Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Over at Sketchplanations.com , Jono Hey explains concepts, ideas, facts with a sketch He draws his "Sketchplanations" using Sketchbook Pro on an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil

Annotated comparison table derived from official Azure documentation - Ultra disk Premium SSD Standard SSD Standard HDD Disk type SSD SSD SSD HDD Scenario IO-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, top tier databases (for example, SQL, Oracle), and other transaction-heavy workloads. Production and performance sensitive workloads Web servers, lightly used enterprise applications and dev/test Backup, non-critical, infrequent access Max disk size 65,536 gibibyte (GiB) Range - Fixed sizes from 4 GiB up to 64 TiB 32,767 GiB 32,767 GiB 32,767 GiB Max throughput 2,000 MiB/s Range - 256 KiB/s for each provisioned IOPS to 2000 MBps per disk 900 MiB/s 750 MiB/s 500 MiB/s Max IOPS 160,000 Range - 300 IOPS/GiB to 160 K IOPS per disk 20,000 6,000 2,000 Notes Outbound data transfers (data going out of Azure data centers) incur billing for bandwidth usage Some of the current limitations: - Supported only in regions - Can only be u...

From Harvard Business Review articles on how to say "No" - To decline gracefully say: “Thank you so much for asking me to be part of this committee. I’m really honored, but I’ll need to respectfully decline because I’m at capacity right now. Thank you for your understanding.” When you’re asked to attend a meeting where your presence is not necessary: “I saw the meeting invite. I appreciate the notice that it’s happening. Jerry will be representing our team. I know he’ll do a great job and will report back on anything we need to know.” When someone asks you to do something that isn’t your job, you have every right to say no “Thanks so much for the invite, but I already have some other commitments.” Saying no to time commitments that don’t align with your priorities or needs can lead to a small amount of initial discomfort but save you hours of time in the end. “That’s not my area of expertise. I’m happy to give you Cheryl’s contact info, and I’m sure she would...

I like the self-help article summaries that Harvard Business Review posts on Twitter. The accompanying images are also brilliant. Listening better is key to collaborating better. Here’s how from the article Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration : * Ask expansive questions - Instead of saying to someone “Did you try asking others who’ve worked on similar projects for advice?”, ask “In what ways have you reached out to others for advice?” *   Focus on the listener, not yourself - We fail to listen because we’re anxious about our own performance. Be generous in acknowledging the points of others. Practice “active listening” -suppress the urge to interrupt or dominate a conversation, make it about yourself, or solve your conversation partners’ problems, and instead concentrating on the implications of their words. *   Engage in self-checks of their own tendencies -  hearing someone’s words is not enough; you also need to take in the speak...

This Week I Learned - * High Scale VMs that leverage Azure Premium Storage have a multi-tier caching technology called BlobCache . BlobCache uses a combination of the Virtual Machine RAM and local SSD for caching. By default, this cache setting is set to Read/Write for OS disks and ReadOnly for data disks hosted on Premium Storage. * Memory optimized VM series like Intel based Es_v3 series or AMD based Eas_v3 series offer high virtual CPU (vCPU) to memory ratio at a very low cost. * Majority of the OLTP workloads today come with 10 to 1 ratio for read and write *  Azure Ultra disks deliver high throughput (up to 2,000 MiB/s), high IOPS (up to 160,000), and consistent low latency disk storage for Azure IaaS VMs. Some additional benefits of ultra disks include the ability to dynamically change the performance of the disk, along with your workloads, without the need to restart your virtual machines (VM). Ultra disks are suited for data-intensive workloads such...

Azure Security and Compliance Blueprints are resources to assist you in building and launching cloud-powered applications that help you comply with stringent regulations and standards. Blueprints include: + Industry-specific overview and guidance + Customer responsibilities matrix + Reference architectures with threat models + Control implementation matrices + Automation to deploy reference architectures The following areas are covered: * Government Blueprints - FedRAMP, UK OFFICIAL, NIST SP 800-171, AU-PROTECTED, Additional Frameworks * Finance Blueprints - FFIEC, PCI-DSS * Healthcare Blueprints - HIPAA / HITRUST, UK NHS * Retail Blueprints - PCI-DSS

If your Facebook & Twitter friends tag you in embarrassing photos or routinely post updates that you're not interested in, there are ways to control it through Settings In Facebook, the Settings option in the desktop interface can be reach through the dropdown arrow of the top menu To prevent being tagged in Facebook, head to the Timeline & Tagging option under Settings and take action - You can stop seeing posts by "unfollowing" a FB friend while still staying friends by clicking on the ellipsis that leads to the context menu options - Similarly through Twitter Settings > Privacy and Safety option, you can prevent photo tagging and muting accounts and words. When you mute accounts, you won’t see their Tweets in your timeline. You can mute one word, phrase, @username, or hashtag at a time.

