This Week I Learned - Week #134

This Week I Learned -

* You can use Windows Server 2012 Standard for the SQL server nodes-unlike in previous Windows releases, you can enable the failover cluster feature in the Standard edition of Windows Server 2012 as well as Windows Server 2012 Datacenter. SQL Server 2012 does require the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2012 to use the AlwaysOn feature

* SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups are supported between Microsoft Azure Regions

* There is a web application with code on Github that can detect a user's location and find the latency of various Azure data centers with respect to the user. For Amazon Web Services timings, there is CloudPing.info

* The whitepaper "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" [PDF] by James Hamilton summarizes the best practices accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live

* The game The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land which currently occupies #1 spot (over 1,000,000 downloads and 31M minutes played on opening weekend alone) on Apple’s Top Free App chart uses Azure DocumentDB. The Next Games development team selected Azure DocumentDB, the fully managed NoSQL JSON database as they needed to ingest massive volumes of game profile and state metadata while serving low latency queries (under 10 ms)

* Microsoft also launched Cloud Accelerator Program in India along with its partners to help businesses create cloud adoption blueprints to identify applications which can move to the cloud.

* SQL AlwaysOn is the technology of choice for disaster recovery of a SQL Server. Azure Site Recovery now provides native support for SQL AlwaysOn.

* Pat Meenan has tirelessly been maintaining the WebPageTest tool for nearly 10 years. Web performance guru Steve Souders, is responsible for many key WebPageTest features including the filmstrip. This tool now has a book on it - Using WebPageTest

* Wayback Machine API can retrieve Wayback Snapshots at a certain time. If the timestamp parameter not specified, the most recently available capture in Wayback is returned.  It may be possible to recover an entire website from the Wayback Machine

* A growing number of institutions are allowing their photo archives via Flickr & its API

* Only 1% of medical articles on Wikipedia have passed review, yet it is widely accessed, with 5 billion page views per year.

* Staycation is a fancy term for spending your time-off at home.  In the days of cheap air travel and a booming economy this never would have been considered.  Some people have spent their lives in one area and want to get away and explore new places.  But we are a country on the move.  According the U.S. Census Bureau, about 1 in 6 Americans move each year and the average American moves 11.7 times in their life.

* "moot" formerly and more acceptably meant "open for discussion, debatable". It is now more commonly used to mean "irrelevant to discussion or debate". "awful" was originally used as a term to mean full of awe, even better than awesome but it now means something exceptionally bad. Auto-antonyms are words which in and of themselves have two or more generally accepted meanings in the English language that directly or generally contradict each other. Such words are also known as antagonyms, contronyms, and words having self-contradictions. Many such contra-definitions arise from slang usage. Others develop as a result of their frequent use in sarcasm.

* 43 Mutual Fund houses in India manage over Rs 13 trillion worth of assets

* The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation that administers the city is divided into 150 wards and 18 circles. These 18 circles are clubbed into 5 zones very appropriately named North, South, Central, East and West Zones. The Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB) takes care of most of the defense lands and the residential colonies in Secunderabad. It is divided into seven wards. Osmania University is independently handled by the administration of the college. Hyderabad Urban Agglomeration (HUA) is spread over four parliamentary constituencies – Hyderabad, Secunderabad, Malkajgiri and Chevella. In terms of the state assembly constituencies, the HUA is spread over 26 of them across three districts. - Hyderabad Urban Lab

* Routemaster Hyderabad is a website for crowdsourcing bus routes information in Hyderabad and for generating bus routes

* Cyberabad Police provides Crime Maps and Accident maps by police station and nature of offence

* Group A employees form less than 5 per cent of the total Indian Central government workforce; Group C and D are about 90 per cent.