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 #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

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 #166

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week #164

This Week I Learned -

* Customers can no longer create Gallery applications like like WordPress, Drupal, and Umbraco in the Azure Classic Portal

* Version 5 of Bing Search API, now part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, is out

* NuGet is the package manager for the Microsoft development platform including .NET. It recently surpassed 1 billion downloads.

* The Swiss-knife-of-a-media-player, VLC Media Player can be used to edit files played within it - you can extract audio out of a video file as well cut a portion of a audio file.

* Over 20 percent of the searches Google gets in the U.S. are now by voice.

* Chromebooks are now the #2 most popular PC operating system in the U.S.

* WhatsApp now gives their users the ability to back up their data to Google Drive and restore it when they setup WhatsApp on a new phone.

* Oracle sought billions in damages from Google over the search engine company’s use of Java programming language in its Android smartphone operating system. Oracle, which obtained Java when it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2009, had been seeking some $9 billion in damages.

* Only female mosquitoes bite humans. Without regular meals of blood, the females lose their ability to reproduce. Only female mosquitoes make that annoying buzzing sound.

* Most mammals except humans produce their own Vitamin C. Guinea pigs, bats and dry-nosed primates have lost their ability to produce vitamin C.

* Humans do not produce two sets of teeth independently. Both sets are produced at the same time.

* A shark's teeth get replaced continuously

* Subhash Chandra Goel started Zee with just Rs 17 and eventually built the Essel Group into a $3.5 billion behemoth

* N Srinivasan's role in the Indian Premier League (IPL) redefined the term 'involved'. At his peak, Srinivasan was the president of the BCCI, de facto president of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, chairman elect of the ICC, a member of the IPL governing council, and a team owner of the Chennai Super Kings  - Economic Times

* According to KPMG's latest Global Profiles of the Fraudster report, 32% of the perpetrators in India were in the 26-35 age group, compared with 14% globally. Global trends also indicate that 69% of the fraudsters were in the 36-55 age group. In India, this age group accounts for 59% of fraudsters - Economic Times

* FSSAI caught napping? - After a NGO Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) study claimed that bread contains cancer-causing chemicals, Food regulator Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) today said it has decided to remove potassium bromate from the list of permitted additives while it is examining evidence against potassium iodate before restricting its use. Potassium bromate typically increases dough strength, leads to higher rising and uniform finish to baked products, while potassium iodate is a flour treatment agent.  - Business Standard

This Week I Learned - Week #163

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* reCAPTCHA is a bot that can find bots

* 49 execs at Infosys drew over Rs 1 crore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week #161

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week #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

This Week I Learned - Week #155

This Week I Learned -

* Azure DocumentDB is ISO 27001, HIPAA, and EU Model Clauses compliant.

* Microsoft has open sourced an Azure Pack Connector that you can download and install to your Windows Azure Pack instance. You will then be able to add Azure subscriptions to tenants in Windows Azure Pack to enable Azure VM creation through WAP.

* “Service Management” and “Resource Manager” (Azure RM) refer to two different REST APIs that enable access to Microsoft Azure cloud services. There isn’t 100% cross-compatibility between them. Certain resource types that are provisioned via the ASM API can be viewed through the ARM API, but generally speaking, the reverse is not true.  Each interface has a separate UI Portal experience, a separate REST API, a separate PowerShell module, and a separate “mode” of operation in the Azure Cross-Platform (xPlat) CLI Tool.

