Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Microsoft provides handy URL shortcuts to key Azure documentation pages . All you have to remember is this - aka.ms/Azure/ <the thing> I made it a little more simpler for myself by configuring the custom search engine option in Chrome browser. So now to jump to the Azure Pricing Calculator, I use: az {tab} pricing This custom search engine option in Chrome is invaluable when websites provide a standard URL pattern. In case of this Azure Shortcuts feature, the keyword suffix is what keeps changing & we can use %s to handle this dynamically for us - aka.ms/Azure/ %s Here is how I customized this through Chrome Settings: 1. Click on "Manage search engines" within Settings 2. Click on Add button to configure aka.ms  3. To invoke the aka.ms URLs, I have chosen "az" as the "wake word"

This Week I Learned - *  SQL Server Azure VMs can use Automated Patching to schedule a maintenance window for installing important windows and SQL Server updates automatically, take advantage of Automated Backup. High availability can be configured using SQL Server Availability Groups * Matt Felton  has shared his AZ 300 & AZ 500 exam prep notes and it's very useful *  Employers are mining the data their workers generate to figure out what they’re up to, and with whom. People/workplace analytics tools like TrustSphere help with the analysis of digital interactions. It doesn’t look at the content of emails or chats but it can identify which employees have strong relationships with peers. It can  highlight an organization’s internal influencers by identifying those whose messages get quick responses and who have strong, ongoing relationships with peers throughout the company - WSJ * Usually when a person eats, their blood glucose rises. I...

Inspired by articles on NatGeo , Gates Notes and the resilience of The Flying Vampires, I created this infotoon with Comicgen & Powerpoint - Click image for enlarged view. Mosquito silhouette image courtesy of Elias Schäfer, Pixabay Mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world , humans come second Image courtesy of Gates Notes Of the 3,500 species that researchers have identified so far, only a few hundred feed on human blood, including the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. In the mosquito world, males live off plants. The female is the biter, the worker, the source of human peril; she lives off plants too, but all those blood nutrients are for her eggs, the nourishing and laying of which are the great project of her short, purposeful, and somewhat solitary life. A single mating may be all an Ae. aegypti needs; she stores sperm inside her body, fertilizing separate batches of eggs as needed, up to several hundred at a time. Five or six occasions...

This Week I Learned - *  A cloud broker is a software application that facilitates the distribution of work between different cloud service providers. This type of cloud broker may also be called a cloud agent. *  Azure Cloud Shell can you let you work with over two dozen pre-installed tools * Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM and SOAR solution * PowerBuilder is tool owned by SAP (following its acquisition from Sybase in 2010) that simplifies the building of data driven, business applications. On July 5, 2016, SAP and Appeon entered into an agreement whereby Appeon would be responsible for developing, selling, and supporting PowerBuilder. * The unemployment rate in the US is at an 18-year low. More open jobs exist than unemployed workers, the first time that’s happened since the Labor Dept. began keeping such records in 2000. * The Aadhaar design did not envisage using it for building online social, financial and asset registries, electronic health record...

Option B is a book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, and Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton. The authors have presented key points from the book in a 20 minute LinkedIn course -  Option B: Building Resilience Here is a summary from the transcript - When something bad happens - big or small, how much are we able to overcome it? Or, how well do we persevere in the face of it? Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity. How do I build resilience? - It's a skill set that we work on throughout our lives. It's something that we can build long before we face any kind of tragedy or difficulty. We can build resilience over time by changing how we process negative events Severe adversity brings real perspective which is about finding appreciation and recognizing, my life could be worse, and realizing how fortunate you are to have the good things that you do in your life. Resilience can be strengthened by expressing gratitude for the g...

This Week I Learned - * Microsoft Azure now allows users to bring in their 32-bit Windows Operating systems over to Azure. * The Azure Service Bus Relay service enables you to securely expose services that run in your corporate network to the public cloud. You can do so without opening a port on your firewall, or making intrusive changes to your corporate network infrastructure. * Microsoft's answer to the integrated on-premises and cloud development story is to go with an Azure Stack system. Similarly, the folks at Amazon want you to buy their hardware and run a clone of AWS in your data center. Google thinks you can get what you need by running GKE On-Prem on top of VMware vSphere on existing hardware with Anthos at significantly lower cost than either AWS or Microsoft. *  Two ways to think about and categorize the machine learning algorithms - by their learning style, by their similarity * British Airways has been fined more than £183 million after computer...

