This Week I Learned - Week #126

This Week I Learned -

* There is a constantly updated compilation of information related to SAP on Microsoft Azure on the SAP website

* There is nice online tool to view Azure SQL Database status & performance history of different Azure data-centers

* Web browsers prevent client-side web applications running from a specific domain to issue requests to another domain for security reasons. CORS is a mechanism that would relax such restriction and allows domains to give each other permissions for accessing each other’s resources. CORS(Cross Origin Resource Sharing) is supported for Windows Azure Storage Blob, Table and Queue services. It can be enabled for each service through the Windows Azure Storage Client Library 3.0. Cynapta Azure CORS Helper is a free desktop utility to manage CORS rules for Azure Blob service

* Coursera uses isomorphic rendering so that its home page is rendered by the browser & server. “Isomorphic” means the UI feels snappy, like a good Single Page App and it renders fast, before all the SPA assets are downloaded. With isomorphic rendering pages load faster when users have relatively poor network connectivity. While there are many ways to go isomorphic, Coursera currently uses React with a Flux application architecture after migrating from Backbone to React over the past year. Coursera backend services are almost exclusively in Scala.

* Web browsers are now little operating systems and Web pages are little applications that run in them.

* The Personal Blocklist Chrome extension will transmit to Google the patterns that you choose to block. When you choose to block or unblock a pattern, the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed.

* ZIP Extractor  is a free, open-source application for decompressing ZIP files into Google Drive. It uses the Google Drive API. Instead of opening suspicious zip files directly on your desktop computer, this utility can be used within an experimental Google Drive account to extract files & store on Drive.

* There are many types of 1-D & 2-D barcodes and there are free and commercial toolkits to programmatically read these barcodes

* BSE (formerly known as Bombay Stock Exchange Ltd.) offers daily, monthly, yearly historical data that can be downloaded as a CSV file

* The Swalekh keyboard developed by Reverie Language Technologies combines Native and Transliteration based input modes of language input across 11 Indian languages, along with predictive typing, and is available for download on the Google Play store

* A year after eliminating polio, India has virtually eliminated tetanus as a killer of newborns and mothers following a 15-year campaign. Unlike polio or smallpox, tetanus can never be eradicated because bacterial spores exist in soil everywhere - NY Times

* A Foldscope is a completely functional microscope, a platform for fluorescence, bright-field, polarization, projection, all kinds of advanced microscopy built purely by folding paper. It is a 50-cent microscope conceived by a Stanford University engineer, Manu Prakash, that folds like origami. It is a device that weighs 9 grams, fits in a pocket, holds regular microscope slides, and can magnify their contents more than 2,000 times using a small built-in lens. That’s good enough to visualize everything from a ladybug’s claws to a colony of bacteria.

* Oliver Sacks who had a fascination for elements in the periodic table, was gifted a little lead (element 82) casket (containing element 90, thorium) for his 82nd birthday. The eminent neurologist and author had face blindness (prosopagnosia), a disorder that causes an inability to recognize faces

* "We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination" - Oliver Sacks

* I like Comics Journalism

* As per TRAI regulations, services to any Prepaid Mobile connection will be deactivated for subscribers with less than Rs.20 balance and if there is no usage i.e. without any usage (incoming or outgoing voice/video calls, Outgoing SMS, Mobile Internet / Data usage, VAS usage or purchases with balance) for 90 days