Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Google has made available the same technical writing course  that Google engineers also take. While the overall material is very useful, the following points appealed to me: * State key points at the start of each document. * Determine what your target audience already knows and what your target audience needs to learn. * Understand the curse of knowledge. * Break long topics into appropriate sections . * Prefer active voice to passive voice. Active voice is usually clearer & shorter. Active Voice Sentence = actor + verb + target Passive Voice Sentence = target + verb + actor Active: "He was born in 1980" Passive: "1980 was the year he was born in" * Adjectives and adverbs can make technical documentation sound dangerously like marketing material.  Refactor amorphous adverbs and adjectives into objective numerical information . * Extra lines of documentation introduce additional points of failure. * Focus each sentence on a single idea.  one ...

Gartner defines a Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms (DSML) platform as a core product and supporting portfolio of coherently integrated products, components, libraries and frameworks (including proprietary, partner and open source). Its primary users are data science professionals. Rating of vendors in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms for 2020 : Leaders - Alteryx - SAS - Databricks - TIBCO Software - MathWorks - Dataiku Challengers - IBM Visionaries - Microsoft - DataRobot - KNIME - RapidMiner - Google - H20.ai - Domino Niche Players - Altair - Anaconda

Fortune magazine partnered with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Institute of Design (ID) to poll educators, influencers, freelance designers, and corporate design teams on the creations they consider truly great and identified 100 iconic designs of modern times . Unlike a similar compilation Fortune did in 1959, the current list features not just products and objects but also systems and services. The ranking is based on five criteria - how adaptable, equitable, usable, impactful, transformational the products are. The 2020 list - 1. iPhone Designed by Apple, 2007 2. Macintosh - defined the personal computer category Designed by Apple, 1984 3. Google Search Engine Designed by Google, 1997 4. Eames Fiberglass Armchair Designed by Ray + Charles Eames, 1950 5. Sony Walkman TPS-L2 Designed by Norio Ohga, 1979 6. OXO Good Grips Peeler - an ergonomically superior peeler that Farber created for his arthritic wife. Designed by Sam Farber + Smart ...

This Week I Learned - * To assess on-prem servers and migrate them to Microsoft Azure, you can use the Azure Migrate Server Assessment Tool and the Azure Migrate Server Migration Tool . * Azure Dedicated Host provides a single-tenant physical server to run your Azure Virtual Machines for Windows Server and Linux. With Azure Dedicated Host, you can address specific compliance requirements while increasing visibility and control over your underlying infrastructure. You can reduce costs by buying Azure Dedicated Hosts reservations . *  Security Best Practices for Azure Solutions  [PDF] * Comedy writers seek the funniest results, horror writers strive for the scariest, and technical writers aim for the clearest. In technical writing , clarity takes precedence over all other rules. *  For encoding it’s videos YouTube uses VP9 – an open-source codec that compresses videos with HD & 4K quality at half the bandwidth used by other codes. * YouTube will default...

This Week I Learned - * Microsoft Translator API is an ISO and HIPAA compliant neural machine translation (NMT) service * Translator Text API Version 3 is GDPR compliant as a processor and satisfies all ISO 20001 and 20018 as well as SOC 3 certification requirements. * Azure Form Recognizer is a cognitive service that uses machine learning technology to identify and extract key-value pairs and table data from form documents. It then outputs structured data that includes the relationships in the original file. Unsupervised learning allows the model to understand the layout and field data without manual data labeling or intensive coding. You can also do supervised learning with manually labeled data. Models trained with labeled data can perform better and can work with more complicated documents. * Form Recognizer keeps your data private. The custom training performed on your documents is not used by Microsoft to improve the Form Recognizer model. * Form Recognizer can be use...

Newer versions of Microsoft Edge & Chrome (versions 75 & above) have a “Reader” mode that when enabled can remove unnecessary background clutter on a web-page making it easier to read This experimental feature can be activated by heading over to "chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode" Restart the browser Subsequently, when you want to view a page in Reader mode in Chrome, click on the three-dot menu button in the upper right, and then choose "Distill page" to view content without distractions. You can choose to toggle the view and change it night-mode based on your preference

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Blueprints : Templates for quick, repeatable creation of fully governed cloud subscriptions. Simplify largescale Azure deployments by packaging key environment artifacts, such as Azure Resource Manager templates, role-based access controls, and policies, in a single blueprint definition. *  David das Neves has nicely compiled learning resources needed for various Azure Certification exams * Amazon offers a free Product Advertising API. PA API version 4 will be shutdown and from March 9, 2020,  PA-API 5.0 has to be used. PA-API 5.0 supports the lighter and slimmer JSON format over XML supported earlier. It is possible to look up for Item using EAN/UPC/ISBN * Some video players now offer searching with subtitles * The tradition of a ‘Hello, World’ program goes back at least to 1978. *  Around 1900, pushover meant "an easy job or task," and by 1922 it also referred to people who are easily taken advantage of. *  ...

While images make web pages better looking, some sites have obtrusive image ads that spoil the browsing experience. Viewing popular websites without images will be weird and there is a way to selectively un-block images for those desired sites. If you're also concerned about conserving bandwidth, here is how you can disable images in Google Chrome. You can go to Settings | Privacy and security > Site Settings > Permissions > Images and then change the slider from "Show All" to "Do not show any images" Alternatively, copy-paste this URL to jump to that setting directly - chrome://settings/content/images ...and then change the slider from "Show All" to "Do not show any images" to apply the setting globally to every site that'll be opened subsequently. When you visit your favorite website, locate the icon in the address bar that says "Images were blocked on this page" and click on it. In the dialog box that...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft Cloud Workshop (MCW) has useful presentation decks and hands-on lab guides. * Mainframe to AWS Migration related tools like Model9, Blu Age, Attunity are available through AWS Marketplace and when they are used, there can be a single bill through AWS. *  An unexpected fallout of the Reserve Bank of India’s moratorium on Yes Bank was a disruption of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) offered by fintech firms, which accounts for the bulk of digital transactions in the country . UPI transactions were down by about 40% on Friday, largely because PhonePe — which sees 20 million transactions a day — could not operate as it is plugged into Yes Bank to provide UPI-based account-to-account transfer services.  Yes Bank was one of the few banks with an online platform for developers and was the most aggressive among banks to build relationship with fintechs . Non-banking payments firms need a banking partner to access UPI. For Ph...

Update [20-Aug-21]  - This bookmarklet originally worked in the way described for an older version of Edge.  Edge has since changed to work more like Chrome, so while most of the article is still relevant the re-purposed links won't open automatically. The links changed by bookmarklet have to be copied and pasted. --- I love the " Reading View " feature in Edge. It lets you focus on the main content of a web page by removing irrelevant parts. Reading view can be toggled on or off from the Reading view (book icon) button on the address bar (or with Ctrl + Shift + R). I noticed that when a web page is open in Reading view, there is a " read: " operator prefixed to the URL in the address bar. This made me wonder if there is a way to have all pages open in Reading view by default. This cannot be done automatically but I figured an initial trigger can be provided through a Bookmarklet  ( from more info, check my other Bookmarklet posts ). So if you're on th...