Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Getting into one of the elite Indian Institute of Technology engineering colleges is a dream that many youngsters & more importantly their parents chase as it is considered a passport to a bright & secure career. Aspiring candidates have to clear the Indian Institutes of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE), the annual entrance examination to be among the privileged few to secure a seat.  The current admission rate in 2017 is around 0.92% in IITs (about 11,000 out of 1,200,000 who applied for JEE Main). 90% of students who pass this exam attend coaching academies, which has created a $3.37 billion industry with annual tuitions of up to $1,700. Super 30:Changing the World 30 Students at a Time , tells the extraordinary story of Anand Kumar, a maverick maths teacher, who is on a mission to select & place 30 of the most financially backward students in IIT each year.  In the 13 years since he started this special school in 2003 for the under-privileged, he has ma

This Week I Learned - *  For SAP HANA on Azure that have been configured in a High Availability Pair, Microsoft guarantees connectivity to at least one instance at least 99.99% of the time. * Large instances of SAP HANA on Azure, which are purpose-built hardware configurations for SAP HANA workloads that require memory sizes larger than 0.5 TB. Instances of SAP HANA on Azure are certified for SAP OLTP and OLAP applications in production, and for dev and test use of all scenarios (that is, non-production OLAP and OLTP). Spanning Azure Virtual Machines and purpose-built hardware, SAP HANA Large instances scale your SAP HANA workloads up to 32 TB on multimode configurations. *  When you deploy two or more virtual machines to an availability set, Azure guarantees that at least one of those machines will be accessible 99.95% of the time. This SLA, however, does not extend to the software running on the virtual machines nor does it guarantee that the website or database will be availab

Documentation related to programming, especially Cloud, may get stale quickly - features can get modified, deprecated or removed. While searching for info on Azure, I like Google to show me results from the last year as anything older than that may not always be relevant. Rather than sort the results each time.... I have configured a Chrome "omnibox" search engine shortcut The querystring value tbs=qdr:y in the below Google Search URL - https://www.google.co.in/search?q=%s&tbs=qdr:y ..does the trick of sorting the search results when I type "gaz", hit Tab key, type my search keyword in the Chrome address bar & hit the Enter key.

This Week I Learned - *  Azure App Service, Web Apps, API Apps, and WebJobs can be remotely profiled. *  Azure Load Balancer has a default idle timeout setting of four minutes or 240 seconds. *  Kestrel, a new managed web server introduced with .NET Core, is by far the fastest available .NET server. According to benchmarks, about six times faster than .NET 4.6 and three times faster than NodeJS. * It is possible to access a mobile's camera from a web app when the page is accessed through a mobile browser  -   < input accept="image/*" capture="camera" type="file" / > *   Microsoft Edge supports bookmarklets . It differs from how is used in other browsers however in that it has to be accessed from Reading List *  Microsoft Research recently released a prototype app called Path Guide that addresses this decades-old issue, providing navigation indoors with an alternative to GPS. *  ...metrics data is... a great leveller - when multipl

Ted Promoted To Software Architect A compilation of links to essays on the role of an architect - *  Becoming an Architect in a System Integrator - What architects do is a mystery to much of the world; this is hardly surprising, because an architect's work is intangible—"thought-ware," if you will—and it happens in the background.  *  An A-Z Guide to Being an Architect * A Day in the life of an Enterprise Architect W.I.P

From the Microsoft ebook Architecting Modern Web Applications with ASP.NET Core & Microsoft Azure  [PDF], part of .NET Application Architecture Guidance - One of the first and most successful of these libraries is jQuery, which continues to be a popular choice for simplifying these tasks on web pages. For Single Page Applications (SPAs), jQuery doesn’t provide many of the desired features that Angular and React offer. Factor  jQuery Angular Abstracts the DOM  Yes Yes AJAX Support  Yes Yes Declarative Data   Binding  No Yes MVC-style Routing  No Yes Templating  No Yes Deep-Link Routing  No Yes