* Takeaways from Migrating Onpremise Web Applications to Microsoft Azure PaaS Cookbook [PDF]:
- Sharding is primarily used in scenarios where there is significant data growth in a particular database, or multi-tenant SaaS scenarios, where each customer’s data must be stored in a separate database. This approach ensures better data isolation and data security.
- Since Microsoft offers datacenters in many different regions, and many different time zones, it’s important to be cautious with time sensitive information.Some applications store Datetime in UTC format and handle the Datetime convention at the application layer which is a good practice to follow. The alternative is DateTimeOffset, which represents a point in time, typically expressed as a date and time of day, relative to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which uniquely and identifies a single point in time. It is advisable to update all the Datetime Objects, both in the application and database objects to Datetime Offset for better handling of the Datetime value in Azure SQL.
- Standard GEO Replication and Active Geo Replication offers Estimated Recovery Time (ERT) less than thirty seconds & RPO/Recovery Point Objective of less than five seconds. Note that you can opt out from geo-replication at any time.
- Azure SQL Database supports only database level collation, SQL_LATIN1_GENERAL_CP1_CI_AS whereas on-prem SQL Server collation can be applied at the Instance/database/table/Column level
- Currently, the default .NET versions supported by Azure WebApp are .NETv3.5 and v4.5. During the migration, it’s recommended you recompile your application to target either v3.5 or v4.5 for better performance and security.
- In certain cases, your application might use third party tools and components which might expect a specific older version on which they are built. In such cases, you can go back to the respective vendor for the latest compatible component versions for the target application framework. Failing this, you may continue to support those old frameworks by specifying a value for the supportedRuntime tag in the web.config file.

- Azure Redis Cache has many advantages over the other two options. It supports running atomic operations on these types, such as:

• Appending to a string

• Incrementing the value of a hash

• Pushing values to a list

• Computing set intersection

• Identifying data unions and differences

• Defining the member with highest ranking in a sorted set

- Other features include:

• Support for transactions

• Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub)

• Keys with a limited lifespan

• Configuration settings to make Redis behave more like a traditional cache

- “Azure Operational Insights” is exclusive for applications hosted on VM/Physical Machine hosted on premise and private or hybrid clouds. It’s the cloud based Log/Security/Capacity Planning service fully managed by Microsoft. With Operational Insights, you can completely automate, store, analyze the logs.

- Hybrid Connection Manager is a part of BizTalk services, provided by Microsoft to bridge the connectivity between on-premises solutions and Azure Cloud Services. It can be installed on a dedicated or shared server, inside your corporate firewall to allow Azure to connect to your designated databases including SQL Server, MYSQL & Oracle. Hybrid Connection Manager uses Shared Access Signature (SAS) to secure the connectivity between your Azure account and your on-premises database. 

* AJAX calls in an application to be migrated to Azure must be stateless

* The SQLAzureMW Community’s “CookBook” [Word Doc] has useful "Recipes" for migrating Databases to Azure SQL Database update V12 (Published: January 2015, Applies to: Azure SQL Database V12)

* As of January 2005, retailers in the U.S. are supposed to be able to support the EAN/UCC-13 code (the rest of the world has done this for years), which uses similar symbology, and one additional digit.

* Raghuram Rajan, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the central bank of India, earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad & PhD from MIT Sloan School of Management. His father worked in the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW). Throughout his childhood, Rajan presumed his father to be a diplomat since the family traveled on diplomatic passports.

* Alibaba's investments in India include $500 million in Snapdeal and a large stake in Paytm as well

* The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers BPA (or bisphenol-A (BPA), primarily used in hard plastics like polycarbonate) to be an endocrine disruptor, meaning it can alter hormonal levels if present in high enough quantities.

* Cholesterol is a lipid, or fat, in the blood that plays a critical role in physiological functions and overall health. The standard “total cholesterol” count is really just the number of molecules of high-density lipoproteins (HDL), low-density lipoprotein (LDL), and 20 percent of your triglyceride level - Go Ask Alice

* Chris "American Sniper" Kyle's father bought his son his first rifle when he was 8 years old. Chris went on to become a United States Navy SEAL and the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, with over 160 kills officially confirmed by the Department of Defense. During four tours of duty in the Iraq War, he was shot twice and survived six separate IED detonations. He was shot and killed by a 25-year-old U.S. Marine whom he had reportedly taken to a gun range in Texas in an effort to help him with his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

* The U.N. World Happiness Report identifies six key factors: G.D.P. per capita, life expectancy, social support, trust, generosity and perceived freedom to make life decisions.

