Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Google's hybrid cloud platform Anthos will let you manage workloads running on third-party clouds like AWS and Azure. Anthos is a service based on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).  AWS Outposts & Azure Stack are the other hybrid cloud options . * The Read Aloud feature in Microsoft Edge on Android provides Text to Speech functionality * In the scramble to model Covid-19 spread and fatalities, data scientists — and the officials who use their models — would do better to recognize and admit what they cannot do, rather than jury-rig something that could end up doing more harm than good - Cathy O’Neil , mathematician, professor, hedge-fund analyst, data scientist, author of “ Weapons of Math Destruction ” * RJio has 388 million users while WhatsApp has 400 million in Indian $5.7 B *  Vasco da Gama , a Portuguese explorer was the first European to reach India by sea in 1498. Da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India was signific...

This Week I Learned - * While replicating a VM in the Azure Migrate project, Azure Migrate Server Migration automatically provisions several different resources in the same resource group as my project. - Service Bus because Azure Migrate Server Migration uses the Service Bus to send replication orchestration messages to the appliance. - A gateway storage account because server migration uses the gateway storage account to store state information about the VMs being replicated. - Log storage account holds the replication logs that the Azure Migrate appliance uploads. - Key vault  - Azure Migrate appliance uses the key vault to manage connection strings for the Service Bus, as well as access keys for the storage accounts that are used in replication. *  Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something. *  Top ten technology books for 2020 according to Gigabit magaz...

Paraphrased summary of the chapter "Copycats in the Coliseum" & "China’s Alternate Internet Universe" from the book AI Superpowers by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee - Silicon Valley and China have contrasting cultures Silicon Valley startups tend to be mission-driven . Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations. Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven . Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. The core motivation for China’s market- driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there. While Socrates encouraged his students to seek truth by questioning everything, ancient Chinese philosophers counseled people to follow the rituals of sages from the ...

Below is a summary of the article  What Makes a Good Mobile Site?  which uncovers 25 mobile site design principles, grouped into five categories: Home page and site navigation - Keep calls to action front and center - Keep menus short and sweet - Make it easy to get back to the home page - Don't let promotions steal the show Site search - Make site search visible - Ensure site search results are relevant - Implement filters to narrow results - Guide users to better site search results Commerce and conversion - Let users explore before they commit - Let users purchase as guests - Use existing information to maximize convenience - Use click-to-call buttons for complex tasks - Make it easy to finish on another device Form entry - Streamline information entry - Choose the simplest input - Provide visual calendar for date selection - Minimize form errors with labeling and real-time validation - Design efficient forms Usability and form factor - Optimize...

Summary of a HBR article " How to Increase Your Influence at Work ": * Develop business-critical expertise and knowhow and don’t keep your knowledge under wraps *  Build connections - that way, they won’t impute negative intentions or motives to you. *  Listen before you try to persuade - ask colleagues for their perspectives and advice and make it clear to your colleagues that you value their opinions. *  Give people what they want - Do your homework to find out what they need to hear and what will capture their attention. If your proposal is fundamentally self-interested, people won’t line up *  Mind your body language (and your tone) - people are constantly assessing whether to trust you or not *  Map a strategy -  create a “power map” - an org chart of decision makers related to your issue. Then begin to think about how and when you will approach these various colleagues. “Who might be threatened by your plans, and how can you b...

The Stuff Americans Are Made of: The Seven Cultural Forces That Define Americans-A New Framework for Quality, Productivity and Profitability attempts to describe the psychology of America. According to the book, the seven cultural forces are: 1. Insistence on choice 2. Pursuit of impossible dreams 3. Obsession with big and more 4. Impatience with time 5. Acceptance of mistakes 6. Urge to improvise 7. Fixation on what's new

This Week I Learned - *  Direct upload provides a simplified workflow to copy an on-premises VHD directly into an empty managed disk. You can use it to upload to Standard HDD, Standard SSD, and Premium SSD managed disks of all the supported sizes. Direct Upload can be leveraged to restore customers’ backups to managed disks without having to bother about storage account management. The Azure Backup support for large managed disks is powered by direct-upload. Customers can use AzCopy to copy an on-premises VHD into an empty managed disk and also copy a managed disk to another Azure region for regional migration or expansion. Azure Storage Explorer exposes Direct Upload via an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), enabling you to migrate your local VHD files to managed disks in few clicks. Moreover, it also leverages Direct Upload to enable you to copy and migrate your managed disks seamlessly to another Azure region. * The Coverage tab in Chrome DevTools can help yo...

This Week I Learned - *  Nills has shared the lessons he learnt co-authoring the book   Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure  [PDF] *  PowerPoint slides & videos on Microsoft security architecture recommendations *  The Twitter Revenue Data Platform engineering team migrated their on-prem architecture to Google Cloud . The revenue for Twitter comes from 2 main categories - Ads & Data licensing and other services. The 2019 revenue was $3.46 billion, which is an increase of 14% year-over-year. * The first-generation  Nexus  7 is a mini tablet computer  co-developed by Google and Asus  that came with Android Jelly Bean *  Some Android models come with a built-in IR blaster, and with the right app, you can use your phone or tablet control your TV * According to data released by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India show non-life insurance penetration in the country is 0.9 percent. * Of all the sh...