Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Now you can get programmatic access to Azure usage and pricing data. You can call the Azure Usage API to get hourly and daily aggregations of your Azure consumption data. The Azure RateCard API offers an exhaustive list of available resources with their retail prices.  * Google employee No. 107 Chade-Meng Tan (Meng)'s  current job description is, "Enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace" * "We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time." - Shawn Achor * How much data does Google have?   According to Randall Munroe - "about 10 exabytes of data across all of Google's operations, and then another maybe five exabytes or so of offline storage in tape drives, which it ...

Bill Gross is the founder of technology incubator Idealab and 100 companies in the last 30 years. In a Ted talk, he reveals the single biggest reason why startups succeed  - timing!

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft publicly acknowledges IE/Edge team's size: ~300 people . * Google is no longer an option as an Identity Provider for Azure ACS *  At $89, Microsoft Official Practice Tests are costlier than the exam *  Software doesn't work and no one cares *  All DB2 editions share the same code base. The only technical differences among DB2 editions are resource limitations and advanced features or tool sets. Applications that are written for any DB2 edition can easily be moved to any other DB2 edition, on any operating system platform that is supported by DB2. *  About 60 percent of global warming emissions is coming from the wealthiest 1 billion people while the poorest 3 billion can't afford or access fossil fuels *  Reflecting on his career in medicine years later, Crichton concluded that patients too often shunned responsibility for their own health, relying on doctors as miracle workers rather than advisors. * Notab...

This Week I Learned - *  To save a set of open tabs in Chrome (so that you can resume reading those pages later) you need only right-click on the tab bar and choose the ‘Bookmark All Tabs‘ option.   In Firefox, use the keyboard shortcut  Alt+T+O+C to copy the URLs currently open within that browser. * HTTPS is steadily becoming a standard for the web. Even for sites which don’t *need* encryption. *  Wikipedia is in the process of implementing HTTPS to encrypt all Wikimedia traffic & also use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to protect against efforts to ‘break’ HTTPS and intercept traffic. This will  make it harder for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to censor access to specific Wikipedia articles and other information . * The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the HTTPS-Only Standard directive, requiring that all publicly accessible Federal websites and web services only provide service through a secure HTTP...

This Week I Learned - *  It is possible to play YouTube videos at custom speed by running this in a developer console while a web page with a YouTube video is open - document.getElementsByClassName("video-stream html5-main-video")[0].playbackRate = 3 *  Yahoo will pull the plug off Yahoo Pipes.   Yahoo Pipes was a precursor to services such as IFTTT.  I hope YQL will live on for a long time. *  YouTube was one of the original applications on the iPhone in 2007. Because it didn't support Flash, they re-encoded every single YouTube video into H.264 with the MP4 container.  * Nilgiri Mountain Railways’ (NMR) toy train covers a distance of 46 km in 5 hours inching up its route between 1,069 and 7,228 ft - The Hindu *  The most common language in Darjeeling is Nepali * Indians are estimated to hold nearly 24000 tonnes of gold worth nearly Rs 63 lakh crore, equivalent to half the country's current GDP - Economic Times *  In New Yor...