This Week I Learned - Week #71

This Week I Learned:

• Windows Azure Pack (WAP) allows service providers (hosters) and enterprises to offer their “customers” Windows Azure like capabilities, hosted within their own data center.
• ASP.NET App Suspend is a new hosting configuration in Internet Information Services (IIS) in Windows Server 2012 R2. This applies to an app running on the .NET Framework 4.5.1. ASP.NET App Suspend enables apps to startup much faster and for each server to host many more apps.
• Deprecated ASP.NET features that impact performance & security - Starting with ASP.NET 4.5.2, the runtime enforces EnableViewStateMac=true. Even if you set it to false, the runtime ignores this value and proceeds with the value set to true.  The UrlPathEncode method was added to the .NET Framework to resolve a very specific browser compatibility problem. It does not adequately encode a URL, and does not protect your application from cross-site scripting. You should never use it in your application. Instead, use UrlEncode.
• Unlike a TFS changeset, a shelveset is a non-versioned entity. If you or another user unshelve the items of which a shelveset consists, edit several files, and then later reshelve the shelveset, the system does not create a new version of the items for future comparison and maintains no record of who revised the items, when, or in what manner. The original shelveset is completely replaced.
• Was a little surprised to see MSDN recommending the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web over the commercial VS 2012 editions - "the Express version is more compact and can be easier to work with than Visual Studio."
• The ISO image of Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2013 with Update 3 for Web has a size of 4.4GB!
• "When I take a snapshot of my "idle" gmail page, there's 136,441 objects loaded in memory. Those objects range from using 32 bytes of memory, to a few kilobytes, up to over 4 megabytes, depending on the object.And that doesn't include the memory used by the browser to actually render the page to you"
• Back in 2008, Foxit Reader was a lean PDF reader - the package size was just 2.55 MB! Now it is 36 MB.
• MyPermissions.org makes it easy to track which Apps you've subscribed to via social logins & the permissions granted to them. The site also rates Android apps
• Incorrect declaration of wealth can invite a fine of up to 500 per cent of the evaded tax. One can also be jailed for up to seven years if the tax due is over Rs 1 lakh. Gifts from unrelated people are taxable if the aggregate value exceeds Rs 50,000 in a year. The gifts received from blood relatives or on specific ocassions like marriage or under inheritance or by will are not taxable. You can revise your tax return as many times as you want. - Economic Times
• About one-fourth of Flipkart's 7,000 full-time employees own a stake in the company.
• Mnemonic phrases or poems can be used to encode numeric sequences by various methods, one common one is to create a new phrase in which the number of letters in each word represents the according digit of pi. For example, the first 15 digits of the mathematical constant pi (3.14159265358979) can be encoded as "Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics"; "Now", having 3 letters, represents the first number, 3. Piphilology is the practice dedicated to creating mnemonics for pi.
• On January 24, 1950, the Constituent Assembly officially declared ‘Jana Gana Mana’ as the national anthem and ‘Vande Mataram’ the national song. 
• During the initial years of drawing the Dilbert cartoon, Scott Adams had a day job. He started drawing the cartoons at 4am, before work (at Pacific Bell, where he worked as a budget analyst). In 1989 he got a break when United Media published Dilbert in 30 newspapers. By 1995, he had left his day job and was supporting himself as a cartoonist.  His background is in Economics & he has a MBA from Berkley. In the podcast where he was interviewed by Scott Hanselman, he reveals that vacations don't work for him and he is not big on free time and instead believes in doing something useful all the time. The the most freeing discovery of his life was that when faced with a cartoonists block, it is better to draw a bad cartoon than draw nothing at all as it is hard to judge what people will like. Diagnosed with focal dystonia that affects his drawing, he was told the fix is to change careers - there is no cure. His book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life highlights that goals are for losers, Passion is bullsh#t and happiness is health plus freedom.
• At INR 2699 or ~$45, Karbonn A50S is the cheapest Android (4.2) phone in India