Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  If you have a second monitor, you can undock the developer tools to that one * Mobile versions of web sites tend to be slimmer, easier to use and not full of popups and demands to sign up for services and the like. Many video sites also use a native HTML5 player on a mobile interface instead of one with lots of interaction and popups. This allows you to save videos in an easy fashion.  * Azure Backup pricing estimator [Excel] -  Usage guide   * Oracle Database Cloud Exadata Service is equivalent to an on-premises Oracle Exadata, just with a different consumption model. For an on-premises consumption model equivalent to our public cloud, behind your firewall, there’s the Cloud at Customer service delivered by Exadata Cloud Machine. * You can write SQL in Google Sheets? It's one of the most powerful tools a Data Analyst could use. Here's why... - You can easily query from another sheet. - Filter out the columns you want with the SELECT ...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Center for SAP solutions (ACSS) is an end-to-end solution that enables you to create and run both new and existing SAP systems as a unified workload on Azure. *  ARM based CPUs are now supported by all major US Clouds . ARM can deliver up to 40% better price/performance vs comparable x86 instances.  Customers can further cut down cloud usage cost by more than half by running their workloads on Oracle Ampere Altra A1 based VMs vs ARM instances from other public cloud providers. * By default, SSH on VMs is configured to use private keys for authentication. When using a bastion host, you log into the bastion host first, and then into your target private VM. Because of this two-step login, which is why bastion hosts are sometimes called " jump servers ," you should use ssh forwarding instead of storing the target machine's private key on the bastion host as a way of reaching the target machine. * Spinnaker is an open-source mult...

This Week I Learned -  *  SAP On Azure [AzSAP] Well-Architected Framework assessment/review is one of three Assessments available for SAP Workload on Azure to support customer/partner journey to Microsoft Azure cloud. * Azure Resiliency – Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery [ PDF ; 31 pages; Jan 2022] *  Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) offers IT production and recovery services that include IT infrastructure, Cloud computing, Disaster Recovery, and Workplace Recovery. Sungard Availability Services declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S., the second in the company's recent history.   *  The Tanium Platform monitors remote endpoints securely and continuously over standard internet connections without requiring VPN access. Using Tanium, IT organizations can monitor all their remote endpoints 24/7 without having to invest in additional VPN licenses or overburdening their already busy VPN servers. Tanium Comply is a security and compliance...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Functions is "married" to Azure Static Web Apps (SWA) and provides the "A" (=API) for running JAMstack apps on Azure. JAMstack is a method for building fast, lightweight web applications using mostly JavaScript, APIs, and markup (HTML/CSS). In a JAMstack web application, as much HTML as possible is pre-built and stored in a content delivery network (CDN). Instead of running a monolithic backend application on the server side to generate dynamic content, dynamic components of the application are based on APIs.  *  Stackdriver is now Google Cloud's Operations suite . Google Stackdriver Monitoring is Google Cloud Monitoring and Google Stackdriver Logs is Google Cloud Logging. * Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. * Power BI has a very powerful import and data cleanup engine which is called Power Q...

A metaphor is often poetically or figuratively (NOT literally) saying something is something else. It creates vivid imagery. The comparisons do not contain "like" or "as" and are directly stated. Examples: Life is a highway. My life is an open book. He is a shining star. She is an early bird. It was raining cats and dogs. You have a heart of gold. Fit as a fiddle. Dull as dishwater. Time is money. A simile describes one thing by comparing it to another using the words like or as . It is more simple and basic than an analogy. Example -  Life is like a box of chocolates Apollo is as cool as an ice cube Our wedding was like a fairytale An analogy is saying something is like something else to make some sort of an explanatory point. It explains an idea. Analogy creates a relationship based on parallels or connections between two ideas. It is more elaborate and extensive than a similie . A good speech should be like a woman's skirt; long enough to cover the subject a...

Strategy & Planning  are not the same.  Summary - A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win. Strategy has a theory. That theory has to be coherent. It has to be doable. Planning does not have any such coherence and no specification of a way that is going to accomplish collectively some goal for the company. Planning • You control costs. • You are the customer. • It's comfortable.  Strategy specifies an outcome • Actual customers are the customers. • You don't control them. • You don't control revenues.  That means putting yourself out and saying, here's what we believe will happen. We can't prove it in advance, we can't guarantee it, but this is what we want to have happen and that we believe will happen. When US air carriers were busily planning what routes to fly and da-da-da, there was this little company in Texas called Southwest that had a strategy for winning. And at first, th...

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft uses Azure Speech for many scenarios, such as captioning in Teams, dictation in Office 365, and Read Aloud in the Edge browser. * Google Cloud provides the following NoSQL database services : Cloud Firestore—a document-oriented database storing key-value pairs. Optimized for small documents and easy to use with mobile applications. Cloud Datastore—a document database built for automatic scaling, high performance, and ease of use. Behind the scenes, it stores data in Google Bigtable. Cloud Bigtable—an alternative to HBase, a columnar database system running on HDFS. Suitable for high throughput applications. MongoDB Atlas—a managed MongoDB service, hosted by Google Cloud and built by the original makers of MongoDB. * App Engine's Datastore became its own product in 2013, Google Cloud Datastore, and is now accessible to developers outside of App Engine. The following year, Firebase was acquired by Google. At the time, it was known for its real-...