This Week I Learned - Week #166

This Week I Learned -

* When a web app goes down, you can visualize data points in a few seconds by using the appLens tool for the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service.

* A Continuous WebJob runs under the scm (kudu) site which, unless "Always On" is enabled, will not start when the site starts

* If you have an application deployed to Azure App Service that's using PHP 5.4, you have to upgrade or use a custom runtime as support for PHP 5.4 ends in October 2016

* India is home to 130 million of Truecaller's 200 million users. Truecaller claims that two out of every three smartphones in India have the Truecaller app. The Truecaller service allows users to find out the owner of any phone number from its database, which is created by crowdsourcing contact details from users’ address books. So, even if you’ve never used the service, your name and number could be on Truecaller’s database, if at least one of your contacts has shared it. The app has an integrated caller ID service which automatically searches for contact details when a user receives a call and also helps with call-blocking. The utility of the service in blocking spam has made Truecaller the third most downloaded app in the country after Facebook and WhatsApp.An average Indian user makes over 12 calls a day and receives more than 10 calls, according to Truecaller’s data. 

* Truecaller's TrueSDK service allows third party apps to verify users with their Truecaller profile and a substantiated phone number, instead of the commonly-used email address.

* Microsoft researchers, Dr. Eric Horvitz, both a computer scientist and a medical doctor by training and Dr. Ryen White, chief technology officer of health intelligence in a recently created Health & Wellness division at Microsoft, and John Paparrizos, a Columbia University graduate student have reported that they could identify from 5 to 15 percent of pancreatic cases with false positive rates of as low as one in 100,000 using health-related data generated from web search histories

* According to the Web Performance tests of the world’s top 50 e-Commerce sites by Pingdom Royal,  78% of the top 100 retail sites had a load time of under 3 seconds, while only 6% took 5 seconds or longer to load. Among the fastest websites the average homepage was 1.70 MB in size, while among the slowest sites the average size was 2.65 MB. According to the HTTP Archive, benchmark for page size as of May 2016, is 2.46MB and overall 42% (21 of 50) of the top 50 sites succeeded in keeping their homepage’s size below it.

* The $2 iOS American-made app Ummo is useful for those preparing for public speaking. With Ummo, you take a prepared speech, tap the microphone icon, wait for the countdown, and then talk. As you speak, the app listens and automatically logs the words, the number of pauses and the use of pesky filler words like … you know, like, right? data like how many words were spoken and how often words were reused. It also displays your pace in words per minute, how loud you were, whether your volume was consistent and so on. The data is presented in easy-to-read graphs, and if you tap on a point in the graph, you can see the words in the speech transcript at that moment. The idea is to learn when in the speech you faltered so you can practice and fix mistakes.

* EMV chip technology is becoming the global standard for credit card and debit card payments. Named after its original developers (Europay, MasterCard and Visa), this technology features payment instruments with embedded microprocessor chips that store and protect cardholder data. Payment data is more secure on a chip-enabled payment card than on a magnetic stripe (magstripe) card, as the former supports dynamic authentication, while the latter does not (the data is static).

* India is the world’s third-largest carbon emitter

* There are 3.5 million Indian-Americans, and they are a highly successful immigrant group with both wealth and deep community connections, making them sought after by politicians. In just one example, some 40 percent of hotel rooms in the United States are owned or managed by Indian-Americans, according to Arun K. Singh, India’s ambassador to the United States - NY Times

* Around the world, 50 types of animals, 3000 types of plants and 2000 species of edible insects are eaten

* India consumes the most Rum in the world, not Jamaica while Whiskey is consumed most in Singapore (not Ireland)

* In The Complete Far Side, Gary Larson says that his greatest disappointment in life occurred when he was at a luncheon and sat across from cartoonist Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family. Larson was not able to think of a single thing to say to him and deeply regretted the missed opportunity.

* Baron-Cohen, who is based at Cambridge University, and mathematician Ioan James of Oxford University assessed the personality traits of Newton and Einstein to see if they exhibited three key symptoms of Asperger syndrome: obsessive interests, difficulty in social relationships, and problems communicating. Newton seems like a classic case. He hardly spoke, was so engrossed in his work that he often forgot to eat, and was lukewarm or bad-tempered with the few friends he had. If no one turned up to his lectures, he gave them anyway, talking to an empty room. He had a nervous breakdown at 50, brought on by depression and paranoia - New Scientist

This Week I Learned - Week #163

This Week I Learned -

* The latest ebook from Microsoft "Understanding Azure - A Guide For Developers" covers newer Azure platform services such as Azure Functions, Azure Service Fabric and Azure IoT application development.

