Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

While scrubbing data in Google Sheets for a hobby project, I discovered the following formulas that made the job easy - 1) If you have a raw string like "Blah|2|4|5|www.google.com", the below formula can split the values separated by the (pipe) delimiter & place them in a new column in a row In cell B2 paste the following: = ARRAYFORMULA ( IFERROR ( SPLIT (A1:A;"|"))) Then paste your data starting with cell A2. As soon as you enter the data it will automatically split the combined values to a value-per-column using the '|' as a delimiter. 2) To remove duplicate values from rows in a column and then show them in sorted order, I used this forumula:  =SORT(UNIQUE(A1:A151)) 3) REGEXEXTRACT  xtracts matching substrings according to a regular expression. This formula will pick a group of numbers from the value at cell A2 =REGEXEXTRACT(A2, "[\d]+") 4) There is no in-built formula to parse JSON output but it is possible to create custom ...

This Week I Learned - * Customers can no longer create Gallery applications like like WordPress, Drupal, and Umbraco in the Azure Classic Portal *  Version 5 of Bing Search API , now part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, is out * NuGet is the package manager for the Microsoft development platform including .NET. It recently surpassed 1 billion downloads. * The Swiss-knife-of-a-media-player, VLC Media Player can be used to edit files played within it - you can extract audio out of a video file as well cut a portion of a audio file. *  Over 20 percent of the searches Google gets in the U.S. are now by voice. * Chromebooks are now the #2 most popular PC operating system in the U.S. *  WhatsApp now gives their users the ability to back up their data to Google Drive and restore it when they setup WhatsApp on a new phone. * Oracle sought billions in damages from Google over the search engine company’s use of Java programming language in its ...

It was gratifying to see a complete JavaScript sample for Bing Search API version 5 Though there is nothing wrong with the sample making a reference to the jQuery library on Google CDN, it felt a little strange as Microsoft should have favored its own CDN Back in 2012, Hotmail's sign-up page used to use Google's ReCAPTCHA service

As more and more Indians get online mainly to take advantage of e-commerce services on the Internet, websites should take responsibility of ensuring that the services they offer are accessible, secure and user-friendly. In my opinion, there should be a national body that  should conduct periodic reviews to certify that sites collecting personally identifiable data or financial details (like credit or debit card info) are accountable for its proper use and meet basic standards. Enforcement of such basic rules is essential as many Indian commercial websites are hardly concerned about their consumers, many of whom can be Internet newbies and gullible. The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation, a state-owned road transportation company offers online ticketing service for the buses it runs through the website  www.ksrtc.in The site is managed by Radiant Info which proudly claims on its website - " Our clients include over 50 of the Fortune 500 global corporations. •Indi...

As a fan of the Mobile Web, I was happy to hear about the new developments announced at Google I/O 2016, Google's annual developer conference, in the recorded presentation The Mobile Web: State of the Union - Google I/O 2016  by Rahul Roy-chowdhury, VP Product Management, Chrome Some key points from that talk: * Advantages of mobile web apps - - Easy discovery - Low friction - Broad Reach - Open & decentralized * "new experiences" like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) make mobile web pages faster to load and more engaging * PWAs provide: an icon users can add to their home screen, a splash screen when they open it, and a full-screen experience with no address bar. * Service worker API allows all the important parts of a web app to be cached so that it loads instantly the next time a user opens it. * There are 1 billion monthly mobile Chrome users * 8 billion sign-ins are assisted by Chrome's password mana...

This Week I Learned - * The latest ebook from Microsoft " Understanding Azure - A Guide For Developers " covers newer Azure platform services such as Azure Functions, Azure Service Fabric and Azure IoT application development. * This interactive Azure Platform Map provides short summaries of Azure Services * The range of tools that are available now and can be considered while designing, developing and deploying software applications is vast *  Zoho AppCreator lets you create native applications across iOS, Android, and Windows that take complete advantage of your device's hardware. *  Some good folks have created a custom ImportJSON formula for Google Spreadsheets *  Progressive Web Applications take advantage of new technologies to bring the best of mobile sites and native applications to users. Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce site, decided to combine their web presence and native app into a Progressive Web Application - Flipkart Lit...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure SQL Database Advisor and the Performance dashboard are now generally available in the Azure portal. Database Advisor helps you to improve the performance of your databases by providing intelligent tuning recommendations that are based on historical usage. To get recommendations a database needs to have about a week of usage, and within that week there needs to be some activity. There also needs to be some consistent activity as well. The SQL Database Advisor can more easily optimize for consistent query patterns than it can for random spotty bursts of activity. * Only business entities in Australia & China  can create services in the Australia Azure regions & China Azure regions respectively. Companies not doing business in Australia or China cannot create resources in those Azure regions. *  Most cloud vendors including Azure only charge for egress (outbound) data and not ingress (inbound). Prima...

An excellent article by Shadma Shaikh  in The Economic Times, highlights the dangers of Mobile Apps which misuse access requirements. Excerpts - As India becomes a mobile app-economy, it is important for users to understand if apps indeed require access to so much of their data and device tools.  Even if .. not paranoid about online security, you ought to be more careful about something else--mobile applications.Apps that read your contact list and your messages--including the ones about your bank transactions and one-time passwords, and access your pictures, screenshots and messenger images. Permissions by themselves are harmless and even useful to provide users a good mobile experience. But since the list of permissions required is long and doesn't explain its effect, an immediate reaction is to treat it the way you would a `Terms and conditions' agreement--accept without reading the list and move to the next step. Skipping over these permissions could m...

If you've wondered about sensors while reading about the spec of a smartphone, the official Android documentation for developers  is a good place to learn more about them - * Most Android-powered devices have built-in sensors that measure motion, orientation, and various environmental conditions. * A game might track readings from a device's gravity sensor to infer complex user gestures and motions, such as tilt, shake, rotation, or swing. Likewise, a weather application might use a device's temperature sensor and humidity sensor to calculate and report the dewpoint, or a travel application might use the geomagnetic field sensor and accelerometer to report a compass bearing. * The Android sensor framework lets you access many types of sensors. * Few Android-powered devices have every type of sensor. For example, most handset devices and tablets have an accelerometer and a magnetometer, but fewer devices have barometers or thermometers. Also, a device can have mor...

This Week I Learned - * Azure SQL Database allows you to store JSON in standard textual format, use standard SQL language for querying JSON data * Azure Media Services now has a Video Summarization feature based on the Azure Video Thumbnails Media Processor which lets you create a short series of clips or “highlights” for a video. * Azure Media Analytics has released Video OCR feature in Preview. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the conversion of visual text from video into editable, searchable digital text. Video OCR detects text content in video files and generates text files for your use - Microsoft DX India Blog *  If there is a legitimate reason you must have an account named Administrator in an Azure VM you can add the account within the VM post creation and it will function as normal. It is only during creation the use of Administrator as the account name is blocked. * Certain license-included Oracle VMs on Azure will stop being available....