This Week I Learned - Week #32 2022

 This Week I Learned - 

* Microsoft  FastTrack for Azure (FTA) team, part of Azure Engineering at Microsoft provides a design review and guidance checklist [Excel]. Main areas of recommendations and guidance are:

>Azure Firewall

>Azure Networking

>Defender For Cloud

>Identity

>Sentinel

>VM Security Checks

* Failure mode analysis (FMA) is a process for building resiliency into a system, by identifying possible failure points in the system.

* A multicloud strategy enables customers to leverage services that span different cloud platforms, enabling them to select the services best suited to the workloads or apps they are managing.

* Commonly cited benefits of a multicloud strategy include:

• Flexibility: Customers wish to have the flexibility to optimize their architectures leveraging the cloud services best suited to their specific needs, including the flexibility to select services based on features or costs
• Avoiding vendor lock-in: A common requirement customers often state, customers often seek design multi-cloud deployments to achieve short term flexibility and long-term agility by designing systems across multiple clouds.

* Kubernetes is focused on the deployment and management of containerized workloads. Kubernetes 1.0 was launched in July 2015. 

* Autopilot is now the recommended way to use Google  Kubernetes Engine

* The new Google Cloud Architecture Diagramming Tool interface provides a list of all the Google Cloud products and services at one place to build architecture diagrams. The tool includes 10+ prebuilt reference architectures for common use cases. Once you are happy with your architecture, you can deploy all the architecture components in Google Cloud with a single click.

* Immersive Reader interactive guide

* A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used. The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback. - Raymond Chen

* Instagram that only allow for uploads from a mobile device and not from a computer. As a lot of people are on metered connections on their mobile device they use the emulation to upload images from their computer. 

* Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, first visited India in 2007. He offshored his team to Varkala beach near Trivandrum where they coded for a month. 

* Mime artist Marcel Marceau worked with the French Resistance to save the lives of thousands of orphans during World War II. Resistance is a 2020 biographical drama film inspired by the life of Marcel Marceau.

* Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects humans and other animals. In humans, malaria is caused by six Plasmodium species: P. falciparum (~75%), P. vivax (~20%), P. malariae, P. ovale curtisi, P. ovale wallikeri,  and P. knowlesi. The Plasmodium parasites are typically introduced by the bite of an infected female Anopheles mosquito. Only female mosquitoes feed on blood; male mosquitoes feed on plant nectar and do not transmit the disease. Malaria parasites can also be transmitted by blood transfusions, although this is rare. There have been documented human infections with several species of Plasmodium from higher apes. 

* The first effective treatment for malaria came from the bark of cinchona tree, which contains quinine. This tree grows on the slopes of the Andes, mainly in Peru. The indigenous peoples of Peru made a tincture of cinchona to control fever. Its effectiveness against malaria was found and the Jesuits introduced the treatment to Europe around 1640; by 1677, it was included in the London Pharmacopoeia as an antimalarial treatment. It was not until 1820 that the active ingredient, quinine, was extracted from the bark. Quinine was the predominant malarial medication until the 1920s when other medications began to appear. In the 1940s, chloroquine replaced quinine as the treatment of both uncomplicated and severe malaria until resistance supervened, first in Southeast Asia and South America in the 1950s and then globally in the 1980s.

* The medicinal value of Artemisia annua has been used by Chinese herbalists in traditional Chinese medicines for 2,000 years. In 1596, Li Shizhen recommended tea made from qinghao (Artemisia annua or sweet wormwood) specifically to treat malaria symptoms in his Compendium of Materia Medica. 

* Artemisinin  and its semisynthetic derivatives are a group of drugs used in the treatment of malaria due to Plasmodium falciparum. It was discovered in 1972 by Tu Youyou, who shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery. Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are now standard treatment worldwide for P. falciparum malaria as well as malaria due to other species of Plasmodium. Artemisinin is extracted from the plant Artemisia annua, sweet wormwood, a herb employed in Chinese traditional medicine. Artemisinin and its derivatives have been used for the treatment of malarial and parasitic worm (helminth) infections. They have the advantage over other drugs in having an ability to kill faster and kill all the life cycle stages of the parasites. But low bioavailability, poor pharmacokinetic properties and high cost of the drugs are major drawbacks of their use. Therapies that combine artemisinin or its derivatives with some other antimalarial drug are the preferred treatment for malaria. China and Vietnam provide 70% and East Africa 20% of the raw plant material. 

* Malaria was once common in the United States, but the US eliminated malaria from most parts of the country in the early 20th century using vector control programs, which combined the monitoring and treatment of infected humans, draining of wetland breeding grounds for agriculture and other changes in water management practices, and advances in sanitation, including greater use of glass windows and screens in dwellings. Most of Europe, North America, Australia, North Africa and the Caribbean, and parts of South America, Asia and Southern Africa have also eliminated malaria.

* Global warming is expected to increase the prevalence and global distribution of avian malaria, as elevated temperatures provide optimal conditions for parasite reproduction

* The Federation of Medical & Sales Representatives Association (FMRAI) - a body of medical representatives has alleged that Bengaluru-based Micro Labs Ltd, the pharma company that makes DOLO spent Rs 1,000 crores in the form of freebies to doctors as incentives for them to prescribe the drug. The market price of DOLO upto 500mg is regulated, however the dosage beyond 500mg can be priced at the will of the manufacturer and in a bid to increase profits, freebies were given to doctors to get them to prescribe the DOLO 650 mg. 

* GCMMF (Amul) is ranked 13th largest dairy company in the world by sales turnover as per Global Dairy Top 20 report by Rabobank in 2022. Amul is also the 8th largest dairy in the world based on the volume of milk handled.

* Brompton Bicycle is a British manufacturer of folding bicycles based in Greenford, London. With practice, folding and unfolding takes 10 to 20 seconds. The modular design has remained fundamentally unchanged since the original patent was filed by Andrew Ritchie in 1979. A Brompton bicycle uses over 1,200 individual pieces. Every Brompton bike is handmade in their London factory.  The actual weight of a Brompton bike depends on the model and configuration, but ranges from 9 – 12½ kg (20 – 28lbs). Each Brompton leaves the factory with two numbers that uniquely identify an original bicycle. These are the serial number and frame number. In August 2017, Brompton introduced an electric bicycle in the U.K.

* Until 1909, that’s about 55 years since the railways were introduced in India, there were no toilets in trains. On July 2, 1909, Okhil Chandra Sen, an Indian railway passenger, wrote an impassioned letter to the Sahibganj Divisional office in West Bengal requesting to set up toilets on Indian Railways. The railway authorities introduced toilets in all lower-class carriages in trains running more than 50 miles at that time.