* This interactive Azure Platform Map provides short summaries of Azure Services

* The range of tools that are available now and can be considered while designing, developing and deploying software applications is vast

* Zoho AppCreator lets you create native applications across iOS, Android, and Windows that take complete advantage of your device's hardware.

* Some good folks have created a custom ImportJSON formula for Google Spreadsheets

* Progressive Web Applications take advantage of new technologies to bring the best of mobile sites and native applications to users. Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce site, decided to combine their web presence and native app into a Progressive Web Application - Flipkart Lite

* Pinterest loads 4x faster and uses 8x less data with a speedier version of their mobile web pages using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

* In 2015, the Mountain View-based social network site, LinkedIn agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over its 2012 security breach. The lawsuit suggested that the company violated not just its privacy policy but also an agreement with premium subscribers on keeping their personal information safe.

* Uber can read your smartphone's battery levels. People are more likely to pay for surge if their cell phone is almost out of battery.

* Some annoying Facebook features like auto-playing videos and interest-based ads can thankfully be controlled through Settings

* reCAPTCHA is a bot that can find bots

* 49 execs at Infosys drew over Rs 1 crore

* Caused by the highly contagious varicella-zoster virus, chickenpox is spread through inhalation of droplets dispersed into the air by coughing and sneezing as well as through direct contact with the skin. Because the virus is spread so easily, it’s advised that people affected by chickenpox steer clear of contact with others until the lesions have dried and crusted over into scabs — usually between four to seven days after the initial onset of symptoms. The chickenpox rash is characterized by three distinct phases: first, the initial breakout of pink bumps; next, fluid-filled blisters; and finally, crusts and scabs. Once you’ve reached phase three, you’re typically good to go back to school or work...the great majority of chickenpox infections last no longer than ten days. The best way to accelerate the healing process is to avoid scratching. Try dabbing calamine lotion on itchy spots, and avoid popping fluid-filled blisters. Adults can also experience temporarily relief from itching through the use of an oral or topical antihistamine, such as diphenhydramine. Do not take any medications that contain aspirin, as this may lead to a serious condition called Reye’s syndrome - Go Ask Alice!

* Platinum is rarer than gold, as the amount of platinum mined each year is a small fraction of the amount of gold mined each year. Its price is more volatile than gold's.

* Niobium is used to produce stronger, lighter steel for industrial pipes and aircraft parts. It is mined in only three places on Earth, and the price of every kilogram is seven times higher than copper.

* Sugarcane is a perennial grass that is grown in tropical and subtropical areas

* In Maharashtra , the biggest producer and exporter of the fruit in the country, the best quality pomegranates come from the driest regions of the state such as Solapur and the rain shadow regions of Sangli district.

* Indian Railways generates over 100 Terabytes  (1 Terabyte= 1,000 GB) of data in a year. Rather than building better websites that can also work on mobile browsers, it plans to release the relatively hard to maintain mobile apps.

* India Post has over 1.55 lakh post offices of which more than 1.39 lakh are in the rural areas

* SBI, India’s largest commercial bank, is still not among the top 50 banks in the world. It is ranked only 67th among the global banks. For an economy such as India’s — the fastest growing large economy in the world — the domestic banking industry is fragmented.

* The Taj Mahal complex is believed to have been completed in its entirety in 1653 (commissioned in 1632) at a cost estimated at the time to be around 32 million rupees, which in 2015 would be approximately 52.8 billion rupees (US$827 million).  It houses the tomb of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Mumtaz during the birth of their fourteenth child.  Aurangzeb, her sixth child, jailed Shah Jahan soon after the Taj Mahal's completion

* Voot is latest among video streaming sites like ErosNow, Hotstar, Spuul that now serve movies for free or through subscription. Voot works in IE 11 but not in Chrome as the content is DRM protected

This Week I Learned - Week #162

This Week I Learned -

* Azure SQL Database Advisor and the Performance dashboard are now generally available in the Azure portal. Database Advisor helps you to improve the performance of your databases by providing intelligent tuning recommendations that are based on historical usage. To get recommendations a database needs to have about a week of usage, and within that week there needs to be some activity. There also needs to be some consistent activity as well. The SQL Database Advisor can more easily optimize for consistent query patterns than it can for random spotty bursts of activity.

* Only business entities in Australia & China  can create services in the Australia Azure regions & China Azure regions respectively. Companies not doing business in Australia or China cannot create resources in those Azure regions.

