This Week I Learned - Week #176

This Week I Learned -

* Azure Virtual Machines Scale Sets make it easy to build highly scalable applications by deploying identical virtual machines (VMs) as a set. Built on the Azure Resource Manager model, Scale Sets works with Windows and Linux images, custom images, and extensions. There is no additional cost to use Scale Sets.

* Default replication scheme for an Azure storage account is Geo-redundant, which replicates data 6 times, thrice in a remote Azure region.

* Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) is only available to store block blobs and not page blobs. VHDs use page blobs only

* All storage accounts have a container named $logs that contains the log files stored as block blobs. The $logs container cannot be deleted.

* Uber processes data for millions of trips in over 400 cities in 60 different countries on a daily basis.  In the beginning, Uber managed their trip data via JSON blobs, with each trip requiring about 20 kilobytes (KB) of data. Assuming Uber processed raw JSON data for exactly 1 million trips a day, 32 terabytes (TB) of data would only last them 10 days (provided ~40% of storage is reserved for system components). Clearly, such a model was unsustainable. Uber selected 10 different encoding protocols (Thrift, Protocol Buffers, Avro, JSON, UJSON, CBOR, BSON, MessagePack, Marshal, Pickle) and paired them with 3 different lossless compression algorithms (Snappy, zlib, Bzip2) - resulting in a total of 40 viable solutions. They settled on Meassagepack - ProgrammableWeb

* Paypal takes a billion hits a day while running on 8 VMs & stays responsive even at 90% CPU. PayPal uses an Actor model based on Akka. WhatsApp, uses Erlang, an Akka competitor, to achieve its incredible throughput - High Scalability

* Google is providing extensive support for .NET in the Google Cloud, including Visual Studio add-ins to make your implementation even easier

* Free VPN providers will often log all your Internet activity and then sell it to advertisers and others. Some free VPN providers also use your bandwidth and sell it to others.

* After becoming a computer science graduate from Stanford University, Brain Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, tested products at the Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems, before joining Yahoo as its 44th employee in 1996 where he worked for the next decade. In 2009, Brain was rejected by both Twitter and Facebook. On 24th Feb, 2009, Brian along his Yahoo colleague Jan Koum incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. In 2014, Brian and Jan sold WhatsApp to Facebook for approximately $19 billion in cash and stock.

* Marissa Mayer was Google employee #20 and female employee #1

* Reliance Jio will take on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular which control around 65% of the market with its fourth generation (4G), long-term evolution (LTE) and voice over LTE (VoLTE) services soon. 

* Banks are mandated to give a Suspicious Transaction Report (STR) if they find over Rs. 10 lakh has been deposited in any account in one go and also if they notice regular flow of large amounts into it from the same source

* There are 24 seats in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly kept vacant in acknowledgement of the fact that these areas have been illegally occupied by Pakistan.

* While most rivers on the Indian subcontinent have female names, Brahmaputra river has a rare male name, as it means "son of Brahma" in Sanskrit (putra means "son").

* ..while India secured political independence in 1947, it got economic independence only with the 1991 reforms.

* It’s been 119 years since Ardeshir, the low-profile Parsi gentleman, implanted the Godrej flag in the land that adopted his Guderz tribe (from which the family name derives) that fled from Iran. Godrej Group’s founder Ardeshir Godrej invented locks, which didn’t have springs, patented the door frame, double-plate doors, and lock-case, and sold his safes at half the price of foreign brands and began manufacturing soap with vegetable oil, out of consideration for Hindu sentiments that disfavoured the use of animal fat. His soaps soon secured celebrity endorsements from Rabindranath Tagore, Dr Annie Besant and C Rajagopalachari. The Godrej Rhyme:
No form of praise could have been higher 
His safes survived ordeal by fire. 
Soap at that time was made from fat. 
But Hindus couldn’t live with that. 
After much experiment and toil 
He made a soap from vegetable oil. 

* In 1958, the first Indian fridge manufactured by Godrej came with a ₹1,885 tag.

* As per the Income Tax Return Statistics for Assessment Year 2012-13, 14 lakh people or just 4.6 per cent of the 2.89 crore taxpayers in India paid taxes in the highest 30 per cent tax bracket.

* A new type of mosquito trap running on solar electricity and using human odor as bait has cut mosquito populations by 70 percent in a test on a malaria-ridden island in Kenya. The traps — which resemble lampshades and hang just outside the house — lured in Anopheles funestus mosquitoes, but they did not attract Anopheles gambiae or Anopheles arabiensis, which are much more important malaria vectors in most of Africa, where more than 400,000 children die of the disease each year... the traps needed regular rebaiting with a blend of five chemical constituents of human odor along with a chemical that mimicked the carbon dioxide plume created by human breath - NY Times

* The top customer of US Oil exports is Canada

* No US city finds a place in the top 10 ranking of world’s most “liveable” cities by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The index, measured out of 100, considers 30 factors spread across five areas: safety, health care, educational resources, infrastructure and the environment to calculate scores for 140 cities - Economist

* The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) authorizes Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish minimum standards to protect tap water and requires all owners or operators of public water systems to comply with these primary (health-related) standards in the US. You can request a copy of your water utility’s annual water quality report – called a right-to-know or consumer confidence report — to find out which contaminants in your local water are of concern. US citizens can request a copy of your water utility’s annual water quality report – called a right-to-know or consumer confidence report — to find out which contaminants in your local water are of concern.  After 70 years of India's independence, clean drinking water (one of the basic necessities of life) remains a scarce commodity. I wonder if there will ever be a similar government regulation in India mandating public water systems to not just provide water but clean drinking water.

* A “moment” actually refers to a specific amount of time! Back in Medieval times, when someone needed a “moment” it meant 1/40th of an hour (1.5 minutes) - Go Ask Alice!

* "Having ambitious goals worked against me...I was struck by an idea that was simple and, for a former athlete, radical: I decided to stop striving....It felt silly and embarrassing — even blasphemous — to set mediocrity as a goal...And so to all of you struggling to find your fitness groove, I have a message for you: Do less, and do it regularly. ..As it turns out, my approach is sanctioned by science. It’s been a revelation."

Comparison of Azure Storage Replication options

Azure offers Storage replication options:

"Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously only within a Primary Region.

"Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated across multiple facilities. These facilities may be within the same geographical region or across two geographical regions.