* Streptomyces bacteria spew geosmin as a weapon against other bacteria in the soil where they live. But to us, that chemical produces a distinct smell known as petrichor, which we recognize as the earthy scent following a rainstorm.

* How do the flowers figure out that it is time to bloom?  Plants rely partially on environmental cues like temperature and light quality. Another signal, the length of the day, is also very important. Plants can sense day length because they have circadian clocks, as people do. In the spring, plants can tell the days are growing longer by measuring how long night lasts. They do this with their leaves, which are photoreceptors that react to sunshine - NY Times

* The song "Enjoy yourself , it's later than you think" was published in 1949

* "In God we trust, all others must bring data" - W Edwards Deming

This Week I Learned - Week #151

This Week I Learned -

* The Cloud OS is Microsoft's hybrid cloud solution comprised of Windows Server, Windows Azure, System Center, Windows Intune, and SQL Server - Building Clouds with Windows Azure Pack [PDF Sampler, Chapter 1]

* "Widgets do track you, as well as sometimes pump advertising: disqus is a good example, they provide comments, but do put advertising content above the comment block. Another example is Facebook. The Facebook like button that's embedded on every site allow Facebook to know what stuff you like: for example, lets say you go on tmz.com for some celebrity stuff, Facebook will then derive that you like celebrity rumors, and so on."

* Tips for Extending Smartphone Battery Life:
1. Use auto-brightness for the screen
2. Block power-sucking ads
3. Tweak your email settings - most phones can be configured to instead check for (or “fetch”) emails on a schedule — say, every 30 minutes — or only when you manually tell your email app to refresh.
4. Play downloaded music instead of streaming.
5. Turn off wireless when reception is poor.
6. Check the battery usage lists - on a Windows Phone, check Settings > Battery Saver > Usage. Be on the lookout for apps that are active for extended periods in the background and are using a lot of battery power. If you find apps using up lots of energy in the background, disable their background activities.
7. Disable unnecessary location tracking.
8. Shut off unnecessary push notifications.

* Silicon Valley can seem like the land of overnight success. College dropouts show up and become billionaires a few years later. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire by the time he was 23, and Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp when it was just five years old.....for start-ups that raise money, the mortality rate is high, with most dying after an average of 20 months and $1.3 million in financing. - NY Times

* ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook currently costs Rs 178,459 (inc. GST delivery). It comes with Intel Core i7-5500U processor, 14 inch WQHD IPS Display (non-touch), 8 or 4 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD. It is touted as the toughest ThinkPad ever made, having undergone eight separate military specification tests. It's RapidCharge feature lets 80% battery to be restored in just under an hour.

* ..lithium ion, the technology that most mainstream batteries are based on, is low cost and easily reproducible while being safe — so we’ll be stuck with it for the foreseeable future. In general, lithium ion improves about 10 percent a year in terms of the amount of energy that can be stored in a given space

* Your spine is a column of 33 small bones called vertebrae and between each is a small piece of disk-shaped cartilage. These discs act as a cushion and prevent the vertebrae from grinding against each other when you "do the twist" or any other movements that involve your back...."bulging" discs are those that shift out of place and put pressure on the nerves in the spinal column. On the other hand, herniated/slipped/ruptured discs are those where the disc cracks or is damaged and the jelly-like fluid inside the disc leaks and irritates the nearby nerves. Disc degeneration refers to any back pain that result from discs that aren't functioning properly...The discs between your vertebrae are made up of a tough outer layer that contains nerves and a soft, jelly-like inside layer. They work together to act as shock absorbers for all the movement and forces a person's body goes through. Over time, all of that strain and stress put on the back (lifting, bending, carrying the sofa up five flights of stairs, etc.) causes wear and tear on the discs and vertebrae. The discs, which are made up of 80 percent water, also dry out with age, making it more difficult for them to absorb shock. These factors make it more likely for your discs to degenerate. You may be able to reduce your risk of back pain by getting regular physical activity, practicing proper posture, and maintaining a healthy weight. - Go Ask Alice!

