Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

8 great reasons to adopt Always-On SSL - paraphrased from this  PDF that could well have been an online article Google will enhance a HTTPS based website's SEO ranking as it now uses that as a ranking signal Google is recommending that browsers warn when the connection is insecure..and you can't be on the wrong side of Google if you want a website to be popular Users are more at risk than ever as they become more mobile SSL is now fast It stops an invoked web page from leaking information via referrer headers You can now enforce it by baking HTTPS into the browser -   HTTP strict transport security (HSTS)  preload list is a list of sites that are hardcoded into Chrome as being HTTPS only Ad networks now comprehensively support SSL SSL certificates are easier than ever to obtain Also, ISPs may not be able to inject ads or tracking code into a secure web page (although a Chrome extension can still can ) Guy Podjarny's article  10 Reasons To Use...

This Week I Learned - * Currently (article updated on Apr 27, 2015), SAP does not support its applications on the Linux guest operating system. * Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides a comprehensive disaster recovery solution suite.  Typical RPO with ASR should be approximately 15 minutes or less, an RTO of 5-60 minutes and a very quick and effective way to do a Disaster Recovery Test. *  Project Gutenberg now allows selected ebooks to be copied directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive * You can save a webpage as a text file in Internet Explorer but not Chrome * According to LinkedIn data, liberal arts grads are joining the tech workforce more rapidly than technical grads. * Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod’s Illustrated Guide to Life Inside Microsoft  has illustrations that represent the new Microsoft *  In the West, public transport authorities give two kinds of feeds: one being a fixed schedule of trains and buses and the other being a real-time feed which ...

1. What is  Azure Cloud Service &  the usefulness of it? Cloud service is a term that means more than one thing, but in summary it's a logical group. There's also Worker and Web Roles that usually are referred as Cloud Service too. So, what is Cloud Service, depends on context. Cloud Services are ways to combine a set of stateful virtual machines (or web/worker role instances, which are stateless virtual machines) into its own private network, sitting behind a public virtual IP address. Cloud service is a management and security boundary for VMs Cloud Service also provides optional load-balancing between the virtual machines Originally, the cloud service was a network isolation container into which compute resources are placed. It is used for Azure PaaS and IaaSv1 resources. Its considered "legacy" and is not present in Azure's IaaSv2 which is based on the new Azure Resource Manager model v1 is the version of IaaS that was launched in 2012. IaaS...

This Week I Learned - * Linux now (August 2015) drives about 25 percent of the activity on Azure - Wired * Cloud computing was invented by Amazon in 2006.  Netflix built its TV and movie business atop the Amazon cloud. Dropbox erected its file-sharing operation there. Google and Microsoft released beta versions of similar cloud services in 2008 — Google App Engine and Windows Azure - Wired * ..you should think of Docker as a shipping container for software. Just as shipping containers give us a standard pod we can transfer from boat to train to truck, Docker offers a standard means of moving software from machine to machine to machine. If an app needs more computing power—or some of the machines running it quit working—Docker provides a way of easily spreading to new machines - Wired *  Hyper-V requires a 64-bit processor that includes Hardware-assisted virtualization & Hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) * The Hyper-V role is not sup...

1. Open the document or spreadsheet to be copied to OneDrive, within Google Docs / Drive 2. From the menu, choose File > Email as Attachment... 3. In the dialog box that opens, choose to attach the file as .docx or .xlsx as appropriate and email it to your Microsoft account 4. When the email is opened within Outlook.com , click on the button View in OneDrive to view & save that file in OneDrive to view it in Word Online or Excel Online

1. Name the "kernel" of the Azure Cloud operating system Fabric Controller ( FC ).  It provisions, stores, delivers, monitors and commands the virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers that make up Azure . 2.  Critical business applications require a low RTO & RPO . True or False True 3. Scaling-out is a preferable scaling method for cloud applications than scaling-up - True or False True. Scaling up is constrained by what VM sizes are available 4. Azure organizes VM sizes into different machine series. What are they & what is specialty of each series? A series - generic workloads A8-A11 - high performance computing D series - high CPU & high temporary data IO DS series - high I/O workloads G series - high CPU & high memory demands 5. When you create a VM in Windows Azure you are provided with a temporary storage automatically. What is the location of this storage This temporary storage is “D:” on a Windows VM and it is “/dev/sdb1” ...

This Week I Learned - * Azure may provision VMs having either AMD or Intel processors. Currently, there is no choice of hardware while creating VMs in Azure.   G-series VMs run on hosts with Intel Xeon E5 V3 family processors. *  All images and disks in Azure, except the temporary disk, are actually virtual hard disks (VHDs). The virtual hard disks are .vhd files stored as page blobs in a standard or premium storage account in Azure. They can also be fixed, dynamically expanding, or differencing. Azure supports VHD format, fixed disks. *  Once a blob is created/uploaded you can't change the blob type. * AWS EC2 virtual machines use EBS (similar to page blobs) for running disks *  You can’t assign more vCPUs to a virtual machine than you have physical cores in your host. *  Jeff Bezos believes in data-driven management . Amazon has laid out 14 leadership principles . “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves”. As team ...

This Week I Learned - *  Router malware is the ultimate man-in-the-middle attack . Beware of the router you are connecting to the Internet through. It could be compromised.  As the amount of stuff we connect to the Internet grows, we have to understand that the Internet of Things is a bunch of tiny, powerful computers, too – and they need the same strong attention to security that our smartphones, laptops, and servers already enjoy. * If you must access non-HTTPS websites, or you are not sure, always use a VPN. A VPN encrypts all your traffic, so you no longer have to worry about using HTTPS. *  Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure at PDC 2008, October 27 *  Under the Microsoft Product use Rights (PUR), Office and Windows 7 are not licensed to run on Virtual Machines . *  Installing Hyper-V in a Windows Azure Virtual Machine is not possible. The hypervisor is a virtualization technique which allows to virtualize a machine directly on the host’s syste...

This Week I Learned - * With respect to Disaster Recovery , a “proactive” hot site allows you to keep servers and a live backup site up and running in the event of a disaster.  A hot site is a must for mission critical sites. A “preventative” warm site allows you to pre-install your hardware and pre-configure your bandwidth needs. Then, if disaster strikes, all you have to do is load your software and data to restore your business systems. In contrast to a hot site, a warm site relies on backups for recovery. A “recovery” cold site is essentially just data center space, power, and network connectivity that’s ready and waiting for whenever you might need it. * This  exhaustive list of things to test for in a Windows desktop application comes from a Microsoftie who says - "When I look back on my LOB-app-building days, I don't know how anything I built ever made it into production" * "Reading Code Complete was a watershed event in my professional life...