Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Several months ago, I wanted to create a glossary of terms I come across as a Cloud Architect. I now think it is easier to compile a meta-list. So here goes the list which will be a work in progress - Microsoft Azure glossary Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services - key terms defined AWS Glossary  [ PDF ] Enterprise Architecture Glossary by California Technology Agency The Ultimate Tech Glossary for Recruiters & HR Managers  - StackOverflow

A slide from a IoT bootcamp session by Janakiram; click to enlarge Platform companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are building platforms to enable developers to build IoT solutions. Industry giants like Bosch, Cisco, Intel, and GE are bringing IoT to both consumers and enterprises. The convergence of devices, cloud and analytics is creating a perfect storm for developers and IT professionals.

This Week I Learned - * Azure Disk Encryption for Windows and Linux Standard IaaS virtual machines is now generally available to enable so customers can protect and safeguard the operating system disk and data disks at rest using industry-standard encryption technology. * Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server is a standalone runtime that lets customers create their own Service Fabric cluster on any set of Windows Server 2012 R2 or 2016 hosts, whether on premises or in any cloud. *  Azure SQL Database Advisor greatly reduces the time required to produce and implement index-tuning recommendations. Now customers can run their production workload in SQL Database for a day, and Advisor will offer relevant tuning recommendations to improve performance (and apply them when customers have enabled automated tuning) - Azure Newsletter * The Mirai botnet which was largely made up of so-called “internet of things” (IoT) devices such as digital cameras and DVR players was the pr...

Interesting points from John Markoff's article  As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential : DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary has announced that it had designed a program that “mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing text-to-speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50 percent.” Cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially While A.I. systems would make some things easier, they would also expand the vulnerabilities of the online world. If you don’t change your Captcha for two years, you will be owned by some machine vision algorithm Companies that offer customer support via chatbots are unwittingly making themselves liable to social engineering. Cybercriminals already exploit the best qualities in humans — trust and willingness to help others — to steal and spy. The ability to create artificial intelligence avatars that can fool people online will only make the problem ...

This Week I Learned - *  A reference architecture is a set of standards, best practices and guidelines for a given architecture that architects, consultants, administrators or managers refer to when making decisions on future implementations in that environment. Don't jump into Azure without a reference architecture. * Cloud is now the default standard for infrastructure * The idea of AWS, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service arm of Amazon.com, grew from a need to optimize the infrastructure of their e-commerce applications. *  If adaptive bots learn from every meaningful human interaction they have, then mistreatment and abuse become technological toxins. Bad behavior can poison bot behavior.  *  Azure Reference Architectures  - "content is really more of the building blocks for constructing an RA rather than a full RA" *  The pattern & practices team, a part of the Azure Customer Advisory Team (!, wasn't it an independent entity earlier),...

To know peak and off-peak traffic timings between locations, use the "Depart at" feature to know typical traffic patterns at different timings possibly based on historical data One scenario where this feature can be useful is when you're looking at new places to live & want to find the commute time for different options Bing Maps has this feature too... but Google Maps is one up with its "Arrive by" feature which will do the math to tell you what time you have to start if you have to reach a destination by a defined time.

Today's Dilbert strip reminded me of the current state of web development described in  How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 Related:  Software industry related comics

Guidelines, Recommendations, Best Practices from the official documentation: Azure App Service Azure Storage Azure Security Azure Network Security Azure SQL Database Security Azure Cloud Services Network Security Availability Scalability Resiliency Data Partitioning Caching Auto Scaling Monitoring WIP... Also see: FAQs on Azure Services from the official docs Azure Guidance by the Microsoft patterns & practices team Azure Solution Architectures Pragmatic Approach to Describing Solution Architectures " My tip for azure is LIMITS. Learn them all, very well "

Paraphrased from a Stackoverflow Q&A - * Use a minimal set of symbols : Boxes, arrows, circles, and lines get you a long way. Prefer simple things to more advanced modeling techniques - everybody understands boxes and arrows. Borrow from UML. Rectangles are things. Lines are associations. 3-D rectangles are servers. File-folder icons are packages. *  Think aloud while drawing to help the audience understand what you're drawing. *  Communicate with your audience . White-boarding is not one-way communication. If you are unsure whether a message got through or a drawing is understood, just ask. * When the audience is sufficiently small, get people close to the board, and make pens readily available so people can draw with you. This allows for better visually aided communication, and an even more efficient white-boarding session. * Take enough time to write and draw "neatly", but prefer a steady communication rate over perfect hand-writing. This is a...

This Week I Learned - * You can use temporal tables to track the full history of data changes directly in Azure SQL Database, without the need for custom coding. *  The insurance company ICICI Lombard uses Azure for its key applications *  Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS . It is free and open-source, although the official download is under a proprietary license. Visual Studio Code is based on Electron, a framework which is used to deploy Node.js applications for the desktop running on Blink layout engine. * Presentations including Data Science Summit 2016 Data Science for Absolutely Everybody from the inaugural edition of  Microsoft Machine Learning & Data Science Summit 2016 are on Channel 9 *  You can leverage 20 Cognitive Services APIs services in conjunction with the Microsoft Bot Framework to build an intelligent assistant. *  R and ML are built into SQL Server 2016...

