Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

 Notable flight booking sites for travel within India - Booking.com  (Founded in 1996 in Amsterdam) Cleartrip (acquired by Flipkart in 2021) EaseMyTrip  (2008) Expedia Flipkart Travel  (parent company founded in 2007) goibibo Kayak Skyscanner Google Flights IRCTC.co.in ixigo MakeMyTrip  (founded in the year 2000 by Deep Kalra) redBus  (founded in 2006, acquired by ibibogroup) Via  (incorporated in 2007) Yatra.com  (2006) akbartravels.com  (launched in 2007) Domestic flight services: IndiGo  (market share of 53.9% as of April, 2021, launched in 2006) Spicejet Go First (Wadia Group company incorporated in 2004) Vistara  (JV of Tata Sons Private Limited and Singapore Airlines Limited (SIA) incorporated in 2013) Air India

This Week I Learned -  * Some websites use CSS property user-select: none;  to prevent the text of an element from being selected. Changing it to  user-select: text; through browser Developer Tools can enable selection. * Microsoft uses more than 30 viability and risk-based criteria to evaluate the placement of each of the three Availability Zones to identify both significant individual risk as well as collective and shared risk between Azure Availability Zones—without compromising the latency perimeter of less than two milliseconds.  *  Windows Server containers are available on AKS . To run Windows Server containers in AKS, you create a node pool that runs Windows Server as the guest OS. Windows Server containers can use only Windows Server 2019. * VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a popular disaster recovery solution. SRM for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) automates and orchestrates failover and failback between an on-premises environment and AVS, or...

Marjane Satrapi's memoir Persepolis in the form of powerful drawings in black & white is like nothing I've seen before. She prefers to call it a comic book rather than a graphic novel . This comic book collection ( from 2000 & 2004 ) has also been made into a 96-minute animated movie in 2007 and both  the formats have won rave reviews.  The Iran-born author's candid & often humorous narration of her years growing up during the Iranian revolution makes a sad & depressing story interesting and informative.  This book is not for the easily offended.  While the book is engrossing enough for a single reading, for students of comic art & aspiring graphic novelists, this is a great resource to learn from.

This Week I Learned -  * For customers looking to leverage the new West US 3 datacenter region and Availability Zones, Azure offers region portability for multiple resources with Azure Resource Mover. * There are more than 270+ instance types available in AWS with 400+ variations and nearly 350 VM sizes in Azure * YUM (​Yellowdog Updater Modified) is a software package management utility used in many popular Linux distributions for installing, updating, removing, and managing software packages. * CrowdTangle is a public insights tool from Facebook that makes it easy to follow, analyze, and report on what’s happening with public content on social media. CrowdTangle allows you to search Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. * GitHub calls Copilot its AI pair programming companion for developers . * Like logical fallacies , these data fallacies are good to keep in mind while making data driven decisions.  * New Zealand's three official languages are Engli...

Microsoft Azure is an authorized cloud environment for running Oracle Database. When migrating Oracle software and workloads from on-premises to Microsoft Azure, Oracle provides license mobility. Microsoft and Oracle’s cloud interoperability partnership means you can rely on tested, validated, and supported deployments of Oracle enterprise and custom applications on Azure with Oracle databases—Real Application Clusters (RAC), Exadata, and Autonomous Database— deployed in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. [ Update - July 2022 ] - Microsoft has teamed up with Oracle to launch a new service called “Oracle Database Service for Azure.” The latest offering provides Microsoft Azure customers access to databases running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle Database Service for Azure builds on a three-year-old partnership between Microsoft and Oracle. Both companies launched an interconnect service in 11 regions back in 2019, which makes it easier for enterprises to run workloads acros...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure BareMetal Infrastructure  offers certified hardware for specialized workloads like SAP & Oracle in some US & European regions.  *  AWS Application Discovery Service  helps in discovering on-premises server inventory and behavior * Google Cloud Migrate for Compute Engine (formerly Velostrata) migrates VMs from your on-premises data center, AWS, or Azure into Compute Engine. * A comparison of Device42 with alternative Discovery / Migration, CMDB, DCIM / ITAM, IPAM  product vendors * AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.  AWS Graviton2 processors, based on the 64-bit Arm architecture, are supported by popular Linux operating systems including Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Many popular applications and services from AWS and Independent Software Vendors...

Having read many of R K Narayan's books & grown up watching the televised version of Malgudi Days, I had long wanted to read his autobiography. I managed to finish " My Days " right after reading R K Laxman's " The Tunnel of Time ". It was a treat to know more about the creative and illustrious brothers first-hand from their autobiographies in their own candid writing style.  R K Narayan's evocative prose, gentle humor & vivid descriptions make the book an engrossing read. It is like time-travelling with him into his past. As a master story teller, R K Narayan can write about even the most mundane of things and make it entertaining and interesting with his unique perspective.  R. K. Narayan was born in Madras in 1906 & spent his early childhood in the care of his maternal grandmother as his father's school headmaster job entailed frequent transfers. Growing up in a academically inclined but a large middle class family (with seven sibling...

Iframe Killa bookmarklet by Rod McNew removes all iframes from the current page. Once added to the (Chrome, Edge) browser Bookmarks or Favorites bar, click the bookmark to remove all iframes. Once started, it also removes newly spawned iframes every 100ms. javascript:void( function(){ setInterval (function(){ document.querySelectorAll('iframe').forEach(function(element) { console.log('Iframe Killa - Removing Element:', element); element.parentNode.removeChild(element) }) } ,100) }()); Besides iframe, the code can be adapted to removed any other pesky HTML element that is hindering your viewing experience.

This Week I Learned -  * Kubernetes API is commoditized and consistent, but the platform experience isn’t. Your Kubernetes experience isn’t uniform across Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), VMware PKS, Red Hat OpenShift, Minikube, and 130+ other options. As you’re choosing a Kubernetes product to use, pay upfront attention to provisioning, upgrades, scaling/repair, ingress, software deployment, and logging/monitoring.  *  Google Cloud Run is better than FaaS . It hosts containers that respond to web requests or event-based triggers. You can write functions, or, containerize a complete app—Migrate for Anthos makes it easy. Take an existing custom-built app written in any language, or packaged (or no source-code-available) software and run it. You don’t have to decompose your existing API into a series of functions, or break down your web app into a dozen components. Cloud Run uses containers. On ...