* Most cloud vendors including Azure only charge for egress (outbound) data and not ingress (inbound). Primarily it removes barriers for customers to move data into the cloud which then encourages applications to be placed in the cloud service to use the data and of course encourages even more data to be placed. Azure charges for data storage and the services running in Azure using that data. This is known as "data gravity", the services follow the data. Additionally most customer data is egress, for example a request is made to a site which is very small but the returned data is much larger - Windows IT Pro

* On May 10, 2016, Azure became generally available from datacenters in Toronto and Quebec City

* Stack Overflow Q&A is deploy roughly 25 times per day to development (our CI build) and to production about 5-10 times on a typical day.

* Microsoft Cognitive Services is the new name for Project Oxford

* Nice disclaimer in the free eBook from Microsoft Press, Migrating SQL Database to Azure - "Azure is evolving rapidly, as is SQL Database. Therefore, the screenshots and all information regarding the pricing, the capacity limits, and the features are accurate only as of the date this content is written"

* This 28-page document from Facebook details how both editors and computer algorithms play roles in the process of picking what should appear in the “Trending Topics” section of users’ Facebook pages.

* While algorithms determine the exact mix of topics displayed to each person, based on that user’s past actions on Facebook, a team of people is largely responsible for the overall mix of which topics should — and more important, should not — be shown in Trending Topics - NY Times

* Amazon's video posting ser­vice is de­signed for “pro­fes­sional video pro­duc­ers,” but its only re­quire­ments are that the videos be high def­i­ni­tion and have closed-cap­tion­ing for the hear­ing im­paired.

* Snapdeal currently covers 28,000 pin codes in India

* About a year into its app-only experiment, Myntra, widely seen as India’s top online retailer of fashion apparel and clothes, has announced it is reversing that strategy to allow users the flexibility of shopping on its website once more - Forbes

* 38 executives of HDFC Mutual Fund and 15 execs at ICICI MF earn Rs 1 crore or more.

* "One second, while I pull up yet another app!" - National Informatics Centre (NIC) is developing  a mobile application that will allow automobile owners to display their vehicle registration certificate, driving licence and insurance documents on their smartphones. NIC is working on M-Parivahan, an app which is touted as having better features than the Telangana transport department's MWallet (developed by Radikal Tribe, currently has 5,692 users). The app is likely to be rolled out pan-India in six months - ET

* ..genius lies not in simply being able to execute the complex but in imagining the simple path no one else had discovered

* "Google has provided enormous benefits to the society, but there are also enormous risks with it. All of our devices spew so much metadata now that it's all swept up and correlated." - Douglas Crockford

* From the movie "Ship of Theseus":
- You think you are a person but you are a colony. A microcosm which has ten times more bacteria in its body... than it has human cells.
- A monk goes to a sandwich seller and says, "Make me one with all"
- Which email can attain cyber enlightenment? One with no attachments

Beware of Mobile Apps which misuse access requirements

An excellent article by Shadma Shaikh in The Economic Times, highlights the dangers of Mobile Apps which misuse access requirements. Excerpts -

As India becomes a mobile app-economy, it is important for users to understand if apps indeed require access to so much of their data and device tools. 

Even if .. not paranoid about online security, you ought to be more careful about something else--mobile applications.Apps that read your contact list and your messages--including the ones about your bank transactions and one-time passwords, and access your pictures, screenshots and messenger images.

Permissions by themselves are harmless and even useful to provide users a good mobile experience. But since the list of permissions required is long and doesn't explain its effect, an immediate reaction is to treat it the way you would a `Terms and conditions' agreement--accept without reading the list and move to the next step. Skipping over these permissions could mean handing over your data to an oblivious app developer or unscrupulous data miners. 

Many apps ask for a host of permissions to access data and functions they don't require. The key lies in identifying the nature of the app and questioning what seem to be unnecessary requests.

The latest version of Google's Android operating system and Apple's iOS allow users greater flexibility in deciding what permissions to give to apps.

Developers, in the process of making apps more usable, end up asking for access to too many things the apps don't require, says Bryce Boland, chief technology officer, Asia-Pacific, at cyber security firm FireEye. Some well-known brands, too, have poorly coded apps that end up compromising on security, he said.

Yuval Ben Itzhak, former chief technology officer at security software company AVG Technologies, points out that if data leaving a device via an app is unencrypted--not converted into code to prevent unauthorized access--hackers can `look inside' it and get access to passwords, credit card numbers and other personal details.This is most likely to happen on public WiFi hotspots like those at airports, malls or coffee shops.

