This Week I Learned - Week #159

This Week I Learned -

* Bing Code Search makes it easy to get code snippets for a specified programming task

* Earlier this month, Google Compute Engine, Google’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering and Amazon Web Services alternative, went down across all regions for 18 minutes. The outage was reportedly caused by two bugs in Google’s network management software, bugs triggered by a configuration error after Google engineers made changes to GCE’s network configuration in an effort to speed it up. Jet.com whose pages use services from Lytics, an online ad-targeting company, suffered a slow down of its site as Lytics outsources its IT infrastructure to an IaaS provider. Google Cloud Platform - Planet Performance

* Cross-site scripting (XSS), exploits the trust a user has for a particular site. XSRF or CSRF (sometimes pronounced sea-surf) exploits the trust that a site has in a user's browser.

* On 27/07/2016, the amount of storage that comes with OneDrive will change from 15 GB to 5 GB.

* Expression Encoder 4 is an audio/video-encoding and live-broadcasting application that can help bring an edited video project to the web for high-quality playback. It can generate Windows Media video and audio files that are optimized for web playback scenarios, or appropriate for playback on portable devices. This free version of Expression Encoder 4 does not include support for live IIS Smooth Streaming and H.264 encoding.

* While Indian regulators confirmed that online marketplaces may be considered legal, they also decreed that no single seller could account for more than 25% of sales. If enforced, such a requirement would eliminate Cloudtail, the largest seller on Amazon India, effectively making its operations illegal - HBR

* Sikkim became a part of India in 1975. Sikkim has been declared a 100% organic state by the Union government. The chief minister of Sikkim is now the longest-serving chief minister in India - Live Mint

* Doctors who are also authors – Oliver Sacks, Lewis Carroll, Robin Cook, Anton Chekhov, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abraham Verghese.

* "What we often forget is that when we read and enjoy a good novel, we are engaging in a collaborative act with the writer. The writer gives us the words, we provide the imagination, and somewhere in middle space, we jointly create this fictional dream, this mental movie. It requires effort on our part – it is not a passive act, but a creative one to read a book. The writer has to give you just enough words, not too many; just enough so that you can imagine the rest." - Abraham Verghese