Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * With SQL Server Stretch Database, you can dynamically stretch warm and cold transactional data from  Microsoft SQL Server 2016 to Azure. Customers can also use Stretch Database with new Always Encrypted technology, which helps protect your data at rest and in motion * Azure Service Fabric helps developers build, deploy, and operate microservice architecture applications, reliably and at scale. *  Twitter recently reported that Avicoder, security researcher, discovered a security flaw within Twitter's Vine code that allowed for the download of Vine's entire source code. At the heart of the vulnerability is the Docker setup Twitter used to manage the Vine account. *  LanguageCourse.net  has a biased but useful comparison of the leading language learning apps out there * Google for Education has several useful resources for educators and students *  PCmover  software can  automatically transfers files, s...

Pluralsight is a benefit included with Visual Studio Professional, Test Pro, Enterprise and MSDN Platforms subscriptions . MSDN subscriptions offered through MPN, BizSpark, DreamSpark, MCT Developer Software and Services, and MCT Software and Services are not eligible for the Pluralsight benefit. As of July 1, 2016, the courses included are: Course Name / Author / Release Date / Duration VS Professional with MSDN, VS Professional – annual & Test Professional with MSDN (30 courses) VS Enterprise with MSDN, VS Enterprise - annual & MSDN Platforms (45 courses) Architecting Applications for the Real World in .NET ● ● ASP.NET 5: First Look ● ● ASP.NET MVC 5 Fundamentals ● ● Asynchronous C# 5.0 ● ● Automated ASP.NET MVC Testing: End to End ● Azure AD for Developers  / Sahil Malik / 22 Mar 2016 / 4h 52m  ● ● Becoming a .NET Developer ● ● Beginning Automated Testing of Xamarin Applications ● Building a Site ...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft Graph is a unified API endpoint, for accessing data, intelligence, and insights coming from the Microsoft cloud. * Pokémon Go, the " digitally enhanced bird-watching " game, has almost as many users as Twitter *  Catchpoint API monitor can mimic API calls made by mobile devices * What is Digital, anyway? - Digital means exploiting emerging technologies to create user- and customer-centric interfaces and data-driven decisions, leading to more agile, responsive, and competitive business models. * 52% of companies from the Fortune 500 list of 2000 no longer exist * The two-year old New Media Wing under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry mines data from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube to collect sentiments on current affairs and provide insight to senior Government officials on the mood in the social media on a daily basis. The analysis is done using Oracle's Social Relationship Manager  & Meltwater * ...

This Week I Learned - * With SQL Server Stretch Database, you can dynamically stretch warm and cold transactional data from Microsoft SQL Server 2016 to Azure. * To prevent users from accidentally signing in with Microsoft account credentials (hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com, etc.) or non-organizational credentials, you can leverage what’s known as a domain hint when you're navigating users to the Azure AD sign-in page. * HTTP/2 is a networking protocol for low-latency transport of content over the web. It originally started out from the SPDY protocol, now standardized as HTTP version 2. Recent versions of all popular web and mobile browsers except Opera Mini support HTTP/2. *  Because mobile devices do not have the same computation power as regular laptops and desktop computers, creating a mobile-friendly experience requires more than using a different CSS layout. It’s also about the quantity and size of the resources used. Too many resources, or resources that are...

Going by the quality of  hashtags & topics that show up on Twitter Trends, I definitely think they are gamed. Though I found Twitter Trends useful earlier, they seem meaningless to me now as I regularly see a lot of shady & silly trending topics. A while ago, Amit Agarwal wondered while tweeting if it takes just 63 tweets to make a topic trend ? The Twitter Trends FAQ informs that  Trends are determined by an algorithm and, by default, are tailored for you based on who you follow and your location. This algorithm identifies topics that are popular now, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help you discover the hottest emerging topics of discussion on Twitter that matter most to you. There doesn't seem to be any method in the trending madness though. I found a topic listed in Trends though it had a single tweet! To promote its business interests, it appears Twitter doesn't mind if a topic is promoted artificially. To...

Books: *  Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Machine Learning  [Free, PDF] (Published: April 2015, 237 pages) *  Microsoft Azure Machine Learning by Sumit Mund Presentations: *  Amy Kate  Videos: *  Channel 9 videos Tutorials: *  Building a classification model in Azure ML - Titanic passenger data set  *  Predicting Gas Prices Using Azure Machine Learning Studio  (April, 2015) *  Linear regression model that predicts the price of an automobile  (July 2014, Updated: 03/09/2016) *  Cortana Intelligence Gallery  - Azure ML community contributions *  ML Algorithms Labs: *  Mostafa Elzoghbi's DataCamp  -  4 Hands-on labs  (November 2016) * 11 Hands-on labs (March 2016) *  3 Hands-on Labs to build a real solution in Azure ML  focusing on three topics: an introduction to Azure ML, text analytics with R and Azure ML, and deploying predictive models wi...

