Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Articles on docs.microsoft.com now redirect to learn.microsoft.com  *  JSON Crack generates graph diagrams from JSON files and makes them easy to read. * Ujaval Gandhi has shared the full course material for " Mapping and Data Visualization with Python ", a comprehensive guide for creating static and dynamic visualizations with spatial data. *  AI4Bharat was set up as an initiative of IIT Madras to build open-source language AI for Indian languages. * There is a tradition in China of  zhuansong, or re-gifting . It may be regarded as vulgar in other cultures, but in China re-gifting is widely seen as a compliment, enhancing the status of both the giver and the recipient.  * Mango is the national fruit of the Philippines. * Nightingale is Iran's national bird * Barley's glycemic index score of 28 is the lowest of all grains. Millets have a low glycemic index, ranging from 54 to 68 in Foxtail Millet (Italian Millet, Kangni / Kakum i...

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014) provides a 'big picture' approach to human history.  Sapiens has been reimagined in a graphic novel in collaboration with comics artists David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave. The comic format makes the content accessible to a wider audience. Yuval says historians don't usually talk about physics, chemistry and biology but human history is actually a direct continuation of physics, chemistry and biology.  The unique storytelling approach in the books blending different subject areas makes for a fascinating read. The graphic novel makes  you forget that you are consuming scientific facts . Sapiens: A Graphic History will be published in four volumes. The first two are currently available - Volume 1 – The Birth of Humankind   Volume 2: The Pillars of Civilization The information presented is equally distributed among the characters: Professor Saraswati speaks only on biology and zoology, Father Klüg dea...

The following Org Chart comic was drawn by Manu Cornet and appeared in The New York Times in 2011. Cornet is a French programmer, cartoonist, writer and musician. Cornet worked at Google from 2007 until 2021. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft acknowledged the drawing thus in his book 'Hit Refresh' -"A cartoonist drew the Microsoft organization chart as warring gangs, each pointing a gun at another. The humorist's message was impossible to ignore [...] I told employees that renewing our company’s culture would be my highest priority." Popular LinkedIn contributor Alex Xu asked after how relevant is the drawing after more than 10 years and current and past employees of those companies have responded with their experiences .

This Week I Learned -  * Azure availability zones are connected by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than 2ms . They help your data stay synchronized and accessible when things go wrong. Each zone is composed of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.  * Azure has availability zones in every country in which Azure operates a datacenter region. Currently only certain regions within them support availability zones. In India, availability zones are supported in Central India . * Zone-redundant services: Resources are replicated or distributed across zones automatically. For example, zone-redundant services replicate the data across three zones so that a failure in one zone doesn't affect the high availability of the data.  * Most of Forbes’ infrastructure on Google Cloud is containerized and orchestrated with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), using OSS Istio as a platform-independent service mesh t...

This Week I Learned -  * To recover from availability problems that affect your Azure API Management service, be ready to reconstitute your service in another region at any time. Depending on your recovery time objective, you might want to keep a standby service in one or more regions. You might also try to maintain their configuration and content in sync with the active service according to your recovery point objective. The API management backup and restore capabilities provide the necessary building blocks for implementing disaster recovery strategy.  To move API Management instances from one Azure region to another , use the service's backup and restore operations. You can use a different API Management instance name or the existing name. API Management supports multi-region deployment, which distributes a single Azure API management service across multiple Azure regions. Multi-region deployment helps reduce request latency perceived by geographically distributed API...

 1) What are the key Kubernetes use cases and advantages? The  top use cases are : DevOps CI/CD Automation Modernizing legacy applications by implementing and utilizing a container-based infrastructure Automated app operations Advantages are : Optimize hardware usage to make the most of your resources. Automate and control application deployments and updates. Scale your containerized applications as well as their resources—on the fly. Declaratively manage services to ensure deployed applications run as intended. Perform health checks and enable application self-healing. 2)  How many Kubernetes clusters should you use to run a set of applications ? Following are some of the options: One large shared cluster Many small single-use clusters Cluster per application Cluster per environment The answer depends on your use case — you have to trade-off the pros and cons of the different approaches against each other to find the solution that works best for you. 3) How many nod...

VMWare KubeAcademy has great  learning material on Cloud Native & Kubernatives  Highlights from the 3-part " Understanding Cloud Native " course "part of becoming an expert is sounding like an expert" Mesos was an orchestration tool powering Twitter Borg was built from scratch and it was uniquely designed for use at Google, not something that could easily be exposed to outside parties, and more importantly it was viewed as a significant competitive advantage and rarely spoken of outside of Google. Joe Beda, Craig McLuckie, and Brendan Burns at Google set out to create a project that incorporated everything Google engineers had learned through the design and, and development of Borg and its successor, Omega. Kubernetes traces its lineage directly from Borg.  Compared to the massive system that is Borg, there were many improvements made to make container technologies accessible outside the walls of Google and easier for developers to consume.  The project was...

This Week I Learned -  *  Zero downtime migration between a database on the AWS EC2 database and Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database service can be achieved using OCI GoldenGate bidirectional replication . Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. OCI GoldenGate provides bidirectional and unidirectional data replication. An active-active replication is used for high availability and zero downtime migration. *  Google ranks image results based on alt text * The curse of the ninth is a superstition connected with the history of classical music. It is the belief that a ninth symphony is destined to be a composer's last and that the composer will be fated to die while or after writing it, or before completing a tenth. This superstition was hatched by Mahler. Before him, Beethoven and Schubert had died before or while writing th...