Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  The Cloud OS is Microsoft's hybrid cloud solution comprised of Windows Server, Windows Azure, System Center, Windows Intune, and SQL Server - Building Clouds with Windows Azure Pack [ PDF Sampler, Chapter 1 ] *  "Widgets do track you, as well as sometimes pump advertising: disqus is a good example, they provide comments, but do put advertising content above the comment block. Another example is Facebook. The Facebook like button that's embedded on every site allow Facebook to know what stuff you like: for example, lets say you go on tmz.com for some celebrity stuff, Facebook will then derive that you like celebrity rumors, and so on." *  Tips for Extending Smartphone Battery Life : 1. Use auto-brightness for the screen 2. Block power-sucking ads 3. Tweak your email settings - most phones can be configured to instead check for (or “fetch”) emails on a schedule — say, every 30 minutes — or only when you manually tell your email app to...

This Week I Learned - *  ASP.NET 5 will be renamed as ASP.NET Core 1.0 *  Flipkart is now the first Indian app across all genres including- communication, social, entertainment, to cross the 50 million install benchmark on Google Play Store.Globally, Facebook,Google and  Whatsapp  account for the highest downloaded apps. *  There are over 1.50 lakh post offices across the country, of which 1.25 lakh are in rural areas *  Mysuru continues to be the cleanest city in India. Hyderbad is ranked 19th *  Great piece of science writing about the attempts to save the sole Siachen avalanche survivor, 25-year-old, Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad -  "Lance Naik Hanamanthappa is believed to have been caught in an air pocket created by two large blocks of ice, keeping him alive. Around 7 p.m. on February 8, the rescue teams found him. In the throes of hypothermia, he had stripped down to his inner wear. “When the rescue teams found him, he was w...

The top inhibitors to cloud adoption are : Security Regulatory/compliance Privacy Lock-in  Complexity  Other concerns Interoperability Reliability Expertise Requirement for new processes (for example, security policies, VPN [virtual private network] access) 

This Week I Learned - *  Azure's new CDN experience is built on the Azure Resource Manager. It allows you to preload individual assets to your CDN endpoint and purge individual cached assets or entire directories from your CDN endpoints. * Netflix started migrating their systems to AWS in August of 2008 and "..in early January, 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service!". Notes from Netflix Tech Blog  articles: - "By incorporating the principles of redundancy and graceful degradation in our architecture, and being disciplined about regular production drills using Simian Army , it is possible to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure and within our own systems without impacting the member experience." - To deal with fault-tolerance & be proactive, Netflix has built a Simian Army suite of tools to induce various kinds of ...

This Week I Learned - *  Possibly, Azure Stack will replace Windows Azure Pack , but Microsoft has typically stopped short of making such direct statements. Comments from Microsoft representatives on the UserVoice forum where Microsoft gathers public feedback indicate Azure Stack is a improved version of Azure Pack *  Loved these excellent, thoughtfully consolidated architecture posters on Microsoft Cloud Services * Azure Storage Table rows can be queried with PowerShell . Its results can be extracted to a CSV file . The script can be scheduled to be run automatically with Task Scheduler on your local machine . * Azure SQL Database can be created with PowerShell and ARM Template too *  As per Capers Jones, the relative cost of fixing defect increases with the progress of software development life cycle. *  Brazil grew at 7.6 percent in 2010, and had discovered huge oil reserves which the then President Lula likened to “winning a lottery t...

There are multiple ways to filter columns in a HTML table within any web page 1. Google Sheet can be used to scrape tabular data. For example, by using the IMPORTHTML formula in a cell within Google Sheet it is possible to scrape the tabular data from this Wikipedia article link : =IMPORTHTML("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India", "table", 4) The table referred in the formula is the fourth among the tables on the web page referred by the URL. Once you have the data within Google Sheet, you can filter by column value (select column header, choose Filter from Data menu) or hide column (select column, choose Hide column from context menu) Mediawiki, the open-source wiki application that Wikipedia is based on makes it simple to make a table's columns sortable by just including the value "sortable" in the CSS class attribute for that table. 2. Stoyan Stefanov's ReactiveTable bookmarklet can work on any table (that has table ...

With the Azure Portal, Kudu & online editor, it is possible to publish a website with static web pages in minutes, all within the browser - no desktop tools required! After creating a new Azure Web App through the portal, go to your Windows Azure Web App’s Kudu dashboard using this URL -  https://{your site name}.scm.azurewebsites.net (in other words, add .scm in front of the site name). Click on the Site extensions tab and pick Visual Studio Online (really bad naming for the online editor considering VSO is also the former name of the cloud version of Visual Studio ALM tool) Create static pages using the lightweight browser-based "Monaco" editor. The pages get saved automatically and the site pages can be viewed instantly!

The Azure documentation on NoSQL-based Table is pretty comprehensive (Azure Storage Table Design Guide runs into 50+ pages if you print it)  & well written. The consolidated comparison chart on Azure Table Storage vs Azure SQL Database copied from MSDN is a great reference to review occasionally. Nothing summarizes info as well as a table (heh!). Comparison Criteria Azure Table Storage Azure SQL Database Data relationships No Azure Table Storage does not provide a way to represent relationships between data. You can obtain simple relationships by using schema-less properties of tables and structuring the data in the required format. Yes Similar to SQL Server, Azure SQL Database allows you to define relationships between data stored in different tables by using foreign keys. ...

An explanation from the book Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015 : Continuous Integration is all about quick feedback and validation of the commit phase. Continuous Delivery is about establishing a mindset where you can deliver features  at customer demand.  Continuous Deployment can be viewed as the next level of Continuous Delivery. Where Continuous Delivery provides a process to create frequent releases but not necessarily deploy them, Continuous Deployment means that every change you make automatically gets deployed through the deployment pipeline. When you have established a Continuous Delivery solution, you are ready to move to Continuous Deployment if that’s something your business would benefit from.