Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Naveen Patnaik is one of the longest-serving chief ministers of any Indian state having won five consecutive terms. Before he became Chief Minister of Odisha,  Naveen Patnaik authored 3 books  including  The Garden of Life .   This book covering 70 healing plants out of the 1500 that Charaka’s treatise describes in Charaka Samhita (pre-2nd century CE), was a great introduction for me to Ayurveda. Along with the Sushruta Samhita, Charaka Samhita or Treatise of Charaka (pre-2nd century CE) is one of the two foundational texts of this Ayurveda that have survived from ancient India. Charaka’s treatise describes 1,500 plants and identifies 350 of them as valuable for medicinal purposes. The Garden of Life is divided into five sections--Sacred, Medicinal, Culinary, Cosmetic, and Aromatic--and features discussion of the applications of seventy plants along with some interesting anecdotes. SACRED PLANTS Banyan (Ficus bengalensis) - Indian merchants, or banias , frequen...

This Week I Learned -  *  The Kubernetes attack area is vast    *  A list of companies that discount their software and services for nonprofit orgs * OpenAI’s Codex is a family of AI models from Open AI that translates between natural language and code in more than a dozen programming languages. * Codex powers GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer available in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Copilot draws context from code and comments you’ve written, and then suggests new lines or whole functions. *  Prompt engineering is the practice of using prompts to get the output you want. A prompt is a sequence of text like a sentence or a block of code. The practice of using prompts to elicit output originates with people. Just as you can prompt people with things like a topic for writing an essay, amazingly you can use prompts to elicit an AI model to generate target output based on a task that you have in mind. *  Prompt engineering  is a co...

This Week I Learned -  *  Top 10 Azure Security Best Practices Slides * A CI/CD pipeline is a tool that automates the process of building, testing, and deploying software. It integrates the different stages of the software development lifecycle, including code creation and revision, testing, and deployment, into a single, cohesive workflow.  *  How to read a WebPageTest Waterfall View chart * roadmap.sh is a community effort to create roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help guide the developers in picking up the path and guide their learnings. * Homework helpers - Microsoft Math Solver    WolframAlpha Step-by-Step Solutions provides solutions for over 60 topics within math, chemistry and physics. * Being furloughed means that your employer is requiring you take an unpaid leave of absence. While furloughs are temporary, a layoff means you are permanently separating from your employer. Furloughed employees keep their outstanding vaca...

This Week I Learned -  * Azure purchasing options: Customers under the Pay-as-you-go subscription model enjoy the benefits of no minimum purchase requirements and have flexible pricing.  In Azure in Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, end-customer pricing for Azure services is determined by the channel partner. Microsoft pricing to the CSP partner is under the pay-as-you-go model with the benefits of no minimum purchase requirements and flexible pricing. Customers or partners who purchased Azure within an Enterprise Agreements (EA) or Enterprise Subscription Agreements (EAS), Microsoft Product and Services (MPSA), or Server and Cloud Enrollments (SCE) agreement have price protection on currently offered Azure services and will receive the lower of the baseline price or the new market price. A baseline price is the price at the beginning of an Azure agreement or the price at which a new Azure service was made generally available. If the new market price is higher than t...

Paraphrased from the official documentation - IBM's acquisition of Red Hat for $34B in 2019 was the largest in software history Red Hat open source technologies provide a unified, enterprise-grade, hybrid solution for running workloads consistently across on-site and cloud infrastructures. Cloud-native development is an application development, deployment, and operational discipline spanning people, process, and technology to speed up high quality application production.  Cloud native development combines the modular architecture like microservices, containers and API-driven programmable orchestration automated workflows to enable continuous application delivery.  It changes the entire life cycle of how requirements are collaboratively incepted, coded, tested, and deployed. RHEL and Red Hat OpenShift provide an abstraction layer that is certified for all the major clouds. Kubernetes is the foundational orchestration tool used in Red Hat OpenShift to manage the container deploy...

This Week I Learned -  * Too much choice can cause indecision and delay. Multiple contractors in your house simultaneously doing home improvement can create a lot of complexity and coordination for you to manage. The same dynamics exist for multicloud. Some companies choose to be multicloud because they’ve adopt a best-of-breed approach, selecting certain providers for the tasks at which their technology excels. Some companies become multicloud for regional or compliance needs while some find themselves in a multicloud situation because of mergers and acquisitions that bring other clouds into their portfolio. - Do’s and don’ts of a successful multicloud strategy   * Modern hypervisors are pretty efficient. VMware reports hypervisor overhead rates of just 2 percent compared to bare metal [ PDF ] *  When running Kubernetes on VMs instead of bare-metal, virtualization is going to reduce total resource availability for your pods by about 10% to 20% . When you run your no...

Reference architectures combine general architecture knowledge and general experience with specific requirements for a coherent architectural solution for a specific problem domain. Source:  Software Architecture - A Comprehensive Framework and Guide for Practitioners They document the structures of the system, the main system building blocks, their responsibilities, and their interactions Good reference architectures are based on proven principles, patterns, styles, and tactics. Examples: Azure AWS Google Cloud OCI

Some fundamentals and basics of networking by Arnold Britto : Attend relevant events, get-togethers, gatherings, and association meetings; Meet as many people as possible; Gather information at the event/gathering; Assess information and store relevant data of contacts met at these gatherings; Follow-up with relevant contacts through telephone conversations or personal meetings; Keep constant track of progress with your contact base and leads; Delete contacts that are not relevant and make space for new contacts; Increase intensity.

This Week I Learned - * Azure Private Endpoint is a network interface that that uses a private IP address from your virtual network to connect you privately and securely to a service powered by Azure Private Link . You can use Private Endpoints to connect to an Azure PaaS service that supports Private Link (like Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database) or to your own Private Link Service. By enabling a private endpoint, you're bringing the service into your virtual network. A private endpoint connects to one Private Link Service. You can have multiple Private Endpoints in same VNet or subnet. They can connect to different services. Both Private Endpoint and Private Link Service need to disable network policies to function properly. Private Link Service over a Basic Load Balancer isn't supported.   *  Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure  [PDF] by Nishant Singh and Michael Kehoe, 2022, 324 pages * The MITRE ATT&CK framework ...

Drawing by Sukumar Ray Sukumar Ray (father of  Satyajit Ray) was serious, lively and intensely curious, and a natural story-teller. He would show his brothers and sisters pictures of weird and wonderful animals from their father’s storybooks and invent his own stories about them. He created his own creatures too, with untranslatable onomatopoeic names – forerunners of the verses and drawings which today are loved wherever Bengali is spoken. He also dreamed up a novel way of relieving frustration through story-telling – ‘Fake Anger’, as he called it. Like his son Satyajit, Sukumar was famously even-tempered from early childhood on. If one of his friends felt angry with somebody but could not get back at him, Sukumar would say, ‘All right, let’s fake some anger!’ Then he would begin spinning strange stories about his victim, with everyone else joining in. ‘There was no hatred or malice in them,’ recalls his sister Punyalata, in her memoir Chelebelar Dinguli (Those Childhood Days; 195...