"Geographically Redundant Storage (GRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously within a Primary Region and then replicated asynchronously to a Secondary Region. You cannot directly read data from or write data to the Secondary Region associated with GRS Accounts.

"Read Access Geographically Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously within a Primary Region and then replicated asynchronously to a Secondary Region. You can directly read data from, but cannot write data to, the Secondary Region associated with RA-GRS Accounts.

Replication strategy	LRS	ZRS	GRS	RA-GRS
Data is replicated across multiple facilities.	No	Yes currently available only for block blobs	Yes	Yes
Data can be read from the secondary location as well as from the primary location.	No	No	No	Yes secondary endpoint is similar to the primary endpoint, but appends the suffix –secondary to the account name. For example, if your primary endpoint for the Blob service is myaccount.blob.core.windows.net, then your secondary endpoint is myaccount-secondary.blob.core.windows.net. The access keys for your storage account are the same for both the primary and secondary endpoints.
Number of copies of data maintained on separate nodes.	3 replicas each reside in separate fault domains and upgrade domains	3	6 replicated three times asynchronously, across separate fault domains and upgrade domains in secondary region	6

Related terms:

"Primary Region" is a geographical region in which data within a storage account is located, as selected by you when creating the storage account. You may execute write requests only against data stored within the Primary Region associated with storage accounts.

"Secondary Region" is a geographical region in which data within a GRS or RA-GRS Account is replicated and stored, as assigned by Microsoft Azure based on the Primary Region associated with the storage account. You cannot specify the Secondary Region associated with storage accounts.

"Geo Replication Lag" for GRS and RA-GRS Accounts is the time it takes for data stored in the Primary Region of the storage account to replicate to the Secondary Region of the storage account. Because GRS and RA-GRS Accounts are replicated asynchronously to the Secondary Region, data written to the Primary Region of the storage account will not be immediately available in the Secondary Region. You can query the Geo Replication Lag for a storage account, but Microsoft does not provide any guarantees as to the length of any Geo Replication Lag under this SLA.

A fault domain (FD) is a group of nodes that represent a physical unit of failure and can be considered as nodes belonging to the same physical rack.

An upgrade domain (UD) is a group of nodes that are upgraded together during the process of a service upgrade (rollout).

Azure in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Worldwide for third year running

Gartner has named Microsoft a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Worldwide for the third year in a row based on completeness of our vision and ability to execute.

The following table from an email advertorial summarizes the current Gartner MQs for IaaS, PaaS and Saas solutions for key enterprise workloads where Microsoft is recognized as a leader while showing how the other Cloud Providers fare.

This Week I Learned - Week #175

This Week I Learned -

* Docker is at the confluence of three major IT investment areas - Cloud, DevOps and Microservices

* Azure RemoteApp is being retired.  Microsoft will be partnering with Citrix in the remote desktop and applications space to address new scenarios on the Azure cloud.

* jsDelivr is a free and public CDN that offers hosting for developers at no cost. It’s a lot like Google Hosted Libraries, but with more projects and freedom. Anyone can submit a library for hosting on this CDN. It’s fast with multiple points of presence around the globe — 81. The main backbone of it is built on top of CDN networks provided by MaxCDN and CloudFlare. jsDelivr is the first CDN to support loading multiple files with a single HTTP request

* jQuery Geocoding and Places Autocomplete Plugin is an advanced jQuery plugin that wraps the Google Maps API's Geocoding and Places Autocomplete services. You simply provide an input that lets you search for locations with a nice autocomplete dropdown. Optionally add a container to show an interactive map and a form that will be populated with the address details.

* Sogou is a dual-engine browser. One engine is Webkit and the other supposedly is Trident. 360 Quick Browser, 360 Safe Browser, Sogou Explorer are popular in China. Amazon Assistant browser extension is available for 360 Quick Browser, 360 Safe Browser, Sogou Explorer, Sleipnir browsers.

* SyllableCount.com uses a combination of a 240,364 word U.S. English syllable count dictionary and a syllable counter algorithm.It's algorithm may not be entirely accurate due to the numerous syllabic anomalies found within the U.S. English language.

* The Oatmeal, the website that former computer programmer Matthew Inman launched in 2009, draws as many as 7 million unique monthly visitors. Inman’s comics have won an Eisner Award, the Pulitzer Prize of the comics industry. Matt can accurately predict what massive groups of people will find entertaining. His mother, Ann Inman, an artist who supported a family of seven by making mohair teddy bears for collectors around the world, says her son became a web developer after the Silverwood Theme Park fired him from his summer parking-lot job after discovering he was only 14 years old. Like most artists, Inman lives in perpetual fear that he will never have another good idea. “I enjoy things most when I suffer beforehand..I’m driven by rage and anxiety’’ he says - The Seattle Times

* Only contribution to Tier-I NPS account (not Tier-2) is eligible for income tax benefits. Investment up to Rs 1.5 lacs into NPS in a financial year is eligible for deduction under Section 80CCD(1). This deduction comes under the overall ceiling of Rs 1.5 lacs for deduction under Section 80C but an additional Rs 50,000 deduction over and above the ceiling limit of under Section 80C can be claimed through investments into NPS under Section 80CCD (1B). Also a further deduction under Section 80CCD(2) is possible through contribution from the employer up to 10% of Basic Salary + Dearness Allowance. The 80CCD(2) benefit is available to employees only and not to those who are self-employed.

* The 'Produnova' vault is considered most difficult and dangerous manoeuvre in women’s gymnastics. It currently has a 7.0 D-score and thus provides a leg-up for any gymnast able to perform it successfully. The manoeuvre, named after Russian gymnast Yelena Sergeyevna Produnova, consists of a front handspring and two front somersaults. The trick is to get high enough to be able to execute two flips in the air and land safely on your feet. In 1999, Produnova became the first person to nail the vault and, since then, only five other gymnasts have successfully executed it. Dipa Karmakar, one of those five gymnasts, has made the Produnova her calling card - Business Standard

* Hyperandrogenism is a medical condition characterised by excessive levels of androgen, indicated most clearly by the amount of testosterone in a woman's body. It is one of the primary symptoms of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), and 1 in every 7 women between the ages of 15 and 30 suffers from it. In other words, hyperandrogenism is pretty common. Except on the sports field.  In 2011, the IAAF, contending that high levels of testosterone conferred a biological advantage on female athletes - it is believed to help build muscle and make athletes faster - ruled that a female athlete would be eligible to compete against other women "provided that she has androgen levels below the male range". On behalf of every woman athlete with her condition, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand from Odisha, decided to challenge the IAAF's ceiling on the permissible amounts of testosterone in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, in Switzerland. On 25th July 2015, in a landmark judgment, the court overturned Dutee's ban imposed prior to the 2012 Commonwealth Games and ruled that the ceiling on testosterone levels would be suspended for two years, while the IAAF gathered proof to support their claims of testosterone-linked biological advantage - Roopa Pai

This Week I Learned - Week #174

This Week I Learned -

* Azure in-place virtual machine migration eliminates virtual machine reboots during critical security updates for host operating systems. Critical security updates for host operating systems previously caused a reboot. Now, most virtual machines benefit from Azure in-place virtual machine migration that only pauses them for up to 30 seconds, while the local temporary disk and memory state are preserved. 

