Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Update [2/Sep/2016]: Glad that Azure documentation has a comprehensive mapping of AWS-Azure terms AWS service Plain English definition Azure equivalent  Description Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud / EC2 Host the bits of things you think of as a computer A web service that enables you to launch and manage Linux/UNIX and Windows server instances in Amazon’s data centers. Virtual Machines (VMs) Provision Windows and Linux Virtual Machines and applications in minutes Identity and Access Management (IAM) Setup additional users, setup new AWS Keys and policies A web service that enables Amazon Web Services customers to manage users and user permissions within AWS. Azure Active Directory  Synchronize on-premises directories and enable single sign-on Amazon Simple Storage Service / S3 Store images and other assets for websites. Keep backups and share files between services. Host static websites. Also, many of the other AWS services write and read from S3. Storage for the intern

This Week I Learned - * Azure DocumentDB is ISO 27001, HIPAA, and EU Model Clauses compliant. * Microsoft has open sourced an Azure Pack Connector that you can download and install to your Windows Azure Pack instance. You will then be able to add Azure subscriptions to tenants in Windows Azure Pack to enable Azure VM creation through WAP. *  “Service Management” and “Resource Manager” (Azure RM) refer to two different REST APIs that enable access to Microsoft Azure cloud services. There isn’t 100% cross-compatibility between them. Certain resource types that are provisioned via the ASM API can be viewed through the ARM API, but generally speaking, the reverse is not true.  Each interface has a separate UI Portal experience, a separate REST API, a separate PowerShell module, and a separate “mode” of operation in the Azure Cross-Platform (xPlat) CLI Tool. * Takeaways from  Migrating Onpremise Web Applications to Microsoft Azure PaaS Cookbook [PDF] : - Sharding is primarily used

Based on a real occurrence...

Some bios grab attention with a play of words & ideas. Here's a list of creatively written bios with the parts I found interesting highlighted: *  Scott Hanselman  - Before Corillian and Microsoft I worked as a Principal Consultant at STEP Technology, speaking, writing, consulting, and very much not getting rich during Web 1.0 ... I've also been an Adjunct Professor at OIT, teaching C# and Web Services. I created the first PalmPilot Diabetes Management System in 1998 and sold it to a healthcare company some years later. I'm trying to raise $50,000 for Diabetes research... is a failed stand-up comic ..  I have a large fore five-head . *  Bruno Lowagie is the original developer of iText, an innovative PDF library that has grown into a global software company. * Bill Scott has always been passionate about software engineering (30 years). And just as passionate to understand how humans interact with software. For a long time he couldn't decide if he was an engin

I loved reading the free ebook , Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Web Apps for Developers by Rick Rainey, the fourth ebook in Microsoft Press’s free Microsoft Azure Essentials series. It had all the ingredients of what I consider a good technical book - plain-English, no-fluff, straight-forward tone & a conversational style, lots of relevant visual content . After covering the core concepts of Azure Web Apps in the first chapter, the book covers topics related to it like “Azure WebJobs”, “Scaling Azure Web Apps” & “Monitoring and diagnostics” (which a good coverage of Site Control Manager/Kudu) in the subsequent chapters - all in about 120 pages. The book is aimed at beginners but it is a good reference book for those experienced as well. It has plenty of screenshots on carrying out simple tasks with Azure Web Apps using the new Azure Portal. It has useful Tips & Notes scattered throughout the book that offer insight on not so obvious facts, background context an

This Week I Learned - *  PowerShell's Invoke-RestMethod command can be used to call REST APIs * To celebrate 10 years of AWS , AWS training partner, qwikLABS is offering 95 free online self-paced labs through the end of March 2016. * “Polanyi’s Paradox” - “We know more than we can tell”. The top Go players can’t fully access their own knowledge about how they’re able to perform so well. This self-ignorance is common to many human abilities, from driving a car in traffic to recognizing a face. Polanyi’s Paradox hasn’t prevented us from using computers to accomplish complicated tasks, like processing payrolls, optimizing flight schedules, routing telephone calls and calculating taxes. But as anyone who’s written a traditional computer program can tell you, automating these activities has required painstaking precision to explain exactly what the computer is supposed to do. AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence system built by the Google subsidiary DeepMind, does use simulations

This Week I Learned - * You can integrate your web, mobile, or API apps with your V1 or V2 virtual networks. *  HockeyApp provides mobile app distribution, crash reporting, and in-app user feedback so you can build the world’s best mobile apps. * Azure DNS is an Azure Resource Manager–only service, it is not supported in the Azure classic portal. * Red Hat Enterprise Linux images are now generally available and offered through Azure Marketplace on a pay-as-you-go model with per-hour billing. * Developers who used Facebook's Parse hosting (which is now closed) as the backend to support their mobile apps, can now utilize Azure App Service. *  Google's Chrome Music Lab makes use of Web Audio API, an open web standard that lets you create and manipulate sound right in the browser. *  ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library. The ZXing Decoder Online web application is powered by the barcode scanning i

If you need a barcode to be scanned from a mobile web app & then get back the code as text from the scanner , the ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library & ZXing Barcode Scanner  (630K+ downloads from Google Play Store in April 2021) can help. Note that this web page will only work when opened within an Android browser & smartphone with camera having ZXing Barcode Scanner installed Here are the steps for a simple demo: 1. Create a webpage to initiate the bar code scanner through anchor tag. When the ZXing Barcode Scanner application is installed on an Android device, a URL call to: zxing://scan/?ret=http://example.azurewebsites.net/desc.html?code={CODE} ..will bring up the device bar code reader so that the user can scan the barcode. The code is returned via the callback URL parameter supplied in the zxing URL. 2. ZXing Barcode Scanner will present the code to the file desc.html . To show that the code is

This Week I Learned - * For Azure Virtual Machine instances in an availability set, there will be at least a 30-minute interval between each VM in an availability set (if they are in different update domains). Maintenance is scheduled to only impact one region at a single time in each regional pair. This enables you to deploy VMs across those regions to reduce the impact of the maintenance - Azure Maintenance notification * The Azure Portal may be the biggest, most complex Single Page Application (SPA) in the world. The portal framework is built on TypeScript and Knockout. *  Stack Overflow’s architecture serves 200+ million HTTP requests with modest hardware. Azure hosted MSN.com serves upwards of a billion http requests a day * The OneNote Clipper is a bookmarklet / browser extension that can capture an image of the entire web page or selected text from a web page. All clips include a link that lets you return to the original web site. *  In the coming years, machine lea