the name of the Skype Contact and choose View Profile. In the dialog box that opens up, hover over the More button to see the time at which that Contact was last online - Skype can now be used across a variety of devices including the TV! Skype is integrated with Outlook.com but needs a plugin for the feature to work

SuperFreakonomics, Illustrated edition beautifully analyzes random real-life human interest stories & shows how you can draw value from good data. The authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner put life into dull topics with their entertaining and data-centric storytelling. The biggest takeaway for me from the book is how data can be used to derive insights and solutions. I was fascinated by the story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who in 1847, while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic proposed the practice of washing hands with an antiseptic solution before operating. At that hospital, doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. He arrived at this suggestion after carefully analyzing the data about deliveries in both wards. Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an

This Week I Learned: OpenSSL is a very common open source library used for implementing SSL, and it’s regularly seen in web server environments such as Apache and nginx. The Heartbleed bug was introduced in version 1.0.1, which was released in March 2011, and its fix was just released this week in version 1.0.1g. It is estimated that this covers about 17 percent of the world’s websites running SSL, but it doesn’t impact web servers that don’t use OpenSSL, such as Microsoft IIS.  Customers running Linux images in Azure Virtual Machines, or software which uses OpenSSL, may be vulnerable .  About two-thirds of Web servers rely on OpenSSL. 44% of Twitter users have never tweeted. Mobile is where Twitter earns most of its money . EMarketer expects about 77 percent of Twitter's estimated $1.1 billion in advertising revenue to come from mobile this year.   The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb)  hosts movie scripts online free for reading and downloading. Steve Jobs and Steve

Gramener's HTML5-based web app about the Indian Elections uses a bunch of JavaScript plugins and to pack a lot of data into an appealing visualization. It uses Bootstrap, jQuery, d3.js, jQuery.SerialScroll. The code shows a lot of concern for Apple devices. YSlow & PageSpeed give the app an A grade for its performance. According to a Gramener blog post , the entire Election Analytics Centre sits on a single server in Southeast Asia, hosted on Azure.  It’s a virtual machine provisioned with 4-cores and 7GB of RAM running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, with nginx as the front-end proxy. All visualisations are rendered as SVG. Also see:  HOW TO highlight a Province within a Country with Google GeoChart

My notes from Microsoft Virtual Academy's  Windows Azure SQL Database course: SQL Database is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) feature of Microsoft Azure. You can also run a on-premise SQL Server database on IaaS VM. In general, the smaller the database size and table size, the better the use case works for SQL Database (PaaS). SQL Database has 3 editions: Web, Business, Premium Web and Business offer relational databases run on shared resources, with built-in replicas within a datacenter. Web edition supports up to 5GB databases, and Business edition supports up to 150 GB databases.  SQL Database Premium edition is charged based on the reservation size assigned to the database and storage volume of the database. SQL Database provides the same tabular data stream (TDS) interface as SQL Server. Therefore, you can use familiar tools and libraries to build client applications for data that is in the cloud. There are currently two Premium database sizes during preview. P2 offers

Building for the cloud is a different ball game than building solutions the conventional way. The developer has to think about cost and availability, among other things, while devising solutions - factors that were not a great concern earlier. Building Real World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure (link to PDF)  is a free ebook that contains strategies, guidelines, best practices, patterns for building cloud apps. The chapters could have been numbered as it is the general practice with books. We hear about movies made from story books but this book came out after  Scott Guthrie’s video presentation on the same topic . The book has three authors - Tom Dykstra, Rick Anderson, and Mike Wasson and it has been reviewed by scores of others experts. The code snippets referenced in the book are part of a complete Visual Studio project - Fix It Sample Application . I liked the illustrations and tables - they complement and improve the explanations. A few samples: Types of NoSQL databases