* Azure Security Center helps you take control of cloud security policies, monitor the current security of your Azure resources, and detect and respond to active attacks.

* Powershell command to view the Fault Domains and Update Domains for ARM VMs -

PS C:\> $AS = Get-AzureRmAvailabilitySet -ResourceGroupName "RGEastUSMinecraft"

PS C:\> $AS.VirtualMachinesReferences | ForEach { $VMResource =(Get-AzureRmResource -Id $_.id);


* MariaDB is an open source relations database that can bsed as an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL. Notable users include Wikipedia, Google & Facebook. The latest versions of MariaDB include GIS & JSON features.

* Some devices do not fully support modern HTTPS. The vast majority of unencrypted end user traffic originating from a set of surveyed Google services comes from mobile devices. Certain countries and organizations block or otherwise degrade HTTPS traffic

* Apple.com & Microsoft.com do not support Default HTTPS (i.e the site does not redirect HTTP requests to a HTTPS URL)

* You can get free certificates for any use from Let’s Encrypt

* Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, is an open source initiative from Google to improve the mobile web experience for everyone.

* In the exam for constable posts being conducted by the Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC), around 2.68 lakh candidates will compete for the 477 vacancies of which 32,346 candidates are engineering graduates, 2,511 hold a M.Tech degree and 11,703 candidates have MBA degree. Officials are not surprised with engineers and M.Tech degree holders applying as similar trend was seen in other recruitment examinations as well. Increased desire for Government jobs is a big reason while improved access to higher education is another factor, says a senior teacher of Osmania University. Most of these engineering graduates are the beneficiaries of expansion of engineering education and MBA colleges and the fee reimbursement scheme - The Hindu

* Built in 1929, the first Parle factory built in Mumbai’s suburb Vile Parle is shutting down soon. Today, with the Rs. 10,000 crore company’s vast array of eatables across the chocolate, baked goods, drinks and confectionaries categories – like the Parle-G biscuits, Frooti, Melody chocolates, Mango Bite candies, Monaco, KrackJack, Hide & Seek, Bourbon, Appy, Parle Poppins and the pocket-friendly Kismi, Parle holds a staggering 40 percent share in the biscuit market and a 15 percent share of the total confectionery market in India.

* What began as a single race has now grown to a 306 events sporting spectacle in 42 sports disciplines. Over 10,500 athletes from 207 countries are expected to participate in the XXXI Olympiad at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is the first time it’s being held in South America.

* Bust-out fraud consists of an initial phase where the individual works to develop the card issuer’s trust and a strong credit profile with the goal of opening numerous accounts and receiving credit line increases so that more funds are available for the second phase of the fraud, where the individual makes transactions that he or she doesn’t plan to repay i.e. After credit is built, the "bust-out" takes place.

* Garry Trudeau is the Pulitzer Prize cartoonist, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury, which appears daily in over 1,400 newspapers. In 1975, Garry Trudeau became the first comic strip artist ever to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. Doonesbury is "a comic strip that began life, when I was in college, as a one-off. It was a sports strip that was about a particularly outstanding football player on my college campus. And it caught the eye of a syndicate chief, who wrote me in my junior year and said, "How would you like to do this for a living?" So, that’s the—I didn’t have a particularly long period of paying dues. I jumped in right after graduation, and I’ve been writing this daily comic strip, which was about collegiate life, but which became about the broader world and all the many issues I’m interested in."

* "Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable" - Garry Trudeau, cartoonist, Doonesbury

This Week I Learned - Week #173

This Week I Learned -

* With SQL Server Stretch Database, you can dynamically stretch warm and cold transactional data from  Microsoft SQL Server 2016 to Azure. Customers can also use Stretch Database with new Always Encrypted technology, which helps protect your data at rest and in motion

* Azure Service Fabric helps developers build, deploy, and operate microservice architecture applications, reliably and at scale.

* Twitter recently reported that Avicoder, security researcher, discovered a security flaw within Twitter's Vine code that allowed for the download of Vine's entire source code. At the heart of the vulnerability is the Docker setup Twitter used to manage the Vine account.

* LanguageCourse.net  has a biased but useful comparison of the leading language learning apps out there

* Google for Education has several useful resources for educators and students

* PCmover software can  automatically transfers files, settings, profiles, and applications to a new PC or upgrades to a new OS, including Windows 10.

* Capgemini, which was the seventh largest employer in 2014-15 has displaced HCL  to break into the top 5 list of IT-BPO employers after TCS, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro.

* After scouring 42,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean for the wreckage of MH370 at a cost of more than $130 million (with another 4,000 square miles to go) over a period of two years, officials from Malaysia, China, and Australia have announced that they will suspend further efforts to find the plane.

* Palladium is one of the rarest metals on earth, about 15 times  more rare than platinum and 30 times more rare than gold. Around 80% of the world's palladium production comes from 2 countries - Russia and South Africa.

* Some of the 17 "rare" elements are among the world's most abundant elements; they're only referred  to as "rare" because they're difficult to extract.

