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."

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 #170

This Week I Learned -

* You can use Always Encrypted to help ensure that your sensitive data remains private and confidential while it's stored and queried in Azure SQL Database

* Azure Automation schedules now support time zones and adjust for daylight saving based on the schedule’s time zone.

* Windows Server 2016 features support for containers. These are not Linux-based, but containers that run on Windows and run Windows on the inside. They allow you to run applications insulated from the rest of the system, within portable containers that include everything an application needs to be fully functional. As they did with Linux, containers will change the nature of the software supply chain for Windows users.

* Bing API v5 service differentiates between a DOS attack and QPS (queries per second) violation. If the service suspects a denial of service attack, the request will succeed (HTTP status code is 200 OK); however, the body of the response will be empty. If you exceed your QPM (queries per month), the request fails with HTTP status code 403, and if you exceed your QPS, the request fails with HTTP status code 429. The response will also include the Retry-After header, which contains the number of seconds that you should wait before sending another request - MSDN

* It's been almost two years (August 2014) since Google announced that HTTPS was a ranking signal. As of late June, SEOMoz's tracking data shows that 32.5% (almost one-third) of page-1 Google results now use the "https:" protocol.

* Any major change from HTTP to HTTPS for sitewide URLs is risky, especially for large sites.

* There are more than 3 billion internet users who access it using 8.1 billion connected devices, including more than 24,000 distinct mobile device types.

* There are 12,106 W3C specified APIs and no browser implements them all

* Over the last year (June 2015-May 2016) 2.07% were running IE8, a browser that Microsoft no longer patches; the same goes for more than three-quarters of the 1.59% on IE9 and for virtually all of the 10.95% who ran IE10 

* Webcompat.com is a place to report bugs from any website across the web

* Tesla the inventor:
- He was a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin
- Tesla felt that thought could be photographed ultimately. He believed we would develop ways to see thought and that people would communicate with their thoughts. He had so many phobias that he couldn't have had close relationships with women. He didn't like most of the jewelry that they wore or the perfume, and he couldn't bear to touch hair. In fact, he didn't like to shake hands.
- Tesla underwent a debilitating trauma a few years after recovering from cholera. This time, the nature of the illness and its causes were a complete mystery. Tesla's physical senses, which had always been remarkably acute, seemed to go inexplicably into overdrive, paralyzing him with an overabundance of sensation. Tesla shunned physical contact with other people, with a special aversion to touching hair. To avoid shaking hands with people he met, Tesla lied that he had injured his hands in a laboratory accident.
- Tesla claimed to never sleep more than two hours
- In middle age, Tesla became a close friend of Mark Twain; they spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere
- Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize clothing; on several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress
- Tesla had serious differences with Edison & Marconi & a lot of animosity
- In 1917..Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal
- Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions

* Mexico which has one of the highest prevalence rates for obesity in the world,  introduced a 8% "sin tax" on energy dense food (275 kcal/100 g).

* India is the largest importer of defense related equipment in the world. Of its annual spend of over $50 Billion on arms, over 50% of that is spent on imports.

* The son of a government bureaucrat, Subramanian Swamy was raised in New Delhi but left in 1962 to pursue a doctorate in economics at Harvard, the beginning of a nearly 50-year affiliation with the university, as an associate professor and summer lecturer. Over the years, Mr. Swamy has served five terms in Parliament for two different parties that have since become part of Mr. Modi’s governing party. He settled into a routine of spending winters in India and summers teaching at Harvard. Mr. Swamy’s wife, Roxna, is a member of the Parsi community, which emigrated centuries ago from Iran. One of his sons-in-law is Muslim. He has nearly three million Twitter followers - NY Times

* The journalist, Suhasini Haider is Subramanian Swamy's daughter

* Steve Wozniak stayed at Hewlett-Packard before he finally jumped to Apple. Bill Gates stayed at Harvard until he wrote the first code for what became Microsoft Basic. Larry Page and Sergey Brin stayed in graduate school until Google started to become viable as a business. They even tried to sell their business to Yahoo for one million but Yahoo said no.

* America is a little different from Japan, but ultimately it’s all the same. We’re all the same in that we’re enticed into the false illusion of happiness through material purchase.

* Aedes albopictus, known as the Asian tiger mosquito, is found on Long Island and is capable of transmitting Zika in a laboratory setting. As bats eat flying insects, including mosquitoes, a Long Island town is using bat houses in several parks to attract more bats to the area. Bats can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes per hour. New York State is home to nine bat species — none of them vampire bats. New York State is home to nine bat species — none of them vampire bats. Less than one-half of 1 percent of all bats in North America carry rabies, according to the Humane Society of the United States - NY Times

* Sir John Chilcot’s 12 volume report covering 2.6 million words (the complete works of Shakespeare contain 8,85,000 words) found that not all peaceful options had been exhausted in the lead up to the war and the invasion was by no means a final resort. His inquiry took 7 years, a year longer than the 6 year Iraq war.