To devise Azure cloud-based solutions, it helps to know what options are available. Services keep getting added & removed from the Microsoft Azure Management Portal at irregular intervals. For instance, the CDN service at one point could be accessed only from the old Silverlight portal and then the option disappeared altogether. It is now back (after the Build 2014 conference) These Azure Services can be accessed through the Portal and also programmatically via PowerShell and the Management API. Within the Management Portal each of the Services can be initiated from the left pane or from the New menu option which categorizes the Services: Compute Web Site Virtual machine Mobile Service Cloud service Data Services SQL Database Storage HDInsight Cache Recovery Services SQL Reporting App Services Media Service Service Bus Queue Topic Relay Notification Hub Visual Studio Online BizTalk Service CDN Automation Scheduler Active Directory Directory

This Week I Learned: Yahoo, Flickr and LinkedIn use Node Google may use EXIF data from pictures as a ranking factor (" we reserve the right to use EXIF or other metadata that we find about an image ") US Citizenship and Immigration Services denied more new L-1 B petitions for Indians in FY 2009 (1,640) than in the previous nine fiscal years combined (1,341 denials FY 2000-2008 ) There are about 500,000 Indians living in Qatar, twice the number of Qatari nationals . Nepal and India account for 50% of the total migrant workforce there. The nine-phase Lok Sabha elections in India begin on April 7th, 2014 and will end on May 12th. The vote count will take place on May 16th. Andhra Pradesh voters will have a series of elections from mandal parishad to Lok Sabha. For the Lok Sabha elections, the Election Commission (EC) has decided to mark the index finger of the right hand of voters with inedible ink mark instead of the left, which is the normal practice. Candidates standi

UX guru Jakob Nielsen recommends  following the platform GUI standard  when it comes to the order of the OK & Cancel buttons. The Windows User Experience Guidelines differ from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines when it comes to the sequence of OK/Cancel buttons: Windows puts OK first while Apple puts OK last. Safari browser on Windows has dialog boxes with Cancel button first. I found this unusual dialog box via a Google Chrome browser setting, breaking at least a couple of  Microsoft's user interface guidelines : click to enlarge image Also see:  Use the "inverted pyramid" for UI text in dialog boxes

Following are some of the domain names used by Microsoft Azure services: Azure Portal - portal.azure.com Azure Preview Portal -  preview.portal.azure.com Azure Cloud Shell - shell.azure.com Azure DevOps -   dev.azure.com   Kudu Debug console - *.scm.azurewebsites.net Azure Container Registry - *.azurecr.io Blob - *.blob.core.windows.net Table - *.table.core.windows.net Queue - *.queue.core.windows.net Files - *.files.core.windows.net Service Bus - *.servicebus.windows.net  SQL Azure - *.database.windows.net CDN - *.vo.msecnd.net Traffic Manager - *.trafficmanager.net Mobile Services - *.azure-mobile.net BizTalk Service - *.biztalk.windows.net Cache - *.cache.windows.net HDInsight - *.azurehdinsight.net Cloud service - *.cloudapp.net Azure Management Portal - manage.windowsazure.com Azure Machine Learning - studio.azureml.net IAM - *.accesscontrol.windows.net Backup - *.Backup.windowsazure.com Azure API Management - *.azure-api.net.com Azure Monitor - *.ods.opin

Some divisions within companies like Google, Microsoft, Mozilla have been offering support for their products over Stack Overflow . Their employees monitor & answer questions with tags pertaining to their division. I noticed that articles in the Windows Azure documentation can now be edited within Github. This is an interesting use of Github. The videos of Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel have subtitles created by volunteers on Amara.org Also see:  Finding social media stressful? Outsource their maintenance

Google App Script is to Google products what Office Macros are to the Microsoft Office suite. I'm a fan of the ImportXML function that can used within Google Spreadsheet to scrape values from a web page given a  URL and a XPath query representing a HTML segment to extract. Now if you wish to maintain historical values, you'd have to archive the values dynamically fetched by ImportXML function each day. This process can be automated by setting up a trigger for a script to copy values between sheets of a Google Spreadsheet within the Google App Script editor to run at any interval that you can choose. This snippet  from a StackOverflow answer accomplishes that. Also see:  HOW TO prevent screen scraping