Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

 This Week I Learned - * SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance both run on the latest stable version of the SQL Server database engine and Windows operating system, and most users would not notice that upgrades are performed continuously. *  The Oracle CPU (OCPU) unit of measurement for x86 OCPUs is worth at least two vCPUs .  * Reading Progress is a free tool built into Microsoft Teams designed to support and track reading fluency.  Languages supported by Auto-detect can be used with Reading Progress. *  Google Cloud Shell Editor  is powered by the Eclipse Theia IDE platform and supports Go, Java, .Net, Python and NodeJS. * MapmyIndia is a digital mapping company whose data powers Apple Inc.’s Maps and Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa in India. The Okhla, Delhi-headquartered company sells its technology and geospatial information to a broad range of global brands, including Uber Technologies Inc., Mercedes-Benz, McDonald’s Corp. and e-commerce rivals Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart. The mar

Azure’s Well-Architected Framework targets a specific workload and provides guidance at the  workload level . The Cloud Adoption Framework  is really focused at the  portfolio level . Organizations new to cloud will begin with Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework.  CAF ensures the platform, processes, and people are delivering a well-managed operating model across the portfolio. WAF goes deep on each application (or at minimum the most important ones) to validate architectural decisions at the workload level . The five pillars of   Well-Architected Framework are: Cost Optimization – Managing costs to maximize the value delivered Reliability – Ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function Operational Excellence – Operations processes that keep a system running in production Performance Efficiency – Ability of a system to adapt to changes in load Security – Protecting applications and data from threats The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is organized around seve

This Week I Learned -  * To show a date in a country specific format as a string, use toLocaleDateString() &  toLocaleString() methods of the Date object and specify locale - var n = new Date();  n. toLocaleDateString (" en-CA "); // 2021-08-16 n. toLocaleString (" en-IN "); // 16/8/2021, 9:18:46 pm *  Google Sheets API v3 was turned off on August 2, 2021.   Apps based on the Google Sheets API v3 have to migrate to Google Sheets API v4 .  * Azure NetApp Files can be used while migrating/ setting up Enterprise File Shares on cloud . With Azure NetApp Files, demanding file workloads such as databases, SAP, virtual desktop infrastructure, and high-performance computing applications can be moved to Azure without changing the architecture or the applications. * When deploying legacy .NET Framework applications you have to target Windows Server Core, compatible with legacy apps and IIS, but it has a larger image. When deploying .NET 5 applications, you can target W

Do’s and don’ts of multicloud from the Google Cloud Blog : Do: Use services from each public cloud because of their differentiated services or to handle regulatory reasons, existing business relationships, and accommodating mergers and acquisitions. If you acquire a company that uses another cloud, it’s usually expensive and difficult to consolidate. It can be smarter to stay put. Do: Recognize different stakeholder interests and needs. Groups within your organization will come at multicloud from distinct directions. And this may impact your approach  Do: Ask others what worked, and what didn’t. Do: Experiment first using techniques like multi-region deployments to surface issues in your support process or toolchain that fail when faced with distributed systems. Start with muti-region deployments and chaos engineering experiments before aggressively jumping into multicloud architectures.  Do: Embrace the right foundational components, including Kubernetes. Everything will not run on Ku

With Microsoft's Immersive Reader feature becoming part of more Microsoft products like the Edge browser, Word, PowerPoint, it is great to see the Read Aloud option also that comes along with it.  If your activities involve reading from a screen for long periods, some of it can be handed over to this Read Aloud feature so that you can sit back & listen while a computerized voice reads out content you specify in a locale specific accent that you can configure. You can open local PDF files in Microsoft Edge browser and have the Immersive Reader's Read Aloud feature read out the content for you. Did you know, Amazon Alexa, Amazon's voice-based AI-powered digital assistant has a desktop  version for the PC and can read Kindle books that are in your account? You can ask Alexa on PC app on Windows to read the book by specifying the title. By just saying, "Alexa, read Kindle book", I got Alexa to start reading out aloud the book I was going through on Kindle. To re