* Like Machine Learning - "A passion is a theory. Now you have to test your theory. The world is your laboratory. Construct the experiment that will test your theory. Then test and test and test and tweak and test more" - James Altucher

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.

This Week I Learned - Week #158

This Week I Learned -

* REST, or Representational State Transfer, in the JSON/Atom Custom Search API is somewhat different from traditional REST. Instead of providing access to resources, the API provides access to a service. As a result, the API provides a single URI that acts as the service endpoint. Google has also provided a Nuget package Google.Apis.Customsearch.v1 for .NET client.

* Did you know that you can securely and easily take Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) exams online from the comfort of your home or office? [YouTube video] You will need a computer with a microphone & webcam for an online proctored exam

* ICICI Bank has launched iWork@home, an initiative that allows women employees to work from home for up to a year. The technology platform for this programme has been developed in-house by ICICI Bank in partnership with students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. To ensure that data security and privacy are upheld, facial recognition technology would be used to scan the face to ascertain no intruder accesses the office system - Business Standard

* Windows NT has formed the basis of every major Windows operating system since 1993. Win 10 is NT

* Dave Cutler, 74, ...still comes to his office each day on Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond, Washington, campus, has shaped entire eras: from his work developing the VMS operating system for Digital Equipment Corporation in the late ‘70s, his central role in the development of Windows NT – the basis for all major versions of Windows since 1993 – to his more recent experiences in developing the Microsoft Azure cloud operating system and the hypervisor for Xbox One that allows the console to be more than just for gaming. Work on Azure / Red Dog (the project’s code name) started in 2006. Cutler’s role was to develop the hypervisor for the cloud operating system. On Oct. 27, 2008, Ozzie stood on stage at the company’s Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles and announced a technology preview of Windows Azure. Dave also designed and wrote the hypervisor for Xbox One

* Your butt muscles, or "glutes," include the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus. The gluteus maximus, one of your butt muscles, is the largest muscle in the human body — and it's big for a reason. It's got a lot of responsibility: it helps keep your trunk erect while standing and kicks in some anti-gravity action when you're taking the stairs! - Go Ask Alice!

* National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) has launched Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is expected to make e-commerce transactions easier, and facilitate micropayments and person-to-person payments. UPI runs on the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) platform, the service will be available real-time and 24x7. 

* Some of the famous varieties of coconuts (grown in the West and East Godavari districts) are Godavari Ganga, Gautami Ganga, Kera Sankara and Kera Bastar. Ganga Bondam is the noted variety which is known for tender coconuts in Konaseema area. Kerala coconuts, which are bigger in size compared to AP, are dominating the local market - The Hindu

* Concerned with the write offs of Rs.1.14 lakh crore of bad debts between 2013 and 2015 by the Public Sector Banks (PSB) and the growing amount of Stressed Assets in the banking sector, the Supreme court (SC) had asked the Reserve Bank of India in February 2016 to furnish a list of the borrowers which are in default of loans by the banks and financial institutions in excess of Rs 500 crore ..RBI had submitted the required information in a sealed cover to SC in end March 2016. Two points stick out jarringly in RBI’s submissions. Firstly, the RBI made a fervent plea that the information should be kept secret else it would destroy public confidence in the banking system, dent the “fiduciary relationship” between the RBI, banks and the borrowers and adversely affect the economy. Secondly, it conceded before the SC that it does not have information about loan accounts, involving Rs 500 crore or more, which were restructured before June 2014 - Times of India

* One Person Company is a new type of business entity that allows a single entrepreneur to operate a corporate entity with limited liability protection. Before the One Person Company (OPC) was introduced through the Companies Act, 2013, a minimum of two persons were required to started a Company or Limited Liability Partnership (LLP). A OPC must be converted into a Private Limited Company if it crosses an annual turnover of Rs.2 crores and must file audited financial statements with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs at the end of each Financial Year. 

* "All the people like us are We, and everyone else is They" - Rudyard Kipling

*  "For me, home is really a state of mind, where you feel comfortable, needed and..wanted" - Dr Abraham Verghese

Gyan from Ram Shriram

“I was an entrepreneur many times over. I failed a couple of times; I succeeded three or four times. If you fail six or seven times, then it is better to work for a big company because it is not good for your health.” 

- Kavitark Ram Shriram, Silicon Valley investor,  one of the first investors in Google, 58-year-old Google board member having a net worth of about $1.9 billion (Rs. 12,663 crore).

Also see: Hey RAM