Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Google currently supports more than 80 APIs that developers can use to integrate Google services and data into their applications. *  X-Ray for Movies & TV is a feature available on Kindle and Wii U devices that enables Amazon Instant Video viewers to easily and seamlessly learn more about the video they’re watching. It is designed to enrich the experience of watching movies and TV shows by embedding IMDb’s content into the Amazon Instant Video viewing experience.  On books, X-Ray lets you trace characters, places, and ideas as you journey through chapters, using information from Shelfari, YouTube, and Wikipedia. * The eight Harry Potter movies earned over 7 billion worldwide. *  HDFC Bank Ltd is the leader in mobile banking with 38.2% market share in FY15, followed by ICICI Bank * The main business of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation as its name implies should have been catering but it makes more money from onl...

This Week I Learned - * Each Azure subscription supports up to 50 storage accounts (so 500 TB (for each Azure storage account * 50 = 25 Petabytes)  and therefore 25 Petabytes * Affinity groups are no longer recommended, or required for virtual networks .  No longer do you need to explicitly group resources in close proximity to each other to minimize latency between items like VNETs, VMs, and storage .  Improvements to the Azure virtual network infrastructure have made communication between different parts of the Azure DC very quick . *  Azure API Management  service lets you take existing backends and project a mobile-friendly, modern RESTful URL structure, transform XML to JSON on the fly, without costly modification work involving engineering teams and months of waiting. *  Twitter , GitHub, StackOverflow, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr use Redis in some form or the other. Redis is an open-source advanced key-value cache and store....

There are free tools like PDFRider that let you manipulate PDF files and do things like extracting only some pages from a PDF document & packaging them into a new PDF. But why bother installing tools when Google Chrome browser can do that for you. Chrome can open not just web pages but also local PDFs. You don't need a PDF reader anymore if all you generally do is scroll through them. With the Print option of Chrome, you can save any web page as a PDF. What's more, you can extract sets of pages from a PDF document or specific pages of a web page to a new PDF by specifying page ranges separated by a comma. This is not a common use case but remember when you face such a scenario, you don't need any other utilities. Also see:  HOW TO bulk archive a web page along with linked pages in PDF format - needs IE

This Week I Learned - * The new version of the  Azure Pricing Calculator  is a lot more useful *  Azure Data Catalog is a fully managed service that stores, describes, indexes and provides information on how to access any registered data source. It closes the gap between those seeking information and those producing it. Azure Data Catalog uses a crowdsourced approach. *  Power BI service is a cloud-hosted, business intelligence and analytics service (“SaaS”) *  Think of machine learning simply as a branch of statistics, designed for a world of big data . * “Everything in the company is really driven by machine learning.” - ex-Google employee *  Apple..makes ~80%ish of their revenue from iOS-based products while Google makes ~90%ish of its revenue from advertising *  Google collected about $11.8 billion on mobile search ads in 2014, with about 75 percent coming from ads on iPhones and iPads. * It is estimated that Goog...

Hit F12 (keyboard shortcut for the browser's Developer Tools) while you're signed into Facebook and click on the Console tab. You'll see this - That's the JavaScript console used by web developers which is usually blank but Facebook inserts a warning  there to alert unsuspecting users who can become victims of a social engineering attack . As there are multiple ways (self-XSS, clickjacking, sharebaiting, phishing, bad apps, access token theft) that a non-technical Facebook users can be exploited by web scamsters, Facebook documents the ways in which victims can fall prey possibly hoping that they will bother to read it. Instead the explanations can actually teach aspiring hackers how to trap gullible users. Also see:  Facebook embarrassment

Though the book Exam Ref 70-534 Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions  came after I cleared the exam, I've found the book very useful and well-written. Some of the definitions and explanations are presented very crisply. I'm compiling a list of key points from the book and online resources to serve as a glossary of sorts which I plan to review frequently. This is an embedded Microsoft Office presentation, powered by Office Online . The curriculum of the exam covers the entire breadth of Microsoft Azure Services. I'm amazed at how big & complex Azure has grown since I started working with it in 2010.

This Week I Learned - * Both Microsoft and Google allow you to create accounts for their services with your existing email address like <you>@<anydomain>.com (without requiring a Hotmail/Live, Gmail address) * You need to login to your Gmail account at least once every 9 months else Google may terminate your account according to their program policies . *  Draw.io which lets you create architecture diagrams online has icons for Azure * Typo-squatting - a minor change in the URL through text characters, has become a new method for hackers to infiltrate systems, especially when internet users are conducting financial transactions online. * Amazon Web Services customers in India include Hike, PayTM, ZEDO, Freshdesk, Inmobi, Capillary Technologies, HackerEarth, Getit, Ferns N Petals, redBus, Druva, Vserv, Hungama, Tata Motors, Jubilant Food Works, STAR India, Future Group, Manipal Global Education, Classle, NDTV, Dalmia Bharat Sugar, Usha Interna...