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning environment “democratizes” the mysterious art of data science. It exposes this art to the masses by means of an easy-to-use visual interface that requires literally no programming and only a browser to use - and it is free! This table lists the features that the paid version has - Free Standard Azure Subscription Not Required Required Max Number of Modules per Experiment 100 Unlimited Max Experiment Duration 1 hour per experiment Up to 7 days per experiment with a maximum of 24 hours per module Max Storage Space 10 GB Unlimited - BYO Read Data from On-Premises SQL Preview No Yes Execution / Performance Single node Multiple nodes Production Web API No Yes SLA No Yes,  99.95% availability of API transactions for Request Response Service (RRS), 99.9% availability of API transactions for Batch Execution Service (BES) and management APIs Storage Does not require or allow separate storage ...

A while ago, YouTube  used to provide Bollywood & other regional language movies for free viewing. Now there are a bunch of OTT(Over-the-Top) sites available over the internet. Some (marked in bold) offer free fare with or without registration for part of their collection - Hotstar - is developed, built and maintained by Accenture on their Accenture Video Solution (AVS) platform  which relies on AWS. Hotstar is currently available only in Nepal and India MX Player Zee5 JioCinema Airtel Xstream  - partial access offered as a benefit for Airtel phone users Vi Movies & TV  - offered as a benefit for Vi phone users Spuul Eros Now Voot BIGFlix BoxTV Tubi  - an ad-supported video-on-demand service, a division of FOX Entertainment Discovery+   Amazon Prime Video Netflix SonyLiv YuppTV Hungama Hoi Choi Aha Alt Balaji Sun Nxt TVF Play ShemarooMe Also see: Search for Movies on Indian Streaming Sites Indian Comparison Shopping Sites  Lo...

This is an interesting promotion till July 2016 to get more people to try out Kindle ebooks in India. When you buy a Top Ramen Masala Noodles pack, you get a code on the Tastemaker that has to be SMS-ed to 9246016161. Shortly thereafter you get a link to claim a ebook worth Rs 100. A 420gm noodles pack that costs Rs 60 has 6 Tastemaker sachets & entitles you to Rs 600 worth of Kindle ebooks. The offer honors only 3 of the alphabetic codes embossed on the Tastemaker sachets to be SMS-ed from a single mobile number. So to avail all 6, you'd need 2 unique mobile numbers. The downside is that Amazon gets email addresses and phone numbers to mine while consumers can avail this offer a very limited number of times no matter how many noodle packs they purchase. I got myself the Kindle version of " How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life " by Scott Adams, " I Too Had a Dream " by Verghese Kurien, Gouri Salvi that tells...

This Week I Learned - * You can use Always Encrypted to help ensure that your sensitive data remains private and confidential while it's stored and queried in Azure SQL Database * Azure Automation schedules now support time zones and adjust for daylight saving based on the schedule’s time zone. *  Windows Server 2016 features support for containers. These are not Linux-based, but containers that run on Windows and run Windows on the inside. They allow you to run applications insulated from the rest of the system, within portable containers that include everything an application needs to be fully functional. As they did with Linux, containers will change the nature of the software supply chain for Windows users . *  Bing API v5 service differentiates between a DOS attack and QPS (queries per second) violation. If the service suspects a denial of service attack, the request will succeed (HTTP status code is 200 OK); however, the body of the response will be emp...

Microsoft Cognitive Services  is a collection of the following APIs: Academic Knowledge API  helps to interpret user queries for academic intent and retrieve rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). The MAG knowledge base is a web-scale heterogeneous entity graph comprised of entities that model scholarly activities: field of study, author, institution, paper, venue, and event. The MAG data is mined from the Bing web index as well as an in-house knowledge base from Bing. Bing Autosuggest API lets partners send a partial search query to Bing and get back a list of suggested queries that other users have searched on  Bing Image Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Images  Bing News Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/News  Bing Speech API is a cloud-based API that provides advanced algorithms to process spoken language. With this API, developers can add speech driven actions to...

This Week I Learned - * The F-Series Azure Virtual Machine instances are optimized for compute intensive workloads and are based on 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) processor, which can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.2 GHz with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0. These sizes have the same CPU performance as the Dv2-Series at a lower per hour price, making these sizes the best value in price performance on Azure. These virtual machines are available in 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 core sizes with 2 GB random-access memory (RAM) and 8 GB of local solid state drive (SSD) per CPU core and have options for both standard and premium storage optimized sizes. These sizes are best suited for scenarios such as analytics, web and gaming servers, and batch processing, and also those that do not require as much memory or SSD per CPU core.   *  Apache Spark for  Azure HDInsight offers customers a fully managed, secured, and highly available enterprise-ready Apache Spark solution. ...