* In the US, leap year coincides with the presidential election years.

* "Poverty is not just about a lack of money. It’s about the absence of the resources the poor need to realize their potential..time & energy. About 1.3 billion people—18 percent of the world’s population don’t have lights, heat, air conditioning, or even the Internet" - Bill & Melinda Gates 2016 Annual Letter

* “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.” – Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution

* Sai Chintala has a nice way to recollect names of disconnected acquaintances on meeting them - "......(without causing me or them embarrassment).  “Are you still working in the SAME project” (to check if they are from AppLabs or Cigniti),  “Are you still in the same COMPANY” (to narrow down my guess),  last resort question “What is your new EMAIL address. Did it change recently ?” (that would nail down their name)"

This Week I Learned - Week #150

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week #149

This Week I Learned -

* Azure's new CDN experience is built on the Azure Resource Manager. It allows you to preload individual assets to your CDN endpoint and purge individual cached assets or entire directories from your CDN endpoints.

* Netflix started migrating their systems to AWS in August of 2008 and "..in early January, 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service!". Notes from Netflix Tech Blog articles:
- "By incorporating the principles of redundancy and graceful degradation in our architecture, and being disciplined about regular production drills using Simian Army, it is possible to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure and within our own systems without impacting the member experience."
- To deal with fault-tolerance & be proactive, Netflix has built a Simian Army suite of tools to induce various kinds of failures, or detect abnormal conditions, and test Netflix's ability to survive them.
- Cost reduction was not the main reason Netflix decided to move to the cloud though it ended up being a fraction of those in the data center -- a welcome side benefit.
- "..the easiest way to move to the cloud is to forklift all of the systems, unchanged, out of the data center and drop them in AWS. But in doing so, you end up moving all the problems and limitations of the data center along with it. Instead, we chose the cloud-native approach, rebuilding virtually all of our technology and fundamentally changing the way we operate the company."
- "Architecturally, we migrated from a monolithic app to hundreds of micro-services, and denormalized and our data model, using NoSQL databases. Budget approvals, centralized release coordination and multi-week hardware provisioning cycles made way to continuous delivery, engineering teams making independent decisions using self service tools in a loosely coupled DevOps environment, helping accelerate innovation."

* JSON.NET is the recommended library to serialize and deserialize JSON in .NET

* HTML, CSS & JavaScript consist of more than 300 W3C specifications from over 400 member organizations. No browser implements every standard, and in fact more than a third of web standards aren’t implemented by any of the most popular browsers - Windows Blog

* Personal assistant programs like Cortana and Apple’s Siri need access to your location, your contacts, voice input, information from email and text messages, browser history, search history, calendar details “and other information.”. Companies often claim this is to provide more relevant results, but the data may also be used to help send more targeted advertisements your way - NY Times

* Steve Kangas coined the term bookmarklet as a portmanteau (a word created from two other words) of bookmark and applet.

* Befunky is an online app that can turns your photographs into interesting cartoons without requiring any software.

* Tableizer is an online web app that  can convert Spreadsheets into HTML Table format

* Six out of the eight startups valued at over $1 billion have domiciled outside India, either in Singapore or US. In 2014, 54% of all new-age startups raising money chose to domicile outside India.

* Uber claims it has a little over 250,000 driver partners on its platform in India. Ola says it has over 350,000.

* The online grocery market in India valued at $200 million annually. Amazon has set the cat among the pigeons by deciding to get into the already crowded hyperlocal grocery delivery market. Currently cornered by BigBasket, Grofers and Peppertap - Business Standard

* Amit Singhal, the senior vice president for search, and one of the earliest builders of Google’s global system, announced that he would retire on Feb. 26. Singhal, 48, joined Google in 2000 as employee No. 176. One of his earliest jobs at Google was rewriting the initial breakthrough algorithms. "When a regular person hits a wall and gets discouraged, that’s when Amit is just getting started." - Matt Cutts

* StatCrunch is a statistical data analysis package that takes data from a web page through a user-initiated bookmarklet click.

