Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The YouTube video transcript is a great feature to use if you have to take notes while watching or if you're interested in just the content.  This feature works on the YouTube website on a desktop browser while viewing videos for which captions are available.  Click the horizontal three dot menu beneath the YouTube video. In the menu that opens up, click "Show Transcript".  The transcript will appear next to the video. I like that I was also able to search for a keyword using the browser's Find (Ctrl+F) functionality and jump to that specific point in the video.

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure SQL migration extension for Azure Data Studio enables you to assess, get Azure recommendations and migrate your SQL Server databases to Azure. * The Microsoft Offensive Research & Security Engineering (MORSE) team’s charter is to ensure that Microsoft ships the world’s most secure operating systems, cloud platforms, and edge devices. It is responsible for secure design reviews, code reviews, penetration testing, developing frameworks and rules for automated static analysis and fuzzing, and creating platform-wide vulnerability-class mitigations. * Face recognition systems use computer algorithms to pick out specific, distinctive details about a person’s face. These details, such as distance between the eyes or shape of the chin, are then converted into a mathematical representation and compared to data on other faces collected in a face recognition database. The data about a particular face is often called a face template and is distinc...

Highlights from a  podcast in which Dilbert creator Scott Adams talks about his book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"& startup CalendarTree  [30:54] On keeping the voice authentic - So the first, I guess, eight years of my (cartooning) career, I actually had a day job. So I've been pulling from those memories. Plus a lot of people email me and say, could you please embarrass my boss? He desperately needs it and I'm always happy to help. I honestly think that to be a really great manager, you've got to have at least some minimum level of evil in you because the whole point of managing right and leadership in general is getting people to do something that they didn't want to do on their own. So if it was simply a matter of informing them, then you wouldn't need a manager. So you need somebody to actually manipulate people to act against what they believe would have been their own best interest. Good management is excellent manipulatio...

Skribbl.io is a multi-player competitive doodling & word guessing game with elements of Dumb Charades & Pictionary .  Each game consists of about 3 rounds. In every round someone has to draw their chosen word and others have to guess it to gain points.  When its your turn to draw, you have to choose a word (which can be a noun, verb or adjective) from three options and visualize that word in 80 seconds. Alternatively when somebody else is drawing you have to type your guess into the chat to gain points. The earlier you guess a word the more points you get. The person with the most points at the end of game will then be crowned as the winner . As a long time doodler, I like how the game is designed.  As the game requires you to visualize a word and draw on the spot, it is a great fun test of creativity. It has helped me to imagine better and also appreciate how other competitors think and draw. As a web developer, I admire how the minimalistic game is designed an...

This Week I Learned - *  Cloud native applications take advantage of containers, serverless technology, microservice based architectures, and API based solutions that enable developers to build and iterate solutions faster.  They are delivered using a highly automated, DevOps-based approach, enabling developers to continually deploy new updates and capabilities to their customers. * Azure Container Apps is a serverless container-based hosting service that supports event-driven scale.  * A rolling upgrade is an upgrade of a software version, performed without a noticeable down-time or other disruption of service. * The Adobe Document Cloud includes Adobe Acrobat, Document APIs, and Acrobat Sign – a leading cloud-based e-signature service used across regulated businesses, governments, and institutions around the world. They adopted a microservices architecture that utilizes Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Cache for Redis, and Azure Kubernetes Service to scale their Adobe Document C...

I love the "Read Aloud" feature in Immersive Reader that also appears as "Read aloud selection" in the context menu when you select text. This feature works not only for content in English but also several other world languages including Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu. This feature is very beneficial to me while I'm trying to read Indian languages in which I'm not proficient.  One issue that has bothered me is that when I need Read Aloud to switch to a different language (say Telugu) than the last used (English), it cannot detect the language. As a result, I have to manually change it and "Read aloud selection" lags in the changeover. Upon selecting text it would be good to have the "Read aloud selection" feature in the context menu detect language and AUTOMATICALLY choose from one of the voices in that language? I have filed this concern on Microsoft's Feeback portal and hope it will be addressed soon. If this is an is...

 This Week I Learned - * An offering from Microsoft  Azure Cloud Advocates:  Machine Learning for Beginners - 12 weeks, 26 lessons, 52 quizzes, classic Machine Learning for all Data Science for Beginners - 10-week, 20-lesson curriculum Web Development for Beginners - 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum IoT for Beginners - 2-week, 24-lesson curriculum AI for Beginners - 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum * a11y (pronounced "A-one-one-Y" or "A-eleven-Y") is a numeronym  or a word where a number is used to form an abbreviation for accessibility. *  How Uber predicts arrival times using Deep Learning *  System Design Interview - a course is to provide a reliable strategy to approach the system design questions.  *  Catalog of patterns *  Python Design Patterns   * An actuary is a business professional who deals with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty. The name of the corresponding field is actuarial science...

 I like illustrations that summarize a whole topic Paraphrased notes from a LinkedIn post of Alex Xu : Intermittent errors can be handled effectively with exponential backoff in the browser and with a flow control gateway on the server side.  Exponential backoff controls the latency between two retries.  A common way to control the flow of HTTP requests is to set up a flow control gateway in front of the server. This provides two useful tools: 1. Rate limiter, which limits how often a request can be made. It has two slightly different choices; the token bucket and the leaky bucket. 2. Circuit breaker. This will stop the HTTP flow immediately when the error threshold is exceeded. After a set amount of time, it will only let a limited amount of HTTP traffic through. If everything works well, it will slowly let all HTTP traffic through. More answers to web dev questions: How does the browser render a web page?

Explained by Alex Xu  (copied here as LinkedIn posts are not easily searchable): Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)  HTTPS transmits encrypted data using Transport Layer Security (TLS)  If the data is hijacked online, all the hijacker gets is binary code.  How is the data encrypted and decrypted? Step 1 - The client (browser) and the server establish a TCP connection. Step 2 - The client sends a “client hello” to the server. The message contains a set of necessary encryption algorithms (cipher suites) and the latest TLS version it can support. The server responds with a “server hello” so the browser knows whether it can support the algorithms and TLS version. The server then sends the SSL certificate to the client. The certificate contains the public key, host name, expiry dates, etc. The client validates the certificate.  Step 3 - After validating the SSL certificate, the client generates a sessi...

This Week I Learned -  * Google Cloud Whitepaper -  Google Cloud security foundations guide , December 2021, 98 pages * The height of outsourcing - Businesses that use the WhatsApp Business app can send unsolicited messages. Once the message is received, it will be subject to the business’s own privacy practices . The business may designate a number of employees, or even other vendors , to process and respond to the message. While Facebook will not show your messages with businesses in anyone's personal Facebook account nor automatically use your messages to inform the ads that you see, businesses will be able to use chats they receive for their own marketing purposes, which may include advertising on Meta. You can always contact that business to learn more about its privacy practices . *   Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API standard can be significantly more verbose than REST and GraphQL , in part due to the usage of XML and because the standard incl...