* India accounts for or 1,236 or 12 per cent of the total number of bird species in the world, amounting to 10,135. Taxonomically, the bird population in the country is divided into 23 orders, 107 families and 498 genera. Among the bird families, Muscicapidae (comprising chats, robins and flycatchers) are the most diverse, having as many as 97 species. Raptors or birds of prey, which include vultures, eagles, and kites, are represented by 57 species and typical babblers by 53 species - The Hindu

* The director, K Balachander, rechristened Shivaji Rao Gaekwad as Rajinikanth (the color of dusk) as a remark on the latter's skin color

* Karnam Malleswari, India's lone medalist (a bronze in weightlifting) in the 2000 Sydney Olympics is the first woman from India to win an Olympic medal. India has the ignominy of being the country with the lowest medal tally per capita

* By winning the gold in the 10 m Air Rifle event at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Abhinav Bindra became the first Indian to win an individual gold medal at the Olympic Games

* Bhanu Athaiya, the first Indian to win an Oscar has returned her trophy to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as she felt that her family will not be able to take care of the after her demise

* Jammu & Kashmir get 10% of Central Government funds with only 1% of population

* Direct plans of Mutual Funds launched 3 years ago, account for 37% of total industry AUM. A direct mutual fund charges 0.75 - 1.5% or Rs 750-1500 per year for managing an investment of Rs 1 lakh compared with Rs 1500-2000 charged by a regular mutual fund. NPS Tier II plans charge only 0.01% or Rs 10 per year for managing an investment of Rs 1 lakh.

* American Sign Language has 50,000 signs. India has its very own alphabet of signs and symbols called ISL. In 2001, the Ramakrishna Mission released the first Indian Sign Language Dictionary, which documented over 2,500 signs from 12 States, to provide a common sign language code.

* National Consumer Help Line (NCH), a project of the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs (@consaff) has a website & toll-free number - 1800 11 4000

* 35% of water connections in Hyderabad are un-billed. The Water Board loses money on supply of nearly 120 million gallons every day.

* The Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005 is an Act of the Parliament of India "to provide for setting out the practical regime of right to information for citizens" and replaces the erstwhile Freedom of information Act, 2002.The Act applies to all States and Union Territories of India except Jammu & Kashmir. Under the provisions of the Act, any citizen may request information from a "public authority" (a body of Government or "instrumentality of State") which is required to reply expeditiously or within thirty days. The Act also requires every public authority to computerise their records for wide dissemination and to proactively certain categories of information so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally.It is an initiative taken by the Department of Personnel and Training, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions

* Only in India - Mysuru Deputy Commissioner C Shikha, IAS, lodged a formal complaint of criminal intimidation against K Marigowda, an acknowledged member of the "photo club" that hovers around Siddaramaiah and tries to get into every frame the CM is pictured in Mysuru. Even after a FIR has been issued and after a Mysuru court has rejected Marigowda's anticipatory bail application, he is yet to arrested as all the officers whom can be directed to arrest Marigowda are Kurubas, the community that the Chief Minister of Karnataka, Siddaramaiah and her IAS husband, Ajay Nagabhushan belong to - The Economic Times

* Democracies have a weakness: if a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books - Maximum City

Pluralsight benefit for Visual Studio subscribers

Pluralsight is a benefit included with Visual Studio Professional, Test Pro, Enterprise and MSDN Platforms subscriptions.

MSDN subscriptions offered through MPN, BizSpark, DreamSpark, MCT Developer Software and Services, and MCT Software and Services are not eligible for the Pluralsight benefit.

As of July 1, 2016, the courses included are:

Course Name / Author / Release Date / Duration	VS Professional with MSDN, VS Professional – annual & Test Professional with MSDN (30 courses)	VS Enterprise with MSDN, VS Enterprise - annual & MSDN Platforms (45 courses)
Architecting Applications for the Real World in .NET	●	●
ASP.NET 5: First Look	●	●
ASP.NET MVC 5 Fundamentals	●	●
Asynchronous C# 5.0	●	●
Automated ASP.NET MVC Testing: End to End		●
Azure AD for Developers / Sahil Malik / 22 Mar 2016 / 4h 52m	●	●
Becoming a .NET Developer	●	●
Beginning Automated Testing of Xamarin Applications		●
Building a Site with Bootstrap, AngularJS, ASP.NET, EF and Azure / Shawn Wildermuth / 31 Jul 2013 / 6h 29m	●	●
Building and Securing a RESTful API for Multiple Clients in ASP.NET	●	●
Building Cross Platform Mobile Apps with C#, Xamarin, and Azure	●	●
Building Cross-Platform iOS/Android Apps with Xamarin, Visual Studio, and C# - Part 1		●
Building Cross-Platform iOS/Android Apps with Xamarin, Visual Studio, and C# - Part 2		●
Building Highly Scalable Web Applications in Azure / Edin Kapic / 4 Aug 2015 / 2h 23m	●	●
Building Web Apps & Services with Entity Framework and Web API	●	●
C# Best Practices: Collections and Generics	●	●
C# Best Practices: Improving on the Basics	●	●
C# Fundamentals with Visual Studio 2015	●	●
C# Generics	●	●
Creating Custom Controls in Xamarin.Forms	●
Defensive Coding in C#	●	●
Designing a Hybrid Cloud in Azure / Gavin McShera / 4 Apr 2016 / 2h 8m	●	●
Designing Fluent APIs in C#	●	●
Diagnostic Analyzers in Visual Studio 2015: First Look		●
Docker for Web Developers / Dan Wahlin / 28 Mar 2016 / 5h 19m	●	●
Enterprise WPF with XAML and C# from Scratch	●	●
Getting Started with Entity Framework 6	●	●
Getting Started with JSON in C# Using Json.NET	●	●
Lessons from Real World .NET Code Reviews		●
LINQ Fundamentals	●	●
Load Testing with Visual Studio 2013	●
Looking Ahead to Entity Framework 7		●
Microsoft Azure for Enterprises: What and Why		●
Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service / Troy Hunt / 3 Apr 2015 / 2h 23m	●	●
OAuth2 and OpenID Connect Strategies for Angular and ASP.NET	●	●
Plan, Create, and Deploy to Azure With Visual Studio Online		●
SharePoint 2013 Fundamentals		●
SOLID Principles of Object Oriented Design	●	●
SQL Server: Building Simple Asynchronous Applications	●
Test-Driven Development with F#		●
Understanding Machine Learning with R / Jerry Kurata / 18 Feb 2016 / 1h 25m	●	●
Using TypeScript for Large AngularJS Applications	●	●
Visual Studio 2015: Essentials to the Power-User	●	●
Visual Studio Code		●
WCF End-to-End	●	●

Also see: Free Pluralsight videos

This Week I Learned - Week #172

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft Graph is a unified API endpoint, for accessing data, intelligence, and insights coming from the Microsoft cloud.

