Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  This demo page shows how to use DuckDuckGo's APIs  with jQuery *  Xbox, Skype, Bing use Azure Blobs, Tables & Queues .  Microsoft consumer applications like MSN use DocumentDB in production *  BGInfo is a free utility from SysInternals that allows you to create a configuration file that can include information such as host name, system information, and much more. It places this information in a configurable location and size on the desktop, including, optionally, as a wallpaper. *  Banks across the world don't rate so well when it comes to implementing SSL *  All sites on Azure Websites will get a "B" from SSL Labs * Target, the giant retailer...collects all kinds of data on every shopper it can, including whether you’re married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how much money you earn, if you've moved recently, the websites you visit. And with that information, it tries to diagnose each consume...

This Week I Learned - * Unlike a virtualized application includes not only the application - which may be only 10s of MB - and the necessary binaries and libraries, but also an entire guest operating system, the Docker Engine container comprises just the application and its dependencies. It runs as an isolated process in userspace on the host operating system, sharing the kernel with other containers. Thus, it enjoys the resource isolation and allocation benefits of VMs but is much more portable and efficient. * The reason Myntra wants its customers to transact only from apps is that consumer data is most valuable when tied to specific individuals, as it enables a closer tracking of user behaviour. It is also why Google, Facebook, and other tech companies want your mobile number. It is also why Google, Facebook, and other tech companies want your mobile number  The Hindu * 40% of railway tickets & 60% of flight tickets are booked through e-ticketing - Ravi Shankar Prasad...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft Azure Speed Test can gauge which Azure Data Center could be the best for your location by detecting Blob storage latency *  Microsoft supports only specific versions of Microsoft server software on Azure virtual machines . * What should not be run on Azure VMs: - Software whose perf/HA/technical requirements cannot by supported by Azure - Software whose single server spec requirements exceed Azure VM sizes - Software which need high speed network/IO to resources NOT hosted in Azure - Clustered Virtual machines are required - Anything earlier than Windows Server 2008 R2 - 16-Bit and 32-bit operating systems are not supported (but 32 bit process running on a 64bit OS are) * Your site's mobile-friendliness is now considered as a Google Search ranking signal. You can check your site by testing your pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test tool . This tool shows how Google Search sees your pages. ...

This Week I Learned - *  Two billion photos are shared daily on Facebook services....By separating the storage of low-traffic content from that of high-traffic content, we’ve been able to save energy and other resources while still serving data when requested. * To separate two sentences with a new line within a cell in Excel, press Alt+Enter after the first sentence to continue with second sentence on a new line. *  WhatsApp supports 450 million users with only 32 engineers. Erlang was developed by Swedish telecom giant Ericsson over 25 years ago, and now it's finding a home at messaging apps like WhatsApp and TigerText. Even Facebook was singing the language’s praises when it used Erlang to launch Facebook Chat back in 2009—the same year it turned down the job application of WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton. * "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen" -Edward V. Berard * "Multitasking is doing multiple thi...

This Week I Learned - * Chrome has 4 Release channels - Stable, Beta, Dev, Canary *  How-Old.net  uses  Microsoft’s newly released Face detection API to let users upload a picture and have the API predict the age and gender of any faces recognized in that picture . * Google has added the ability for users to export and download their search histories * With his creation of Google Takeout, a unified site for exporting user data from multiple services like Gmail and Google Photos, Googler Brian Fitzpatrick has shown that you don’t need power to drive strategy * Notice on Visual Studio Code home page - "When this tool crashes, we automatically collect crash dumps so we can figure out what went wrong. If you don’t want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, don't install this tool." * The banana plant is the largest herbaceous flowering plant and is mistaken for a tree. India is the largest producer of bananas - Wikipedia * The Bhagwa va...