Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Modest Maps and  Leaflet are open-source JavaScript libraries for working with maps * Ran into multiple articles & answers on Stack Overflow by  Yossi Dahan , solutions architect in the Azure team, all in the same week while researching Azure topics. *  Like the other GData APIs, the Google Spreadsheets Data API has an optional JSON output .   * The Windows Azure Data Centers map is a great way to visualize the DC locations * Found some nice PDF ebooks online - APIs for Dummies ,  SOA Design Principles for Dummies ,  100 SOA Questions Asked and Answered ,  The Pragmatic Logging Handbook from Loggly *  Google Fusion Tables  lets us upload data tables from spreadsheets or CSV files, even KML * Azure offers a free trial and it also has a service to host Azure App Services without even providing a credit card . Wonder how they let users view all the portal features but restrict them fr...

This Week I Learned - *  WebHooks is a simple pattern for integrating event notifications across different SaaS services . If the service you want to integrate with supports WebHooks then you can use that. If it supports SignalR then you can use that. In that sense the two are quite complementary. *  WebHooks is a lightweight HTTP pattern providing a simple pub/sub model for wiring together Web APIs and SaaS services. When an event happens in a service, a notification is sent in the form of an HTTP POST request to registered subscribers. The POST request contains information about the event which makes it possible for the receiver to act accordingly. *  Because of their simplicity, WebHooks are already exposed by a large number of services including Dropbox, GitHub, Instagram, MailChimp, PayPal, Slack, Trello, and many more. For example, a WebHook can indicate that a file has changed in Dropbox, or a code change has been committed in GitHub, or a payment has been in...

To conserve time while doing repetitive tasks, shortcuts can help. If you often use Chrome Extensions, you can place a specific Extension in the Windows Taskbar for easy access. Select the desired Chrome App / Extension from the list of installed Apps by clicking on the Apps button which is the first button in the Bookmarks bar of Chrome browser or type  chrome://apps in the address bar In the page that opens up, right click on the Chrome App / Extension in the list and select "" from the context menu. In the dialog box that opens, choose where you wish to have the application shortcuts. I like invoking the Postman Chrome Extension (for testing REST calls) from the Taskbar with a single click.

The Azure Web App Marketplace lists popular web apps including those which are open-source. The  open-source web apps are great learning material for beginners to dig into and extend existing functionality. The facility to deploy it to Azure with a few clicks can help beginners take the app off the ground.and let them focus on the functionality and code rather than be bogged down with deployment. As the documentation of the Marketplace web apps doesn't directly include the links to the source code or clearly mark those which are open-source & based on ASP.NET, I'm compiling it here - *  MVCForum is a fully featured responsive and themeable ASP.NET MVC 5 discussion board/forum and features similar to StackOverFlow - source code *  BugNET is a .NET based open source issue tracking & project management application - source code https://github.com/dubeaud/bugnet *  BlogEngine.NET is a open source blogging platform written in ASP.NET - sourc...

This Week I Learned - *  Ivan Ristic started  SSL Labs as a side-project in early 2009 ... after he joined Qualys in May 2010 and became the company's director of engineering, he showed the project to Qualys CEO Philippe Courtot, who fell in love with it. Ristic remains the only developer, but the production servers are now maintained by the Qualys's Ops team * H-1B visas are designed to bring foreign professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found. 13 outsourcing companies took nearly one-third of all 85,000 H-1B visas in 2014.With more applications, the number of visas given to outsourcing companies has risen sharply. Many H-1B workers earn salaries below market rates. The vast majority of H-1B workers are from India. - NY Times *  The mobile commerce market will grow to $19 billion, according to a Forrester report and most of this will come from tier-II towns. For companies like Shopc...

Before you read further, note that this is not a perfect way to find all products in Flipkart sold by WS Retail but it is possibly the simplest and may help you find something you are looking for. Like many other annoyed users, I was stuck with money in my Flipkart wallet that can be used only to purchase products from the seller "WS Retail" till I found this way. Just in case you didn't know, if you are dealing with Flipkart gift vouchers, you can only purchase from the seller "WS Retail" on the Flipkart shopping site. Try this set of keywords with the site operator on Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo  - "SOLD BY" "WS Retail" site:flipkart.com To exclude "Out of Stock" products stick a minus sign before the quote-enclosed keywords and add a plus sign before product names that you want to restrict your search by. The below keywords will fetch results for products that have Lumia in them which are sold by WS Retail and NOT ou...

Creators and their side projects that got famous or grew into commercial projects: *  Kovid Goyal - calibre *  Antony Lewis - WordWeb * Ivan Ristic  - SSL Labs (2009) *  John Thornton and Jason Cahill - Wordament * Krishna Bharat - Google News, free news aggregator * Colin Needham - IMDb (1990) * Eric Lawrence - Fiddler, HTTP debugging proxy server application

This Week I Learned - * Azure interacts primarily through RESTful APIs.  Even behind the scenes the Azure PowerShell libraries call the Azure REST APIs . Many times from PowerShell you would just use the Azure PowerShell cmdlets, however there may be times that either there is no cmdlet available as the REST API is very new or perhaps you wish to interact without requiring the Azure PowerShell modules to be installed. *  Interesting facts from S Anand's talk on Data Visualization - Visualization is communicating ideas in a easy to understand way - Doordarshi Party keeps contesting in elections across India but hasn't won a single seat so far - Bilaspur and Shimoga have weather patterns opposite to what's in their sorrounding regions - Russian scamsters linked to a shopping site in UK (sucking up their bandwidth) to sell their products so that potential buyers could view product information from the UK site - When people cook up numbers they cook up...