This Week I Learned - * Azure Front Door (AFD) service has built-in WAF and DDoS Protection. It has a dedicated designer, unlike Web Application Firewall (WAF). * Open API is a specification that documents all the endpoints and operations for RESTful APIs, and all input and output parameters. OpenAPI was originally called Swagger. *  It might be easy to deploy a container, but operationalizing containers at scale — especially in concert with microservices — is not for weekend enthusiasts . * Some Computer Vision APIs don't provide provide good results because of the Exif Orientation of the image provided as input * The most common format for image metadata is called Exif (short for Exchangeable image file format). The Exif-formatted metadata is shoved inside the jpeg file that your camera saves. You can’t see Exif data as part of the image itself, but it is readable by any program that knows where to look for it. Exif metadata is not a native part of the Jpeg fi...

On more than a couple of occasions & especially when I've eagerly wanted my purchases to arrive on time, Amazon has disappointed  with its "fulfillment experience". What makes the experience very bitter is that they wrongly blame you - "Item marked as rejected by you - returning to the seller." though it is some delivery issue at their end. Calling Customer Support doesn't help, they fake concern and promise to follow up. This is actually following by these notifications - "The product is returned to the seller" "Refund has been initiated" There is no guarantee that your purchase will reach you on time and no redressal beyond a refund if it is not delivered. To make it worse, your money is locked for a few days in case of pre-paid orders. If the purchase was made during any of their big campaigns, the refund will be minus the discounts. So much for its slogan of 'India ki apni dukaan'! I noticed there are others t...

I feel cartoons are a great way to express your thoughts and anger without getting into trouble...at least most of the time. A good cartoon is like a sugar coated pill, it can make bitter things palatable. I have a lot of cartoon ideas but most of them just stay in my head due to lack of time & mainly laziness to draw. Back in July, I read about a promising & nifty comic generator on Twitter and got hooked, line and sinker. 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. New features are constantly being added. Comic strips can be built with HTML code or even more easily in PowerPoint. As most of my cartoon ideas deal with millennials who are digital natives for whom the Internet is like food and air, I'm calling the comic strip series #Netizens View what I have created so far as a  slide ...

Highlights from the TED Talk by Sian Leah Beilock - Why we choke under pressure — and how to avoid it We worry about the situation, the consequences, what others will think of us. But what is surprising is that we often get in our own way precisely because our worries prompt us to concentrate too much. That's right -- we pay too much attention to what we're doing. When we're concerned about performing our best, we often try and control aspects of what we're doing that are best left on autopilot, outside conscious awareness, and as a result, we mess up. Ways to prevent choking under pressure - Avoid overattention / Paralysis by analysis - sing a song, take your mind off pesky details  Practise with simulations, Practice under stress - take a timed test, practice in front of a video camera or even a mirror Journaling or jotting down worries on paper before a stressful event can help to download them from mind Be aware of environment - people around us, social me...

Microsoft runs 100% of their SAP applications on Azure and is now in the process of moving the company to S/4HANA. S/4HANA is short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, meaning that it is the fourth version of SAP Business Suite, but is designed to run only on SAP HANA The lessons Microsoft teams learnt while moving SAP to Azure are documented in the free ebook " 15 lessons learned migrating SAP to the cloud " Key points: 1. Understand suitability and migration efforts. Before performing an IaaS migration, a best practice is to assess the complexity of your SAP workloads, the underlying infrastructure, the size of each workload and related databases (in terms of velocity, volume, and variety), and the requirements for seasonal elasticity. 2. Clean out your closet. Moving to the cloud is an opportunity to throw out the stuff you’re not using. When you owned that old on-premises server, it didn’t matter how much old stuff you had buried in there. When you’re on the cl...

This Week I Learned - *  Windows Virtual Desktop is a desktop and app virtualization service that runs on the cloud . * VS Code extension “ARM Template Viewer” lets you visualize your ARM Template code *  Microsoft Antimalware for Azure is not supported in Linux * Cloud Native Computing Foundation( CNCF ) was created by Google in partnership with Linux Foundation to encourage the development and collaboration of cloud native solutions.  Cloud Native Trail Map  is CNCF's recommended path through the cloud native landscape . *  Using target="_blank" with an external link to have it open in a new tab or window can compromise your website if external link has malicious intent . The whole parent web page can be accessed from the page opened through the anchor attribute target="_blank". Almost all browsers don't support access to the DOM if the domain of the website is not the same though the window object of the parent website can still be a...

This Week I Learned - *  With the direct-upload preview feature of Azure managed disks, you can bring your on-premises VHD files to Azure as managed disks .  Cross-region copyto another Azure region is also possible and powered by AzCopy v10 which is designed to support large-scale data movement in Azure. * A security hacker has discovered a key vulnerability in WhatsApp that allows hackers to steal data from users’ phone by sending them corrupt GIFs . The vulnerability, however, exists only in WhatsApp's Android based platform. * Most microprocessors—the chips that do the grunt work in computers—are built around designs, known as instruction-set architectures (isas), which are owned either by Intel, an American giant, or by Arm, a Japanese one. Intel’s isas power desktop computers, servers and laptops. Arm’s power phones, watches and other mobile devices. Almost every one of the 5.1bn mobile phones on the planet, for example, relies on an Arm-designed ISA. An ...