Apps often have permission to create and save files in various locations on your devices, some of which are retained even after the apps are uninstalled. A game app that you uninstalled could have retained images in your phone gallery. Another app that also has access to your gallery can now access those images.

A lot of this unnecessary access requirement also has to do with how apps are built and monetized. To make money out of apps, companies often integrate third-party libraries that allow these external entities to push ads and other content on their apps.Attackers can leverage poorly written code or third-party libraries to gain access to a user's phone or data

The Indian smartphone market that is dominated by second-hand and low-budget smartphones is more susceptible to mobile security attacks

As consumers, if an app is free, we need to figure how its developers make money. Is it by pushing ads or by providing a premium service upgrade in exchange of money?

Consumers who download apps without reading the permissions sought are also responsible for the increase in the number of `incidents' directed through mobile apps.

If people ditch apps that ask for a lot of permissions in favour of those that don't, app developers will be pushed to design apps in a way that they don't ask for unrequired permissions

This Week I Learned - Week #161

This Week I Learned -

* Azure SQL Database allows you to store JSON in standard textual format, use standard SQL language for querying JSON data

* Azure Media Services now has a Video Summarization feature based on the Azure Video Thumbnails Media Processor which lets you create a short series of clips or “highlights” for a video.

* Azure Media Analytics has released Video OCR feature in Preview. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the conversion of visual text from video into editable, searchable digital text. Video OCR detects text content in video files and generates text files for your use - Microsoft DX India Blog

* If there is a legitimate reason you must have an account named Administrator in an Azure VM you can add the account within the VM post creation and it will function as normal. It is only during creation the use of Administrator as the account name is blocked.

* Certain license-included Oracle VMs on Azure will stop being available. You will need to obtain from Oracle, or one of its authorized resellers, the appropriate license(s) to the Oracle products on your deployed VMs before May 30, 2016 & inform Microsoft or else they may terminate your use of your deployed VMs on May 31, 2016, without further notice.

* Apple doesn’t let you change your default browser, so none of that matters. Whenever you click a link in your email or text messages, Safari and only Safari will launch. Apple says it helps maintain an integrated experience. Also, third-party iOS browsers including Chrome have to use Safari’s browsing engine - WSJ

* Office Lens trims, enhances and makes pictures of whiteboards and docs readable, and saves them to OneNote. You can use Office Lens to convert images to PDF, Word and PowerPoint files too. It is available for Windows 10 Mobile, Android & iOS

* Aadhaar is a 12 digit individual identification number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India on behalf of the Government of India. The number serves as a proof of identity and address, anywhere in India. Aadhaar letter received via India Post and e-Aadhaar downloaded from UIDAI website are equally valid. Aadhaar API can be used for user authentication

* The expense ratio is the annual fee that all mutual funds charge their unit holders. This ratio is expressed as a percentage of the fund value. The expense ratio continuously impacts the NAV of a fund. Every day, the published NAV is net of the expense ratio, i.e., the expense is debited from the fund on a daily basis and the NAV is adjusted (decreased) to reflect this debit. It should be noted that by doing it this way, an investor would pay the cost of investing in a fund in proportion to the number of days she is invested in the fund. For instance, if an investor invests in a fund for six months, then the charges incurred will be half the annual expense ratio for the fund - Live Mint

* "in some of the IIMs, more than 95 percent are engineers."

* Camels don't store water in their humps; it's actually full of fat! Camels can go up to three weeks without food — using the fat storage as fuel. When the fat is depleted, the bump on their back is no more!

* An average person could live for about eight weeks on water alone, give or take about a week for an over- or underweight person, respectively. When the body is deprived of new fuel (i.e., food), it breaks into its energy reserves to keep going. The body stores energy in the form of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. After one day without food, the body will have used up its carbohydrates, which are stored as glycogen in liver and muscle cells. After that, it's on to the fat reserves. Your average Joe/Jane, weight-wise, has enough fat reserves to live for four to six weeks without food. After that, the body begins to use its protein reserves (basically, the body itself). Body proteins are used up at a much faster rate than fat, and you could really only get another two to three weeks out of protein. At that point, however, you can't really call it living since so much irreparable damage has been done to the body, including the brain - Go Ask Alice!

* The constitution of Bhutan specifies that 60% of the country must remain forested

* It is a myth that a mother bird abandon her young if touched by a human. Most birds have a poorly developed sense of smell.   One exception: vultures, who sniff out dead animals for dinner.

