Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Azure Purview aids in managing and governing your on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data efficiently. * Great talk by Scott Hanselman on how he migrated 17 years of infrastructure to Azure . *  In 2000, Amazon's biggest expense was datacenter - expensive Sun servers. Amazon spent a year ripping out Sun & replacing with HP/Linux, which formed the foundation for AWS . *  5 situations where you should not invest in AI When you have simpler alternatives When you don’t have enough data. Most AI algorithms require a high volume of data to spot patterns and gain intelligence. Where a specific area of AI works well only in carefully controlled scenarios.  When costs exceed the business benefits When a business scenario needs human understanding and empathy *  Sunbird is an open learning infrastructure that is configurable, extendable, and highly modular. It is a set of core microservices which have been un...

Developer Tools in Chrome & Edge offers convenient ways to probe the content of web pages. Dev Tools can be invoked for specific pages open within the browser by using the F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I or the browser menu. To extract just the text of a HTML list or dropdown identified by id property value of "country" with JavaScript & Dev Tools, use the following from the Console tab - document.querySelector('#country').innerText textContent returns the text content of all elements, while innerText returns the content of all elements, except for <script> and <style> elements.  Snippets  are a feature of the Sources pane in the Developer Tools. It allows you to write small scripts to execute in the context of the current page using a built-in editor. Common tasks can be scripted and kept in a collection for re-use later.

Gartner has assessed the capabilities of selected hybrid array & solid-state array storage systems against key use cases that are associated with primary storage workloads.  A hybrid array is a form of hierarchical storage management that combines hard disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state drives (SSDs) for I/O speed improvements.  Solid-state arrays are the primary external enterprise storage solution for demanding, transaction-oriented primary storage workloads associated with structured data. Gartner projects that advancements in NAND flash and storage class memory (SCM), along with the continued adoption of NVM, are accelerating the transition from hybrid arrays to SSAs to meet demanding input/output operations per second (IOPS) and latency service-level objectives (SLOs). Gartner has rated products from popular vendors based on the following capabilities - Performance - the collective term that is often used to describe IOPS, bandwidth (GB/second) and response times ...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure vWAN provides *managed hub and spoke topology* facilitating any-to-any connectivity * An n-gram is a statistical analysis of how frequently something, such as a word or phrase, appears in writing or speech. The Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that allows you to generate n-grams and compare how often certain words appear.  can: See which spelling is considered standard between two variants. Check whether a variant spelling is still used in modern English. Compare the use of words and spellings in American and British English. Check whether a term is typically capitalized (e.g., Brownian motion vs. brownian motion ). * Hitachi Vantara was created in 2017 as the combination of three previously separate Hitachi organizations: the Hitachi Data Systems storage subsidiary, the Pentaho data integration and analytics business, and the Hitachi Insight Group. The company sells a range of block, file and object datacenter storage systems.  * Nidhi...

 This Week I Learned -  *  Migrate for Anthos is one of the most scalable approaches to modernize applications with Kubernetes orchestration, image-based container management and DevOps automation. Migrate for Anthos automatically generates a container image, a Dockerfile for day-2 image updates and application revisions, Kubernetes deployment YAMLs and (where relevant) a persistent data volume onto which the application data files and persistent state are copied. This automated, intelligent extraction is significantly faster and easier than manually modernizing the app, especially when source code or deep application rebuild knowledge is unavailable. Unlike VMs, all containers on a single node share one copy of the operating system and don’t each require their own OS image and vCPU, resulting in a much smaller memory footprint and CPU needs. This means more workloads running on fewer compute resources.  *  The Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance in the ...

Twitter Moments lets you curate a set of public Tweets from anyone all at one place. Twitter’s recommendation is to keep Moments, the feature to stitch together multiple tweets into slideshow-like stories, around 10 tweets long. From my experience, there may be an upper limit of 50+ in a single collection but managing the list gets messy and some Tweets in the list may disappear or the order may get jumbled. I found that Twitframe allows us to display Embedded Tweets on websites to dynamically show retweet and favorite counts, inline media/card data while isolating the Javascript and DOM manipulation to an embedded iframe. This is an independent service not affiliated with Twitter in any way. No guarantee of availability or security is made by using this service by Twitframe. I used this service to build a slide show of any collection of public Tweets. Check a sample and the Github Gist of the code If you enable  Tracking prevention in Microsoft Edge , the code doesn't work...

 This Week I Learned -  *  Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS), a cloud access security broker (CASB) , helps you gain control over shadow IT with tools that give you visibility into the cloud apps and services used in your organization, asses them for risk, and provide sophisticated analytics. Source: SharePointTalk.net * Azure AD Conditional Access  What If tool allows you to select a user, the app that user is trying to access, and the conditions of that sign-in to see which policies will apply. The simulation estimates the impact this sign-in has on your policies and generates a simulation report.  * Defense in depth means we don’t rely on a single security mechanism, but have multiple layers of security instead. * The LinkedIn breach in which 6.5 million user accounts were compromised was caused by passwords being stored as unsalted SHA-1 hashes . *  The Periodic Table of M365 * A Helm chart is a collection of files that describe a related set ...