List of the different VM sizes: Azure VM Series Type Best Suited For A-series Av2, Amv2 General Purpose development and test servers, low traffic web servers, small to medium databases, proof-of-concepts, and code repositories. B-series General Purpose development and test servers, low-traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers; for workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously D-series D, Dv2, DSv2, Dv3, DSv3 (Hyper-Threaded), DC General Purpose enterprise-grade applications, relational databases, in-memory caching, and analytics. DC series instances enable customers to build secure enclave-based applications to protect their code and data while it’s in use. Dv2-series 11-15, DSv2-series 11-15 Memory optimized enterprise-grade applications that demand faster vCPUs, better temporary storage performance, or have higher memory demands.  E-series Ev3, Esv3 (hype...

The Five Things series on MSDN Channel 9 anchored mostly by Burke Hollands has informal answers by Microsoft experts to interesting questions all in about 5 minutes along with some no holds barred, light banter. Here is the short version of Five Things You Didn't Know Python Could Do from the cleaned up subtitles file : #1. Python empowers scientists. Scientists use a ton of available AI and ML tools in Python. There's SciPy, Pandas, Pytorch, lots of other things and then on Azure you can use hosted Jupiter Notebooks. They're called Azure notebooks #2. Python is used to create a lot of video games and art. The most famous example here is Eve Online. It's a massive multiplayer game #3. You could do home automation with Python. There is a Python package called Home Assistant and it's a really popular home automation Library and you can use that to make a home automation system that focuses on security and privacy first. You can run it on a Raspberry Pi at ho...

The mistakes referenced below are based on the feedback from Turbonomic cloud experts who have guided thousands of our customers from their on-premises data centers to the cloud: Building Cloud Environments on a Shaky Foundation  Cost Reduction as the Primary Driver of Cloud Migration (instead of Focusing on Applications) Lack of Understanding of the Entire Cloud Catalog & Discounting Mechanisms Ignoring that the Reality is Hybrid Locking-In with One Cloud Provider Lifting & Shifting Workloads Without Optimizing Treating Optimization as a One Time or Time Bound Exercise Bringing the Kitchen Sink with You - rebuild is quicker and cheaper and in some cases Not Investing in Training & Enablement Changing Your Tech Stack, But Not Your Culture

This Week I Learned - * Using this nice  Front-End Checklist will ensure all the front-end website quality parameters are taken care of. * The three major use cases for running containers in the cloud include running microservices, batch jobs, and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) of applications. * To run containers in the cloud, you can either spin up your own containers on VMs provisioned for you, or let the cloud provider create and manage them for you by subscribing to its container service (like Azure Kubernetes Service). If you’re going the PaaS route, you can start with a container-based PaaS, such as Tectonic, OpenShift, or Cloud Foundry. * Azure Kubernetes Service is fully Linux-based *  The Azure Cosmos DB Python SDK is the only SDK that supports Azure Table storage in Python. This SDK connects with both Azure Table storage and Azure Cosmos DB Table API. * Ronald Wayne , who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ...

Comicgen is a free comic generator from the good folks at Gramener. It allows you to create you own stories & cartoon strips with configurable emotions, angles & poses for a bunch of pre-built characters. In its simplest form, the  opensource comic library  can be consumed through just HTML and requires just a text editor to get started! It also comes with a JavaScript API . I'm bowled over by the elegance of the idea of creating cartoons with plain HTML! Here's the source code for the first comic strip I created with Comicgen & the generated strip - click image for enlarged view

If you have to download files all files whose links are listed on a web page, this scripted method can accomplish the task faster (after some customization to the specific context) from the console tab of the Developer Tools feature of popular browsers - Array.prototype.forEach.call(     document.querySelectorAll("a.download[href*=x64]"),     function (a) {         console.log("wget " + a.href);     }); With jQuery, it's even more terser - $("a.download[href*=x64]").each(function () {     console.log("wget " + this.href); });

Paraphrased summary of Azure Container Registry (ACR) features from the official documentation - Azure Container Registry is a managed Docker registry service based on the open-source Docker Registry 2.0. Azure Container Registry (ACR) is available in multiple service tiers with several options for aligning to the capacity and usage patterns of your private Docker registry in Azure. Azure Container Registry SKUs Basic Standard Premium Price per day A cost-optimized entry point for developers learning about Azure Container Registry. Basic registries have the same programmatic capabilities as Standard and Premium (such as Azure Active Directory authentication integration, image deletion, and webhooks). However, the included storage and image throughput are most appropriate for lower usage scenarios. Standard registries offer the same capabilities as Basic, with increased included storage and image throughput. Standard registries should satisfy the needs of most ...