* Pokémon Go, the "digitally enhanced bird-watching" game, has almost as many users as Twitter

* Catchpoint API monitor can mimic API calls made by mobile devices

* What is Digital, anyway? - Digital means exploiting emerging technologies to create user- and customer-centric interfaces and data-driven decisions, leading to more agile, responsive, and competitive business models.

* 52% of companies from the Fortune 500 list of 2000 no longer exist

* The two-year old New Media Wing under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry mines data from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube to collect sentiments on current affairs and provide insight to senior Government officials on the mood in the social media on a daily basis. The analysis is done using Oracle's Social Relationship Manager & Meltwater

* ICICI Bank website and the bank's iMobile app can fetch the latest information for services including train options and ticket availability by connecting directly with the reservation system of the Indian Railways on a real time basis. The home page of Rail ticket booking subsite is all of 6.4MB mainly due to a 4.8MB background image. A IRCTC account is required to book train tickets on this subsite.

* ICICI Bank's note to customers using unparliamentary language - "..customers found to be offensive in their interaction with us will be required to close all their relationships with ICICI Bank"

* Amazon has built nearly two dozen warehouses in India  so far. The largest one is in Kothur in Telangana.

* 67% of the Indian population lives in rural areas. Only about 35% of India’s population is connected to the internet. 65% is under age 35. 80% of the population owns cell phones. Mobile wallets already outnumber credit cards

* Gerontology is the study of the social, psychological and biological aspects of ageing that aims to help the elderly lead a better life.

* Dressing the same way everyday saves time

This Week I Learned - Week #171

This Week I Learned -

* With SQL Server Stretch Database, you can dynamically stretch warm and cold transactional data from Microsoft SQL Server 2016 to Azure.

* To prevent users from accidentally signing in with Microsoft account credentials (hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com, etc.) or non-organizational credentials, you can leverage what’s known as a domain hint when you're navigating users to the Azure AD sign-in page.

* HTTP/2 is a networking protocol for low-latency transport of content over the web. It originally started out from the SPDY protocol, now standardized as HTTP version 2. Recent versions of all popular web and mobile browsers except Opera Mini support HTTP/2.

* Because mobile devices do not have the same computation power as regular laptops and desktop computers, creating a mobile-friendly experience requires more than using a different CSS layout. It’s also about the quantity and size of the resources used. Too many resources, or resources that are too small or too large, can ruin the entire mobile experience.

* Security (SSL) has a Performance Tax - Switching to all SSL is a great feature from a security perspective, but at the cost of performance. The problem is that when you introduce SSL, you are also forcing everything on your website (images, third parties, etc.) to also use SSL.  The combination of SSL and geographically induced latency that makes things even worse. Google has some advantages: massive internet presence, geo load balancing, amazing consistent performance (notice the flat line vs. the jittery blue line), anycast network, people dedicated to monitoring and an environment where performance is part of the core DNA of every employee. However, third parties weakest link on a page lacking the ability to handle your load or performance requirement. So make sure you keep an eye on your third parties when you switch to SSL. In HTTP 2.0, everything will be secure.

* Data Scientist (noun): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician

* There are some sites which URL encode links with their content and redirect through their own referrer page. To extract the decoded referred URL from such an encoded URL, URLDecode.org can help. Bing provides an inline form to decode when you search with the keywords "URL Decoder"

* Netflix awarded a $1 million prize to a developer team in 2009 for an algorithm that increased the accuracy of the company’s recommendation engine by 10 percent. It never used that $1 million algorithm due to engineering costs - Wired

* According to Gartner, 40% estimated effort during the software development lifecycle is lost on resolving environment related issues. Environment issues contribute 30% of defects and 20% schedule overruns.

*  Around 10% of Google's 25,000 developers are proficient in ML

* Deep Learning is a new area of Machine Learning research, which has been introduced with the objective of moving Machine Learning closer to one of its original goals: Artificial Intelligence.

* Pocket generates RSS feeds of your data, and you can subscribe to these feeds using an RSS reader

* The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps

* Pokémon Go is a (possibly overrated?) augmented-reality game which requires users to get out and explore the “real world” to play it. This game makes people look like drunkards in the streets and on the roads while their eyes are glued to the mobile screens leading them to the location of the imaginary Pokemon in the hope of catching it...the app can't function particularly well in South Korea because the government constrains the use of Google Maps.

* Amazon.in has crossed one lakh sellers. E-commerce sites have to look out for devious techniques like Roundtripping - sellers buying their own products at heavy discounts to re-sell

* Basal metabolic rate (energy used for bsic funcitoning when body is at rest) is believed to account for 60-80% of the total energy we spend

* The Kanchipuram saree is protected by a 'geographical indication' - no other place can claim to produce it. It is among the costliest silks because a lot of silver (250 gms at least) goes into making its zari (brocade) patterns and borders

* Asia's largest underground library is in Shri Bhadariya Lathi in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan.

* Americans spend about $500 million annually on newspaper obituaries

* Products are sometimes marketed as "Non-G.M.O." even when genetically modified versions do not exist. At the most basic level, a G.M.O. is a plant or animal whose DNA was altered in a laboratory, often by inserting genes from a distant species into its cells with the help of a bacterium or with other tools - NY Times

* "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it" - Mark Twain

Azure Machine Learning Resources

Books:
* Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Machine Learning [Free, PDF] (Published: April 2015, 237 pages)
* Microsoft Azure Machine Learning by Sumit Mund

Presentations:
* Amy Kate 

Videos:
* Channel 9 videos

Tutorials:
* Building a classification model in Azure ML - Titanic passenger data set 
* Predicting Gas Prices Using Azure Machine Learning Studio (April, 2015)
* Linear regression model that predicts the price of an automobile (July 2014, Updated: 03/09/2016)
* Cortana Intelligence Gallery - Azure ML community contributions
* ML Algorithms

Forums:
* MSDN Machine Learning online forums
* StackOverflow

work in progress...

Difference between Azure Machine Learning Free & Paid versions

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning environment “democratizes” the mysterious art of data science. It exposes this art to the masses by means of an easy-to-use visual interface that requires literally no programming and only a browser to use - and it is free!