* In 2009, when I (Nandita Das) was on the Marrakech International Film Festival jury, our president, Abbas Kiarostami, the master filmmaker from Iran, gave a poignant speech at the opening ceremony. In essence he said, “I want to apologise to all the filmmakers whose films we will judge. I recognise the fact that our opinions are subjective and only the films that stand the test of time will be the true winners. But till then, we have been given the uncomfortable task of judging your films. For this, as the jury president, I am sorry.”

* "..responses to any work of art or literature are more often a reflection of one’s own conditioning—perceptions, experiences and exposures" - Nandita Das

This Week I Learned - Week #150

This Week I Learned -

* ASP.NET 5 will be renamed as ASP.NET Core 1.0

* Flipkart is now the first Indian app across all genres including- communication, social, entertainment, to cross the 50 million install benchmark on Google Play Store.Globally, Facebook,Google and Whatsapp account for the highest downloaded apps.

* There are over 1.50 lakh post offices across the country, of which 1.25 lakh are in rural areas

* Mysuru continues to be the cleanest city in India. Hyderbad is ranked 19th

* Great piece of science writing about the attempts to save the sole Siachen avalanche survivor, 25-year-old, Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad -  "Lance Naik Hanamanthappa is believed to have been caught in an air pocket created by two large blocks of ice, keeping him alive. Around 7 p.m. on February 8, the rescue teams found him. In the throes of hypothermia, he had stripped down to his inner wear. “When the rescue teams found him, he was wearing nothing but his thermals. He was found in a sitting position,” says Lt. Gen. S.D. Duhan, Director and Commandant of the Army hospital. The condition is known as ‘paradoxical undressing’ and is common in extreme cases of hypothermia — a condition when the core body temperature drops to 35°C or lower. The body, in a last-ditch attempt to shut down heat loss, induces vasoconstriction, a contraction of blood vessels. This contraction increases the volume of blood brought to the skin’s surface, making the victim feel like their skin is burning up — think about how drinking alcohol makes you feel warm, when it is actually reducing your body’s core temperature."

One typical Friday evening in Bangalore

Google Maps provides a great visualization of the live traffic as well as the typical traffic based on historical traffic data - this is a fantastic idea! Routes having heavy congestion are shown in red and dark red.

This is how the traffic looks on a typical Friday evening in Bangalore:

..and this was how it looked when my wife who was visiting Bangalore had to travel from ITPL to the Bangalore City Railway station on a Friday to catch a train at 6:20pm

We booked a Meru Cab a day earlier (there is a convenience charge of Rs 60 for booking through their call center, a per kilometre cost of Rs 19.50 after the first 4 kms which cost Rs 80 during day time - a relatively higher price than competitors that elicits higher expectations) that was supposed to arrive at 3:30pm. There wasn't any information from the driver or Meru that the pickup would be delayed. Upon being contacted, the driver promised to be there by 3:45pm but didn't turn up. Meru Cab's tagline is "Rely on us". It should have been "Rely on us to spoil your plans".

This situation was also not unanticipated. To cut a long story short the wife caught the train in the nick of time after experiencing the helplessness of being in a traffic system that takes 2 and half hours to cover 32 kilometers and the helpfulness of strangers who offered help & guidance.

Note to self - check if there is an app that can perform predictive analysis of historical traffic data to estimate time needed to travel from point A to B or else build it.

Government agencies waste money on building apps that only a tiny fraction will use

Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB) is the latest to join the app bandwagon with its own Android app. Was this really required? Unsurprisingly, it doesn't have the funds to implement and manage the infrastructure that is the sole reason of its existence.

Update [17-Dec-2015] -  The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) will be launching an app ... that will help citizens click and send photographs of bad road conditions.

Considering that the Internet penetration in India is around 19 per cent of which 50 per cent are mobile-only internet users, this app will cater to a minuscule portion of Hyderabad's population using mobiles running Android. Couldn't their website have been made friendly enough to be accessible from ANY device?

In the absence / lack of enforcement of any guidelines by the Government of India on how governmental agencies & government run utility companies should build their websites and apps, no thought is given to the usability & accessibility of these resources for internet based end-users. What's worse, there is no accountability on how the private user data collected by government agencies will be managed.

All websites designed for or by the United States government must comply with the requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. All other websites (e.g., commercial, private) should strive to be accessible and compliant with Section 508.

I guess there have to be some dramatic cases of identity theft & data loss before compliance laws and regulations are framed and enforced.