TWIL - Week #51

This Week I Learned:

• Windows Azure Traffic Manager (WATM) now supports Windows Azure Web Sites. This will enable directing web traffic across multiple regions in different load-balancing methods: performance, fail-over, and round robin.
• Using Microsoft's Disk2VHD tool, you can convert a physical disk into a VHD so that you can use it as a 
• You can interact with a Office 365 tenant installation with Windows PowerShell.
• JSON became a built-in feature of JavaScript when the ECMAScript Programming Language Standard - Fifth Edition was adopted by the ECMA General Assembly in December 2009.
• Google rolled out something like 665 different changes to how they rank search results in 2012
• Google's Penguin algorithm is targeted towards web spam while the Panda algorithm is targeted towards quality content on the web.
• The idea for FusionCharts, a popular HTML5 charting library, was born from an article written by Pallav Nadhani to make more pocket money as a teenager.
• The US State Department, Greenpeace and IMDB use PostgreSQL open source database system.
• The DataLossDB project tracks world-wide data loss incidents via online attacks. 
• Forty percent of Kenya's GDP moves through M-Pesa mobile payment system.  It works on every single phone possible (including feature phones), because it uses SMS. Something like 25 million dollars a day is transacted through M-Pesa. 
• The size of the India’s electorate for the parliamentary elections is nearly 800 million....an estimated 150 million people are eligible to vote for the first time—a figure larger than the total number of voters that took part in the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. In the 2004 or the 2009 parliamentary elections, a candidate with no criminal cases pending had—on average—a 7 percent chance of winning while a candidate facing a criminal charge had a 22 percent chance of winning.  Becoming an elected representative is the best way for criminals to cleanse their sins.
• The Central government will issue an advisory prohibiting government employees from accessing social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter through officials systems and networks. 4.5 lakh government employees have been allotted official email accounts (nic.in) and five million more such e-mail accounts will be issued.
• “I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.” – Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662