This table lists the features that the paid version has -

	Free	Standard
Azure Subscription	Not Required	Required
Max Number of Modules per Experiment	100	Unlimited
Max Experiment Duration	1 hour per experiment	Up to 7 days per experiment with a maximum of 24 hours per module
Max Storage Space	10 GB	Unlimited - BYO
Read Data from On-Premises SQL Preview	No	Yes
Execution / Performance	Single node	Multiple nodes
Production Web API	No	Yes
SLA	No	Yes,  99.95% availability of API transactions for Request Response Service (RRS), 99.9% availability of API transactions for Batch Execution Service (BES) and management APIs
Storage	Does not require or allow separate storage	Requires users to have an Azure storage account. Azure storage is billed separately.
Production ready?	No, only non-production workloads are supported. You can only operationalize machine learning models to staging API services. Intended for development and personal use only	Production version of Azure Machine Learning

Microsoft Cognitive Services - powerful algorithms to build custom apps with just a few lines of code

Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of the following APIs:

1. Academic Knowledge API  helps to interpret user queries for academic intent and retrieve rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). The MAG knowledge base is a web-scale heterogeneous entity graph comprised of entities that model scholarly activities: field of study, author, institution, paper, venue, and event. The MAG data is mined from the Bing web index as well as an in-house knowledge base from Bing.
2. Bing Autosuggest API lets partners send a partial search query to Bing and get back a list of suggested queries that other users have searched on 
3. Bing Image Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Images 
4. Bing News Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/News 
5. Bing Speech API is a cloud-based API that provides advanced algorithms to process spoken language. With this API, developers can add speech driven actions to their applications including real-time interaction with the user. This REST API offers industry-leading speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and language understanding capabilities delivered through the cloud. Microsoft has used Bing Speech API for Windows applications like Cortana and Skype Translator as well as Android applications like Bing Torque for Android Wear and Android Phone.
6. Bing Spell Check API which performs contextual spell checking for any text and provides inline suggestions for misspelled words. Current spell-checkers rely on verifying spelling and grammar against dictionary-based rule sets which get updated and expanded periodically. In contrast, the Bing team has developed a web-based spell-checker that leverages machine learning and statistical machine translation to dynamically train a constantly-evolving and highly-contextual algorithm to provide spell checking on-demand for almost any word or phrase that exists on the web.
7. Bing Video Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Videos 
8. Bing Web Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Search 
9. Microsoft Computer Vision API is a cloud-based API that provides developers with access to advanced algorithms for processing images and returning information. By uploading an image or specifying an image URL, Microsoft Computer Vision algorithms can analyze visual content in different ways based on inputs and user choices. Computer Vision API offers image “tagging” based on more than 2000 recognizable objects, living beings and actions. In cases where tags may be ambiguous or not common knowledge, the API response provides “hints” to clarify the meaning of the tag in context of a known setting. 
10. Microsoft Emotion API allows you to build more personalized apps with Microsoft’s cloud-based emotion recognition algorithm. The Emotion API takes an image as an input, and returns the confidence across a set of emotions for each face in the image, as well as bounding box for the face, from the Face API. The emotions detected are happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, contempt, disgust or neutral. 
11. Microsoft Entity Linking Intelligence Service is a web service created to help developers with tasks relating to entity linking.Sometimes in different contexts, a word might be used as a named entity, a verb, or other word form within a given sentence. For example, in the case where “times” is a named entity, it still may refer to two separately distinguishable entities, such as “The New York Times” or “Times Square”. Given a specific paragraph within a document, the Entity Linking Intelligence Service will recognize and identify each separate entity based on its context. 
12. Microsoft Face API is a cloud-based API that provides the most advanced algorithms for face detection and recognition. The Face API provides high precision face location detection that can detect up to 64 human faces in an image. Face detection can be done by uploading an entire JPEG file or by specifying a URL of an existing JPEG image on the web.
13. Microsoft Knowledge Exploration Service (KES) offers a fast and effective way to add interactive search and refinement to applications. With KES, you can build a compressed index from structured data, author a grammar that interprets natural language queries, and provide interactive query formulation with auto-completion suggestions.
14. Linguistic Analysis APIs provide access to natural langauge processing (NLP) tools that identify the structure of text. The current release provides three types of analysis: Sentence separation and tokenization, Part-of-speech tagging, Constituency parsing
15. Language Understanding Intelligent Services (LUIS) is designed to enable you to quickly deploy an HTTP endpoint that will take the sentences you send it and interpret them in terms of the intention they convey and the key entities that are present. One of the key problems in human-computer interactions is the ability of the computer to understand what a person wants, and to find the pieces of information that are relevant to their intent. Once your application is deployed and traffic starts to flow into the system, LUIS uses active learning to improve itself.
16. The Recommendations API built with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning helps your customer discover items in your catalog. Customer activity in your digital store is used to recommend items and to improve conversion in your digital store. The recommendation engine may be trained by uploading data about past customer activity or by collecting data directly from your digital store. When the customer returns to your store you will be able to feature recommended items from your catalog that may increase your conversion rate.
17. Microsoft Speaker Recognition APIs are cloud-based APIs that provide the most advanced algorithms for speaker verification and speaker identification.
18. Text Analytics API is a suite of text analytics services built with Azure Machine Learning currently offering APIs for sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and topic detection for English text, as well as language detection for 120 languages
19. Microsoft Video API is a cloud-based API that provides advanced algorithms for tracking faces, detecting motion, stabilizing and creating thumbnails from video.
20. Microsoft Web Language Model API (WebLM) is a REST-based cloud service providing state-of-the-art tools for natural language processing. Using this API, your application can leverage the power of big data through language models trained on web-scale corpora collected by Bing in the EN-US market. 

The following Bing APIs are generally available: Bing Autosuggest API, Bing Spell Check API, Bing Search APIs. These Bing APIs are available as standalone services, and general availability pricing went into effect on July 1, 2016.

This Week I Learned - Week #169

This Week I Learned -

* The F-Series Azure Virtual Machine instances are optimized for compute intensive workloads and are based on 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) processor, which can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.2 GHz with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0. These sizes have the same CPU performance as the Dv2-Series at a lower per hour price, making these sizes the best value in price performance on Azure. These virtual machines are available in 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 core sizes with 2 GB random-access memory (RAM) and 8 GB of local solid state drive (SSD) per CPU core and have options for both standard and premium storage optimized sizes. These sizes are best suited for scenarios such as analytics, web and gaming servers, and batch processing, and also those that do not require as much memory or SSD per CPU core.  

