Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

* In May 2021, Microsoft extended the capabilities of the Power Apps Community Plan to meet the needs of developers and have rebranded it as the  Power Apps Developer Plan . Anyone with a work or school email address can sign up for the Power Apps Developer Plan.  Power Apps doesn't support email addresses provided by consumer email services or telecommunications providers. *  To reduce costs of Dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW), you can pause and resume compute resources on-demand.  You won't be charged for compute resources while the database is paused. However, you will continue to be charged for storage. *  In seven years Microsoft’s migration to the cloud is 96 percent complete and the list of lessons learned is long .  Microsoft Digital’s migration to the cloud decision tree  * AWS Support documents how to avoid incurring charges when using the AWS Free Tier and has multiple times proved to be supportive and reimburse the accidental charges, b...

Like many Indians, I learnt to read, write and speak three languages while at school. I know them enough to do well in exams and stay out of trouble. I could not study my mother tongue formally though I use it everyday. I keep looking for ways to improve my knowledge through self-learning and I'm thrilled that the Read Aloud feature in Immersive Reader now supports Telugu .   This feature is available currently in Word Online (View > Immersive Reader) through pleasant female and male (possibly) neural voices - "Shruti", "Mohan". Like Siri or Alexa, they have a distinct style.  I like the fact that I can read content with configurable text (Karaoke-style) & voice settings or listen to "it" while I finish my chores. I hope the Read Aloud feature supports Telugu within the Immersive Reader in the Edge browser too, soon. 

I've used the Google Bookmarks bookmarklet in the past to save interesting articles for future reference. I like adding some notes so that I know in the future why it was bookmarked. If it was a social media contact, I would like to record some interaction or personal details for future reference.  I found a code sample in a StackOverflow post that showed how to save a URL to Google Sheets. As I like spreadsheets, I liked the idea of saving bookmarks there along with my notes. Having all bookmarks at a centralized location rather than locally on an individual device gives you flexibility to access it from any device. I tweaked the original sample a bit (Github Gist link^)  to create what I call the "L8r" Bookmarklet to record an open web page's URL & its title as a row in Google Sheets - If you are familiar with Google Apps Script & bookmarklets, continue reading or else jump to the end of this post for detailed steps. If you wish to use this bookmarklet, ...

This Week I Learned -  * Multi-cloud refers to the use of two or more cloud computing systems at the same time. The deployment might use public clouds, private clouds, or some combination of the two. Multi-cloud deployments aim to offer redundancy in case of hardware/software failures and avoid vendor lock-in. A lot of enterprises call their virtualized environments private clouds, whether these are hosted in external datacenters or in self-owned, on premises datacenters. Merely combining solutions and services from different cloud providers and/or private clouds do not represent a true multi-cloud approach. There are different opinions on the definitions of hybrid IT and multi-cloud. One is that hybrid platforms are homogenous and multi-cloud are heterogenous. Homogenous meaning that the cloud solutions belong to one stack, for instance Azure public with Azure Stack on premises. Heterogenous then would be for instance combining Azure and AWS. Multi-cloud is a true mixed ...

In the very first paragraph of " The Tunnel of Time ", India's best-known satirical cartoonist R K Laxman  declares that the book is not an autobiography in the usual sense and he will just ramble on. I was hooked by the candor. In the 230+ engrossing pages that follow, he narrates in a refreshingly unconventional style the highlights of his very eventful life and long cartooning career. It is peppered with funny anecdotes and bon mots that will keep you laughing as you read. For years, I've marveled at his wit and keen eye for the absurd in capturing moment's in India's political history through his crisp "You Said It" cartoons. This book makes me admire R K Laxman even more. R K Laxman was the youngest of eight siblings, one of whom is the illustrious novelist R K  Narayan. After high school, Laxman applied to the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art hoping to concentrate on his lifelong interests of drawing and painting, but the dean of the school wr...

This Week I Learned -  *  Low-code is the evolution of rapid application development (RAD) to cloud and SaaS models. Note that Gartner defines a no-code application platform as an LCAP that only requires text entry for formulae or simple expressions. The LCAP market, therefore, includes no-code platforms. Furthermore, “no code” is not a sufficient criterion for tasks like citizen development, as many complex tooling configuration tasks are no code but still require specialist skills. * Temenos acquired Kony to bring low-code and world-class mobile development to its banking solutions. Temenos then exclusively licensed the Kony codebase to HCL Software to improve and market as a general-use low-code development platform in nonbanking industries. HCL has wasted no time in advancing the product, rebranding as HCL Volt MX. - Forrester Wave - Low-code development platforms, Q2 2021 *  Oracle Application Express (APEX) provides low-code application tooling ...

I love Boomarklets . Over the years, I have collected & used more bookmarklets than my Bookmarks bar in my desktop browser can accommodate in direct view. Boomarklets save time by reducing the number of steps it would otherwise take to accomplish a task such as sorting and filtering a column in a table on an external web page as the original table doesn't have that feature.  I fell into a bookmarklet rabbit hole recently and found two interesting bookmarklets in the Wikipedia entry for Boomarklets . The first bookmarklet performs a Wikipedia search on any highlighted text in a web browser window and takes you directly to the corresponding Wikipedia entry (if the keyword is meaningful, otherwise it shows the search results). Alternatively, you can click on the bookmarklet and provide the keyword you want to search for through prompt box that shows up. Drag this link to the Bookmarks bar or Favorites bar in Chrome or Edge to see how it works - Wikipedia Search Impressed with thi...

This Week I Learned -  *  Compared to AKS or EKS, GKE offers more control for cluster sizing, scaling, security, and automation.   *  Oracle Cloud Free Tier now includes two new Always Free services that enable rapidly creating low-code Oracle APEX applications and managing JSON document data * AWS Patch Manager automates the process of patching Windows and Linux managed instances. Use this feature of AWS Systems Manager to scan your instances for missing patches or scan and install missing patches. You can install patches individually or to large groups of instances by using Amazon EC2 tags. *  Dell EMC Storage options include all-flash, cloud and software-defined systems for entry, midrange and enterprise businesses. * A lot of successful start-ups launched with a different business model, and when they ran into trouble, they pivoted to something new. Like Instagram. That was a location-based check-in service when it started. - Silicon Valley, S1E8 * The firs...

I found a neat bookmarklet that calls a REST API to fetch geolocation details for a given IP address . The original source used an external service that serves JSON output over HTTP only.  As Chrome is more stringent about mixed content, the HTTP call was blocked and the desired output wasn't achieved. I changed just one line of the bookmarklet code to use the IPAPI lookup service to get it working again. Drag this link to the Bookmarks bar or Favorites bar in Chrome or Edge - IP Lookup To view geolocation details, selecting an IP address on any web page & then click on the bookmarklet or provide the IP address through prompt box that shows up.

Paraphrased summary of Google's guidance on Cloud migration for the real world - The popular “R” migration strategies ( Gartner's 5 R's ,  AWS's 6 R's ,  Citrix’s 7 R’s ,  Infosys’ 8 R’s ) aren’t really strategies at all.  An IT organization's policies and capabilities do more to determine the migration path than anything else and ultimately override any architect’s prior top-down planning. Almost no application falls squarely into any one of the migration strategies across all of its layers. To develop a real migration strategy, first answer why your organization is adopting the cloud. How you approach it follows from that. To take a more holistic approach to migration according to the Google Cloud Adoption Framework , determine whether your cloud migration needs are tactical, strategic or transformational. If your objective is to reduce cost with minimal change to your applications (i.e., tactical ) then take the migration factory approach.   If your objectiv...