This Week I Learned - Week #6 2022

This Week I Learned - 

* "Inside look at modern web browser" by Googler & drawsplainer, Mariko Kosaka

* curlconverter.com converts curl commands to Python, JavaScript, PHP, R, Go, Rust, Elixir, Java, MATLAB, Ansible URI, Strest, Dart or JSON

* Every Tuesday, Netflix publishes four global Top 10 lists for films and TV

* If you're using messaging with existing applications, and want to move your messaging to the cloud quickly and easily, we recommend you consider Amazon MQ. It supports industry-standard APIs and protocols so you can switch from any standards-based message broker to Amazon MQ without rewriting the messaging code in your applications. If you are building brand new applications in the cloud, we recommend you consider Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS. Amazon SQS and SNS are lightweight, fully managed message queue and topic services that scale almost infinitely and provide simple, easy-to-use APIs. You can use Amazon SQS and SNS to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications, and improve reliability.

* The HSMs in your AWS CloudHSM cluster support quorum authentication, which is also known as M of N access control. With quorum authentication, no single user on the HSM can do quorum-controlled operations on the HSM. Instead, a minimum number of HSM users (at least 2) must cooperate to do these operations. With quorum authentication, you can add an extra layer of protection by requiring approvals from more than one HSM user.

* Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) helps you easily deploy, scale, and manage your third-party virtual appliances. These appliances include firewalls (FW), intrusion detection and prevention systems, and deep packet inspection systems in the cloud. 

* Amazon RDS Proxy is a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) that makes applications more scalable, secure and resilient to database failures. Amazon RDS Proxy allows applications to pool and share connections established with the database, improving database efficiency and application scalability. With RDS Proxy, failover times for Aurora and RDS databases are reduced by up to 66% and database credentials, authentication, and access can be managed through integration with AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Amazon RDS Proxy can be enabled for most applications with no code changes, and you don’t need to provision or manage any additional infrastructure. Amazon RDS Proxy is now generally available for Aurora MySQL, Aurora PostgreSQL, RDS MySQL and RDS PostgreSQL.

* OTT (over-the-top) video streaming is a macro-service that is supported by multiple micro-services working in tandem and uses APIs (application programming interfaces) for integration and agility. This also helps in reducing downtime if there is an issue. As micro-services run separately and are integrated using APIs, it becomes easy to isolate the issue, address it, and resume the service with minimum downtime. There are multiple sub-processes that go into encoding, and typically OTT players work with many tech players parallelly. Here’s a quick summary of various micro-processes involved in the encoding process.

• Pre-processing and quality check of the source video in terms of resolution, bit rate, codecs, and scaling, among others.
• Thumbnail extraction (both manual and automatic) is also part of the video-encoding process.
• After this, compression algorithms are implemented to reduce the file size.
• Implementation of digital rights management (DRM) and encryption of content.
• Containerisation of video or packaging of audio codecs, video codecs, and other metadata (thumbnails, subtitles, etc.) - ET Prime

* The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

* Luc Montagnier, the French virologist credited as a co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), was jointly awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for his work in isolating the virus that causes AIDS. He was lauded for this work, but later criticised for unscientific claims about autism and Covid-19.

* Theoretical physicist Mohammad Abdus Salam was the first Pakistani and the first from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize in science. In 1974, Abdus Salam departed from his country, in protest, after the Parliament of Pakistan passed unanimously a parliamentary bill declaring members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, to which Salam belonged, non-Muslims. 

* Shawshank Redemption was largely individualistic. It worked in a politically liberal environment where individual freedom matters. Today, in a politically polarised world, stories about class conflict are attracting large audiences. Squid Game, the Netflix Korean series, has been the biggest hit for the platform in recent times. Squid Game depicts the lives of debt-ridden individuals. Korean society is polarised between the extreme rich and the poor. - ET Prime

* Persecution of Baháʼís occurs in various countries, especially in Iran, where the Baháʼí Faith originated and where one of the largest Baháʼí populations in the world is located. The origins of the persecution stem from a variety of Baháʼí teachings which are inconsistent with traditional Islamic beliefs, including the finality of Muhammad's prophethood, and the placement of Baháʼís outside the Islamic religion. Thus, Baháʼís are seen as apostates from Islam.

* The constitutions of seven U.S. states ban atheists from holding public office. However, these laws are unenforceable due to conflicting with the First Amendment and Article VI of the United States Constitution.

* In Indian society, rationalists have been generally considered undeclared atheists because they tend to label all sorts of religious activities as superstition. 

* Atheism and irreligion are not officially recognized in India. Apostasy is allowed under the right to freedom of religion in the Constitution, and the Special Marriage Act, 1954 allows the marriage of people with no religious beliefs, as well as non-religious and non-ritualistic marriages. However, there are no specific laws catering to atheists and they are considered as belonging to the religion of their birth for administrative purposes.

* Erode Venkata Ramasamy revered as Periyar (meaning 'respected one' or 'elder' in Tamil), was born  to a Kannada Balija merchant family in Erode, then a part of the Coimbatore district of the Madras Presidency. He became an atheist at 25 after a disturbing experience during his visit to Kasi. His views on the irreligion are based on the eradication of the caste system, religion must be denied to achieve the obliteration of caste system. He felt that people used religion only as a mask to deceive innocent people and therefore took it as one of his duties in life to warn people against superstitions and priests. Ramasamy spent over fifty years giving speeches, propagating the realisation that everyone is an equal citizen and the differences on the basis of caste and creed were man-made to keep the innocent and ignorant as underdogs in the society. The bedrock of Ramasamy's principles and the movements that he started was rationalism. He is known as the 'Father of the Dravidian movement'.  In 1957, he induced thousands of Tamilians to burn the Constitution of India holding the Government responsible for maintaining the caste system. Ramasamy criticized Subramanya Bharathi for portraying Mother Tamil as a sister of Sanskrit in his poems.

* Khushbu was born as Nakhat Khan into a Muslim family in Mumbai. Her parents gave her the stage name Khushbu when she started her career as a child actress. She became the first Indian actress for whom her fans built a dedicated temple.

* If you must reuse disposable plastics, then a “like-for-like” approach is important. This means refilling a container of bottled water with water instead of, say, coffee. Polypropylene (Code 5) is the most suitable for microwaving because of its resistance to heat. High-density polyethylene (Code 2) containers are designed to be put in the fridge and freezer. 

* Known as scallions or green onions, spring onions are in fact very young onions, harvested before the bulb has had a chance to swell. Both the long, slender green tops and the small white bulb are edible, and are good either raw or cooked. They have a similar flavour to onions, but are much milder. Although the bulbs of many Allium species are used as food, the defining characteristic of spring onion species is that they lack a fully developed bulb. The leaves are used as a vegetable; they are eaten either raw or cooked. The leaves are often chopped into other dishes, in the manner of onions or garlic. 

* Punjab is a low rainfall region that simply should not grow rice, but free electricity makes rice cultivation very profitable while destroying aquifers. - Economic Times

* Kerala state was formed in 1956; earlier it was broadly divided into Malabar (North Kerala), Cochin and Travancore kingdoms.