* Apache Spark for  Azure HDInsight offers customers a fully managed, secured, and highly available enterprise-ready Apache Spark solution. Apache Spark is one of the most popular big-data projects. It’s known for handling large-scale data applications in memory, for queries that are up to 100 times faster. Apache Spark lets users do batch and interactive queries, real-time streaming, machine learning, and graph processing—all with a common execution model.  

* With support for  Apple FairPlay Streaming (FPS), PlayReady, and Widevine,  Azure Media Services now provides a truly multi-DRM (digital rights management) solution for streaming VOD and live content

 * AWS is “the overwhelming market share leader,” running more than 10 times the infrastructure cloud-computing capacity as the next 14 largest rivals combined.

* Amazon India has 45000 employees in India.

* Microsoft is currently the only vendor to be positioned as a Leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Identity as a Service, Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Server Virtualization, Application Platform as a Service, and Cloud Storage Services, and as a leader across the data platform and productivity services.

* 52% of the BSE Top 100 companies subscribe to the Microsoft Cloud

* Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka's compensation is 935.38 times the median employee remuneration

* PDF documents can be categorised into three different types, depending on the way the file is created. How it was originally created defines whether the content of the PDF (text, images, tables) can be accessed or whether it is “locked” in an image of the page

* Tenda TE-D151 N150 Wireless ADSL2+ Modem Router advertises its ability to withstand lightning surges of up to 6000 volts as one of its features.

* While Flipkart has a Compare feature to help buyers choose from similar products, Amazon has Buying Guides (on topics as diverse as Routers to Sunglasses) to make online shoppers make informed decisions. The reviews on both sites don't help though & seem biased and paid for.

* About 2,000 known species of fireflies inhabit temperate and tropical forests around the world. All of them, as larvae, produce bioluminescent light through a chemical reaction inside their abdomens. But only some continue to flash as grown-up beetles that we know as fireflies. Most species developed their own flash pattern, or language, that they use to attract potential mates, warn predators about their toxicity, advertise a nutritious dowry, or, for some cannibalistic fireflies called femme fatales, mimic other firefly species and lure them in for dinner. A couple of species even flash in synchrony. The device,  Firefly Communicator developed by Joey Stein, a nature enthusiast and technologist,  is a hand-held, battery-operated, plastic thing-a-ma-jig with two buttons that control an LED light & lets you communicate with fireflies - NY Times

* Melons don't continue to ripen once picked, unlike fruits such as apples, bananas etc. which contain ethylene.  Ethylene exposure will activate chitinase (which is a type of enzyme that breaks down chitin, a structural material inside plants), and cause softening of a pineapple but not ripen it. Fruit ripening is usually due to exposure of unsaturated hydrocarbons e.g. ethylene. This phenomenon occurs in fruit known as "climacteric fruits". Well known examples are banana, avocado, tomato, apple, pear, kiwi, to name a few. Avocados and pears must be picked in order to ripen. Pears that are left on the tree will simply rot. 

* Mallika strain of mangoes which contains high-quality fibreless pulp is a hybrid obtained from crossing the Neelam and Dusheri varieties

* Anant Pai,  of India,  was orphaned by the time he was 2 years old. Anant Pai came up with the idea of Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories or Comics) after he found out that the youngsters knew more about Western civilizations than their Indian heritage. Krishna was the first comic book from ACK came out in February 1970. It carries serial number 11. Numbers 1 to 10 were reprints of Western comics. It was authored by Anant Pai & drawn by Ram Waeerkar. The series covers not just popular personalities but the not so well-known as well (Title # 306 - "The Story of a Scientist - Yellapragada Subbarow"). Deservedly, there is a ACK title on India's Walt Disney - Anant Pai

* The pay revision for Central Government employees this year will benefit 50 lakh employees and 58 lakh pensioners and cost the exchequer Rs. 1.02 lakh crore. The average hike in salaries and pensions is 14.2%.

* Under Section 80GGC of the Income Tax Act, which governs political party contributions, an individual is entitled to claim a 100% exemption from his gross total income on all the donations he makes in a financial year to a registered political party or an electoral trust. Parties require to collect name, address and PAN number if donations are over Rs 20,000.

* Air conditioner in a car consumes 8% of the fuel.

* “I start early and I stay late, not for a day, but day after day, year after year, it took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success.”  - Lionel Messi

* "Speak softly, and carry a big stick." - Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt's attribution of the phrase to "a West African proverb" was seen at the time as evidence of Roosevelt’s "prolific" reading habits, but the claim that it originated in West Africa has been disputed. It has been therefore suggested that he might have coined the phrase himself. "Speaking softly" earned the President enough prestige to even merit a Nobel Peace Prize the following year for his efforts.

Book Review: Microsoft Azure Machine Learning by @sumitmund

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning by Sumit Mund is a good beginner level book that made Azure ML a little less daunting for me. I'll keep going back to it as I continue to learn & experiment more with Azure ML, the amazing predictive analysis tool that makes it easy for developers to leverage complex Machine Learning algorithms all within the web browser.

Having quickly read through the book to familiarize myself with Machine Learning jargon & tried some of the samples, I've realized it'll take me more reading and practice to achieve proficiency. This 200+ paged book whets your learning appetite by covering a breadth of topics with just enough information to get you started but not too much to make it too intimidating for newbies.

It helps that the author makes practical tips & recommendations rather than just pontificating. Sample -
Outliers are data points that are distinctly separate from the rest of the data... In many cases, it is a good idea to clip or remove the outliers.

As with anything related to the Cloud, most info has a limited shelf-life - a serious threat to books & documentation. As Azure ML Studio continues to evolve, some things have changed since the book was written. Therefore you'll find that some Modules described in the book have new names and it is an exercise for the reader to identify the differences.

A little more effort could have been spent in presenting the content better. While the author provides background context for most keywords before introducing them, there were a few instances where the author drops keywords without adequate explanation like in the case of "ports".

Despite the minor blemishes, this book is engaging and well-structured. It helped me appreciate the understated power of Azure ML.

This Week I Learned - Week #168

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Algorithm Cheat Sheet helps you choose the right algorithm for a predictive analytics model.

* Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) is an operating system image available in the Azure Marketplace with a host of popular data science tools pre-installed and pre-configured.