Randy Pausch (1960-2008) was a computer-science and human-computer interaction professor at Carnegie Mellon University. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only 3-6 months to live, he gave a now-famous speech  in September 2007 called The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams  that is available on YouTube.  I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it.  The lecture was written quickly-in under a week. After being uploaded on YouTube, the talk went viral and Pausch went on to appear on Oprah and write a best-selling book expanding on the lecture topics along with former Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow. As a reminder of how fragile life really is, Pausch’s co-author, Jeffrey Zaslow, died in a car accident, a few years after their book was published.  Written in a breezy, conversational style with gentle humor, it has great life lessons. Excerpts & memorable quotes - The brick walls are ther

This Week I Learned -  *  JavaScript isn’t a web technology. It isn’t governed by the W3C but by ECMA. What works and doesn’t work in JavaScript is dependent on browser makers.   *  Superfish  is an enhanced Suckerfish-style menu jQuery plugin that takes an existing pure CSS drop-down menu (so it degrades gracefully without JavaScript) and adds enhancements. * The Enterprise-Scale architecture provides prescriptive guidance coupled with Azure best practices, and it follows design principles across the critical design areas for organizations to define their Azure architecture *  A single heterogeneous Kubernetes cluster can have both Windows and Linux worker nodes . You can only run Windows containers on Windows nodes and Linux containers on Linux nodes. And there's a further constraint: the Kubernetes control plane can only run on a Linux node . Red Hat OpenShift supports both Windows and Linux containers. *  Uptime SLA is an optional feature to enable a financially backed, highe

This Week I Learned -  *  Layoutit grid is an open-source CSS Grid layout generator. It aids in designing web pages layouts by providing CSS grid code as markup. * While you can manage a few containers manually using Docker and Windows, apps often make use of five, ten, or even hundreds of containers, which is where orchestrators come in. Orchestrators help you grow containerized apps at scale, providing functionality for: Deploying at scale Workload scheduling Health monitoring Failing over when a node fails Scaling up or down Networking Service discovery Coordinating app upgrades Cluster node affinity * Open Service Broker for Azure, or OSBA, lets you provision Azure Cloud Services directly from Kubernetes or Cloud Foundry. OSBA in an Open Service Broker API implementation for Azure. The Open Service Broker API is a spec that defines a common language for cloud providers that cloud native applications can use to manage cloud services without lockin. *  Application Proxy is a featu

A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without owning the costs and risks. Success of a service is measured in terms of ongoing service performance (quality, cost, demand, and business impact). A service offering consists of one or more service commitments that uniquely define the level of service in terms of availability, scope, pricing, and packaging options. Customers can choose to receive different levels of performance and features for a given service through service offerings (typically made available as distinct items in the service catalog). A service can have multiple service offerings (each made available as separate catalog items) with different service level agreements (SLAs).  Source:  ServiceNow documentation  [PDF]

  The Inca Indians in Peru were the first to cultivate potatoes around 8,000 BC to 5,000 B.C. Spanish conquistadores were the first Europeans to encounter potatoes, in South America in the 1530s.  French pharmacist  Antoine-Augustin Parmentier  was captured by the Prussians during the Seven Years' War and was fed a constant diet of potatoes, which the French considered as hog feed at the time. After surviving and emerging in good health, he made it his life's mission to promote the merits of potatoes in his country. Thanks to his efforts, potatoes were declared edible in 1772.  Potatoes produce two to four times as many calories per acre as cereal crops.

This Week I Learned -  * The download attribute of the anchor tag prompts the user to save the linked URL instead of navigating to it. Without a value, the browser will suggest a filename/extension. *  One way to center content in a div in 2021 . This works for all kinds of content - div {   display: flex;   /* vertical */   align-items: center;   /* horizontal */   justify-content: center; } If its just text, inline tags then text-align: center can do this in single property. If you want to center vertically and horizontally at the same time - display:grid; place-content:center; * Vue arguably improves upon React by combining the best of both AngularJS and React. Features like component-based approach, the one-way data flow for component hierarchy, virtual rendering and state management of app are features that are borrowed from ReactJS. The templates, syntax and easy user interface have been borrowed from AngularJS. * The Azure Relay service enables you to securely expose service