The below Design patterns  from the Azure Architecture Center  are useful for building reliable, scalable, secure applications in the cloud. New design patterns keep getting added so watch out for them on the  Design patterns  home page. Entire documentation covering each of the patterns can be downloaded as a PDF Pattern Summary Ambassador Create helper services that send network requests on behalf of a consumer service or application. Anti-Corruption Layer Implement a façade or adapter layer between a modern application and a legacy system. Backends for Frontends Create separate backend services to be consumed by specific frontend applications or interfaces. Bulkhead Isolate elements of an application into pools so that if one fails, the others will continue to function. Cache-Aside Load data on demand into a cache from a data store Circuit Breaker Handle faults that might take a variable amount of time to fix when connecting to a remote service or res

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now supports the disaster recovery and migration of on-premises virtual machines and physical servers with disk sizes of up to 4095 GB to Azure. * The attraction of Azure Functions is the cost effectiveness and scalability of serverless computing . Cost is based on execution time and memory usage for each function invocation. An Azure Function definition can be written in a variety of languages – C#, F#, JavaScript, Bash, Powershell, and more. There is no distinction between compiled languages, interpreted languages, and languages typically associated with a terminal window. One criticism of Azure functions, and PaaS solutions in general, is vendor lock-in. *  The new Dv3 and Ev3 (high memory D sizes:D11-D14) sizes are also some of the first VM’s to be running on Windows Server 2016 hosts. *  Pakistan sans Sharif - The “warm and soft” Calibri was designed by Lucas De Groot in 2004 reached people on January 30, 2007 with the la

Inspired by Greg Wilson's  Google Cloud Product in 4 words compilation , I plan to maintain a list of software tools, products & platforms with a short description of what they do. Item name Description Publisher ActiveMQ Open Source message broker in Java. Apache Solr Reliable Open Source enterprise search platform. Canvas LMS Open Source learning management system. CouchDB Easy-to-use Open Source database system. Discourse High-resolution Open Source discussion platform. Django High-level Python Web framework. DokuWiki Versatile open source wiki software. Drupal Popular, easy-to-use content management platform. Elasticsearch Flexible and powerful open source analytics engine. ELK Big data suite consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. GitLab Community Edition Fast, secure Git management software. Hadoop Framework for reliable, scalable, and distributed computing. Jenkins Integration server sup

This Week I Learned - *  Think of Azure Stack as an appliance, a black box that is locked down.  There is no RDP or PowerShell access to the underlying VMs that make Azure Stack function. *  Public IP addresses are region specific and cannot be moved between Azure regions. Likewise you cannot bring your own Public IP addresses to Azure. * Facetagr app has created a data bank of 3 lakh missing kids. In case families don't have photos, a picture of a sibling can also help track a child - Times of India * In recent years, America’s cyberwarriors have blown up nuclear centrifuges in Iran and sabotaged North Korea’s missile launches, with mixed results.  Locking Islamic State propaganda specialists out of their accounts — or using the coordinates of their phones and computers to target them for a drone attack — is now standard operating procedure - NY Times * ...according to Wired, "Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhon

This Week I Learned - * New Azure VPN Gateway SKU’s provide more throughput with an option that offers bandwidth of 1.25 Gbps * Most Microsoft Cognitive Services don't require an Azure Subscription to try, trial keys are available for a 30 day period  & are different for different services. * In April 2016, the party that would elect the next president of France didn’t exist. Unlike established political parties, En Marche! ("On the Move" in English) didn't have any infrastructure, budget or members to support its cause. Then they built a website that contributed to Macron becoming the President.  En Marche used Symfony an open-source web platform made up a set of PHP Components & a Web Application framework and hosted it on GCP * Ransomware, one of the oldest and most prolific forms of cyberattack, relies on encrypting a victims’ files, essentially locking them out of their own computer systems, until they pay a ransom. Last year, cybersecurity resea