From the Azure Boarding Guide for IT organizations (PDF) - Azure meets a broad set of international as well as regional and industry-specific compliance standards. Azure’s adherence to the strict security controls contained in these standards is verified by rigorous third-party audits that demonstrate Azure services work with and meet world-class industry standards, certifications, attestations, and authorizations. Microsoft Azure offers the following certifications for all in-scope services: * Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA) * Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) * Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Cloud Controls Matrix * EU Model Clauses * US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 21 P 11 * Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) * Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) * Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2 * ...

If the brightness control is set to zero on an Android 5.x device which has Adaptive brightness setting, it may result in display being turned off completely. Even if you restart the device, the boot-up animation will appear but the screen will go dark after booting up. To recover from this issue, use another phone's flash light and direct it on the the front camera and light sensor . This will make the screen light up and you can proceed to change the brightness setting to normal. You can choose to turn off the Adaptive brightness setting y going to Settings > Display and disabling that option. The Adaptive brightness setting is enabled by default in Android 5.x. It optimizes the brightness level for available light.

Have you come across a scenario where a hyperlink within a web page leads you to a PDF file or Office document, you don't want to leave the browser at that point & would prefer reading it later? Or maybe as you're browsing this web page through your mobile browser, you'd prefer archiving these files to Google Docs. Google Docs Viewer provides a way to open a web hosted PDF file or Office document within your browser and ALSO save that file directly to Google Drive without having to download it to your PC/device and then upload it to Google Drive. The trick is to append the URL of the web hosted PDF file or Office document to Google Docs Viewer service - https://docs.google.com/viewer?url= https://aka.ms/SQLtoAzure/MobPDF After that file is opened within the browser, click the "Save to Drive" icon (as shown in the screenshot) in the header of Google Docs Viewer to save it to your Google Drive.

As I had predictive text keyboards with continuous gesture typing (like the Swype keyboard) by default on every smartphone I've used (Samsung, ASUS ZenPhone, Lumia ), I found it strange that a new Android device that I started using, Lyf Wind 3 , did not have it. While searching for an Android keyboard, I learnt interesting facts about gesture typing keyboards - * Swype keyboard app isn't free * The two popular free keyboards currently are Swiftkey & Google Keyboard & they have a lot of similar features - Feature Swiftkey Google Keyboard Gesture Typing Yes Yes Number Row No Optional Learns from You Yes Yes Next-Word Prediction Yes Yes Updated Dictionary Yes Yes Dictionary Sync Yes Yes Themes Yes Yes...

This Week I Learned - * Amazon Web Services, is now on pace to generate more than $10 billion in revenue this year * What makes the Amazon Echo stand out is a technology called a far-field microphone that can make out someone’s voice from across a room, even when there is background clatter. And the Echo is always in position to listen for the so-called wake word — Alexa. The vast majority of Echo’s intelligence is contained in AWS, and most of the apps that developers have built for Alexa run on the cloud service -  NY Times * A start-up called TrackR that makes wireless beacons for finding misplaced keys and wallets, recently released an app for Alexa that allows people to find their items with voice commands. * 20 percent of Google searches on mobile phones are done by voice * Uber, which started as a company around the time that Google started work on autonomous vehicles, is already testing self-driving cars to pick up customers in Pittsburgh. ...

Source: Dil b ert Google CEO Sundar Pichai is positioning his company for an “AI-first world,” while Microsoft has been wedding intelligence to business data for nearly 20 years (Forbes India) Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft have joined hands to create an organization to set the ground rules for protecting humans — and their jobs — in the face of rapid advances in artificial intelligence - Partnership on AI The group released eight tenets that are evocative of Isaac Asimov’s original “ Three Laws of Robotics ” which appeared in a science fiction story in 1942. Asimov’s rules are: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. The Partnership on AI shares the following tenets: We wi...

This Week I Learned - *  VNet peering is a mechanism that connects two virtual networks in the same region through the Azure backbone network. Once peered, the two virtual networks appear as one for all connectivity purposes. They are still managed as separate resources, but virtual machines in these virtual networks can communicate with each other directly by using private IP addresses. The traffic between virtual machines in the peered virtual networks is routed through the Azure infrastructure much like traffic is routed between VMs in the same virtual network. Some of the benefits of using VNet peering include: - A low-latency, high-bandwidth connection between resources in different virtual networks. - The ability to use resources such as network appliances and VPN gateways as transit points in a peered VNet. - The ability to connect a virtual network that uses the Azure Resource Manager model to a virtual network that uses the classic deployment model and enable full co...