Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning by Sumit Mund is a good beginner level book that made Azure ML a little less daunting for me. I'll keep going back to it as I continue to learn & experiment more with Azure ML, the amazing predictive analysis tool that makes it easy for developers to leverage complex Machine Learning algorithms all within the web browser. Having quickly read through the book to familiarize myself with Machine Learning jargon & tried some of the samples, I've realized it'll take me more reading and practice to achieve proficiency. This 200+ paged book whets your learning appetite by covering a breadth of topics with just enough information to get you started but not too much to make it too intimidating for newbies. It helps that the author makes practical tips & recommendations rather than just pontificating. Sample - Outliers are data points that are distinctly separate from the rest of the data... In many cases, it is a good idea to clip...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Algorithm Cheat Sheet helps you choose the right algorithm for a predictive analytics model. * Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) is an operating system image available in the Azure Marketplace with a host of popular data science tools pre-installed and pre-configured. *  Azure SQL Data Warehouse can connect to Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning libraries and Azure Data Lake. *  Mark Zuckerberg covers his laptop camera. The taped-over camera and microphone jack are usually a signal that someone is concerned, perhaps only vaguely, about hackers’ gaining access to his or her devices by using remote-access trojans — a process called “ratting.” (Remote access is not limited to ratters: According to a cache of National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, at least two government-designed programs were devised to take over computer cameras and microphones .) - NY Times ...

This Week I Learned - * A web page I built with StupidTable jQuery plugin to sort a table was about three times lighter than the more feature-rich  DataTables jQuery plugin *  Nice code sample of an Azure Function that uses a blob trigger, sends the uploaded object to be analysed by Cortana Intelligence and stores the results in a DocumentDB collection. *  It is possible to get data (from a relational database) into and out of a Google Sheet programmatically *  Windows App Studio  which makes is easy to build a Windows Phone app without coding now provides a REST API Data Source feature that allows users to integrate apps with third party APIs. * Power BI is an evolution of the add-ins previously available in Excel: Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power View. You can use Power BI with or without Excel—you no longer are dependent on the version of Microsoft Office installed at your company. Power BI is not just a tool: it is an ecosystem that...

My mobile browser has been letting the websites I visit know what handset I use and I wouldn't have known this until I saw this targeted ad - an ad for case for Lumia 530 I knew about browser user-agent strings, but today I learnt that browsers give away device model name as well, through the user agent they expose - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530 Dual SIM) like Gecko Cookies , prying sites like Google , Facebook , apps like TrueCaller know more about me than my friends and family . Good-bye privacy !

Native mobile apps are being touted as the best thing since sliced bread by influential, ill-advised digital immigrants.  This is disappointing as they only consider the supposed coolness factor & ignore the minefield of issues that native apps present. Native apps are costlier to build than mobile web applications (websites that work on mobile browsers) and difficult to maintain . Native apps are useful only when they really utilize a smartphone's features for a good cause. Even as one in three consumers know the mobile apps they are using will collect data about them, yet they download any app that “looked cool”, exposing themselves to privacy risks, according to a survey by cyber security firm Norton . Close to 50 per cent of Indians have over 20 apps on their smartphones, and mobile wallets and e-commerce apps are among the top five applications used. A study by Norton analysed over 10.8 million apps in over 200 app stores. A third of them (3.3 million) come ...

You can set up Chrome to get notifications, like meeting reminders, from websites, apps, and extensions on your computer. The Push Notifications API feature in Google Chrome allows websites that you give permission to the ability to send you notifications and alerts – even when the website isn’t open in a tab. Web Push works hand-in-hand with other cool features like Service Workers and Web Manifests to help ‘app-ify’ websites on mobile and desktops. Notify.js is a simple wrapper for the Web Notification API. You can block the notification feature completely in the Google Chrome browser if you have no use for it. If you’re browsing in incognito mode, you won’t get notifications.

This Week I Learned - *  When a web app goes down, you can visualize data points in a few seconds by using the appLens tool for the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service. *  A Continuous WebJob runs under the scm (kudu) site which, unless "Always On" is enabled, will not start when the site starts * If you have an application deployed to Azure App Service that's using PHP 5.4, you have to upgrade or use a custom runtime as support for PHP 5.4 ends in October 2016 *  India is home to 130 million of Truecaller's 200 million users .  Truecaller claims that two out of every three smartphones in India have the Truecaller app. The Truecaller service allows users to find out the owner of any phone number from its database, which is created by crowdsourcing contact details from users’ address books. So, even if you’ve never used the service, your name and number could be on Truecaller’s database, if at least one of your contacts has shared it. The app has an int...

JavaScript and JSON Essentials by Sai Srinivas Sriparasa is a useful beginner-level book for developers looking for an introduction to JSON. In about 100 pages, it covers the basic topics related to JSON with plain-English explanations. I liked Chapter 5, Cross-domain Asynchronous Requests which covers JSONP or JSON with Padding among all the chapters. There are more Web APIs in the  comprehensive directory that the website ProgrammableWeb maintains  which are JSON based now than other formats which indicates the importance of JSON. I wish there were more code samples covering public JSON-based Web APIs & their usage Excerpts and samples of the explanations I liked: JSON is text-based, lightweight, and a human-readable format for data exchange between clients and servers. JSON is derived from JavaScript and bears a close resemblance to JavaScript objects, but it is not dependent on JavaScript. JSON is language-independent, and support for the JSON data format...

Taking off from the single basic JavaScript sample on the newly minted  version 5 of Bing Search API, I put together a couple of samples of my own. You'll have to sign-up for a free key  from Microsoft Cognitive Services to replace in the code samples to try them & also experiment with all the other APIs that are available Bing Search API gets not just web search results but also image, news, & videos results for a given query and allows up to 1,000 free transactions per month across all Bing Search APIs Google Custom Search API has a few additional steps & provides 100 search queries per day for free This comparison of version 2 and 5 highlights the improvements - Category Feature v2 v5 Web Search REST API x x Related searches x x Ranked Answers (image, video, news, math, time) x Deep links (for first web page result) x Adult intent signal x Image Search REST API x x Enhanced filters: image size, license...

On my desktop PC that originally had Vista, I upgraded it to Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 . When the pre-release offer to upgrade Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 came up last year, I went for it thinking I would have the option to choose based on the features it had. Little did I think that I would be nagged constantly to complete the upgrade. As I was low on hard disk space, I kept procrastinating. The nag turned into a threat last month & before I knew what I clicked, the upgrade already started. I let it do it's job before going to bed took. When I peeped several times in between, I would see this - 99% complete "Your PC will restart several times" I noticed that the upgrade hardly took up any hard disk space. After a fortnight of using it, I can definitely say Windows 10 feels faster than Windows 8.1 & way better!

This Week I Learned - * Azure App Service app cloning can be used to clone apps from one region or one app service environment to another.  * Active geo-replication in Azure SQL Database provides database-level disaster recovery, cross-region redundancy, readable online secondary databases, and automatic asynchronous replication. *  On June 2, 2016, users from multiple locations faced issues searching for a product on Amazon’s desktop as well as mobile websites. The problem lasted for more than 3 hours. * Based on interest-based ads policy pages of Facebook and Amazon is that they are both associated with the Digital Advertising Alliance & follow the same modus operandi *  The average age of an InMobian is 28 years *  It takes quite some time to draw a cartoon & color it * In October 1887, John Boyd Dunlop , a veterinary surgeon, developed the first practical pneumatic or inflatable tyre for his son's tricycle *  Henry Nich...