* Azure SQL Data Warehouse can connect to Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning libraries and Azure Data Lake.

* Mark Zuckerberg covers his laptop camera. The taped-over camera and microphone jack are usually a signal that someone is concerned, perhaps only vaguely, about hackers’ gaining access to his or her devices by using remote-access trojans — a process called “ratting.” (Remote access is not limited to ratters: According to a cache of National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, at least two government-designed programs were devised to take over computer cameras and microphones.) - NY Times

* Based on the data gathered from Trend Micro Mobile App Reputation Service, malicious apps related to Godless malware  threat can be found in prominent app stores, including Google Play. The incident provides further evidence that users can't strictly trust official app stores to stay protected.

* Interesting facts from LinkedIn's Top Attractors list
- Half of CapGemini’s global workforce is based in India.

- Wipro (Western India Palm Refined Oils Limited) is one of India’s largest public companies and the seventh largest IT company in the world. Wipro has 170,000 employees on six continents and generates half of its revenues in the Americas.

- OYO’s founder and CEO, Ritesh Agarwal is just 22 years old and is the first resident Indian to win the Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant from Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel.

- Cognizant was ranked #230 in the Fortune 500 list this year, up from #288 in 2015.

- Since 2012, Amazon has offered a program called "Career Choice," where the company pays 95% of tuition for its fulfillment and customer service center employees to take courses in non-work related fields, such as airplane mechanics, nursing, and medical lab technologies.

- Salesforce consulted monks when constructing areas for mindfulness in its offices. (Conservative Hindus swear by vasthu)

* The CEO of Goldman Sachs, a brand that for most of the world is the archetype of “Wall Street bank,” now tells anyone who asks that his company is actually a tech firm (and the fact that a quarter of its workforce is now engineers backs that up

* Dohaz.com does English translations of Hindi lyrics of mostly Bollywood songs

* The average consumption per user on Google's broadband Wi-Fi network at 19 railway stations is 15 times the data (Source: IAMAI Data, Google Internal Data) they would consume on a 3G pack in a day, which today is the most dominant means of access to the Internet in the country. 

* Venezuela has shown that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food. Economists say years of economic mismanagement — worsened by low prices for oil, the nation’s main source of revenue — have shattered the food supply.

* Natural gas, the kind used to heat homes and fuel gas stoves, is actually odorless. A chemical, called mercaptan, is added to the gas to give it a scent... of rotten eggs. This is done so that if a gas leak occurs, (which could be dangerous) humans can detect even the slightest whiff and report it ASAP

*  Michael Phelps, aged 30,  is the most successful Olympian in history with 18 golds, two silvers and two bronzes in his four trips so far. In 2014, he went into rehab after his second D.U.I. arrest in September 2014 (his first occurred when he was 19) "having no idea what to do with the rest of his life".

* In the book Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl argues that we have an incredible power to shape our attitudes and responses to the challenges life presents us and that we inevitably grow thanks to these challenges. We inevitably choose to be who we are...if we choose wisely, we can triumph even in tragedy. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual

* "Stop saying learning to code is easy..."easy" sets folks up for failure and a lifetime of self-doubt" - Scott Hanselman 

This Week I Learned - Week #167

This Week I Learned -

* A web page I built with StupidTable jQuery plugin to sort a table was about three times lighter than the more feature-rich DataTables jQuery plugin

* Nice code sample of an Azure Function that uses a blob trigger, sends the uploaded object to be analysed by Cortana Intelligence and stores the results in a DocumentDB collection.

* It is possible to get data (from a relational database) into and out of a Google Sheet programmatically

* Windows App Studio which makes is easy to build a Windows Phone app without coding now provides a REST API Data Source feature that allows users to integrate apps with third party APIs.

* Power BI is an evolution of the add-ins previously available in Excel: Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power View. You can use Power BI with or without Excel—you no longer are dependent on the version of Microsoft Office installed at your company. Power BI is not just a tool: it is an ecosystem that can integrate existing corporate BI with Self-Service BI - from the Intro of the free ebook Introducing Microsoft Power BI [PDF]

* Downloading MeasureUp practice tests to virtual machines is prohibited.

* Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14 million (in cash) in 1987, its first significant acquisition. Robert Gaskins helped invent PowerPoint at Forethought Inc. in 1984. After the sale Robert reported directly to Bill Gates, heading up Microsoft’s business unit in Silicon Valley. He managed the growth of PowerPoint to $100 million in annual sales before his retirement in 1993.

* Kaggle hosts competitions provided by industry and academia to find machine learning solutions on different data sets. It also hosts publicly available datasets like the Enron email dataset (354.72 MB) which contains approximately 500,000 emails generated by employees of the Enron Corporation. It was obtained by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during its investigation of Enron's collapse.

* Active noise canceling actually uses a mic to listen to ambient noise and then plays the inverse sound wave into the headset, "canceling" the ambient noise

* How drivers of cab aggregation services game the system to create artificial scarcity and trigger surge pricing - drivers concentrate in one location, switch off their app, and create artificial scarcity. They use the second phones to keep track on the rising prices. Once the surge begins, they log back again.

* Locally grown food products are becoming more desirable than products sourced from far away...free-range livestock that are fed natural foods may be more desirable than cage-raised livestock that are fed a processed food

* Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) Chief Executive Officer Pawan Agarwal is tasked with improving food testing facilities and working with food businesses to improve manufacturing practices and hygiene standards. He feels it is wrong for Indians to expect international food safety standards as it is impractical

* If you file your return on time, losses of this year can be set-off against gain of forthcoming years. Supreme Court of India rejected a petition of Ms. J Jayalalitha, Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu against Madras High Court order to prosecute her for non filing of return of a firm in which she was a partner.

* A total of 28.7 million individuals filed income tax returns, of which 16.2 million did not pay any tax, leaving only about 12.5 million tax-paying individuals, which is just about 1 percent of the 1.23 billion population of India in the year 2013.  The Prime Minister of India urged tax officials — who are responsible for providing Rs 17 lakh crore to the government — to double the number of taxpayers to 10 crore from 5.43 crore (54.3 million) now. Google throws up 7 crore search results in response to the question 'How to pay tax in India' and 12 crore answers for 'How not to pay tax in India'.

* Labrador retriever is the most popular dog according to American Kennel Club which publishes an annual list of the most popular dog breeds in the United States, based on registration data for the nearly 200 breeds they officially recognize - WSJ

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