* The United States Air Force facility commonly known as Area 51 is a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base, within the Nevada Test and Training Range. The base's current primary purpose is publicly unknown. Its secretive nature and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led Area 51 to become a focus of modern UFO and conspiracy theories - Wikipedia

* If you consume fewer calories than your body requires for daily operations, it turns to internal sources of fuel. Those sources consist of body fat and lean tissue, meaning muscle. The problem with losing muscle is that, unlike fat tissue, muscle burns calories. Having less muscle means a lower resting metabolic rate, so you burn fewer calories throughout the day. Losing muscle may also discourage physical activity, which is important for maintaining weight loss. Extra protein is advisable during weight loss to avoid stripping yourself of muscle. Exercise is also key, particularly weight training, since it is known to build muscle. - NY Times

* Blame it on Lead: Exposure to lead has been linked to reduced reading scores, oppositional behavior and increased rates of teen pregnancy.

* Cockroaches choose from one of several preferred trajectories when running from a predator, and that variability is enough to confound their attackers most of the time. Although there was some variability, the researchers discovered that over repeated tests this angle of escape ranged from about 90 degrees (at a right angle to the direction of the threat) to 180 degrees (the opposite direction), with peaks, or preferred trajectories, of about 90, 120, 150 and 180 degrees - NY Times

* Kaushik Jayaram and Robert J. Full, who work on technology inspired by biology, were drawn to roaches as a model for soft robots. Cockroaches can tolerate pressure equivalent to 900 times their body weight. When pressed flat enough that their legs splayed, they could still move about 20 body lengths a second. They can tolerate flattening not because the roach exoskeleton is soft, but because it is composed of rigid plates connected by more flexible tissue.

* Some consolation  - A court in Saudi Arabia revised the punishment given to a stateless Palestinian poet convicted of apostasy, reducing it from death to eight years in prison, 800 lashes and public repentance

* Artur Fischer, a German inventor who registered more than 1,100 patents is ahead of Thomas Edison, who had 1,093 patents to his name. He was nearsighted, short and lacked a high school diploma. What Bill Gates was to the personal computer, Artur Fischer is to do-it-yourself home repair. At 27 years of age, he founded his own company, the Fischer Group, which today has 42 international subsidiaries, employs 4,000 people worldwide and sells its 14,000 products in more than 100 countries. One of Mr. Fischer’s most recent inventions is a gadget that makes it possible to hold and cut the top off an egg of any size. He got started on the problem when a hotel owner complained to him that his guests, on opening their boiled eggs for breakfast, always made a mess — the year was 1946.

* Iraq depends on oil for 90% of its revenue

* India is the world’s largest meat exporter.

This Week I Learned - Week #145

This Week I Learned -

* The Azure Desired State Configuration (DSC) Extension, which can be used to upload and apply a DSC configuration on an Azure VM, was introduced in August 2014. It is currently at Version 2.13

* Building Azure VM with ARM templates consists of two rough steps: building a JSON template file and executing the New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment cmdlet, which then reads all of the logic inside of this JSON template file to feed the Azure API the parameters it needs to provision a VM...a simple Windows VM will require at least a 140 line template

* Installing Azure PowerShell via WebPi/MSI or Install-Module differs in several ways. One difference is that the WebPi/MSI method installs the PowerShell modules to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\PowerShell\, whereas Install-Module downloads them to C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules.

* Resource Manager APIs and PowerShell modules are incompletely (or simply not) documented, and .. many features are missing or half-baked.

* The Visual Studio ALM team maintains a Feature Timeline for TFS and VSTS to augment their UserVoice site.

* The Visual Studio Team Services maintains a Service Blog that tracks outages and reports on service status 

* A Visual Studio Team Services account allows 240 minutes (4 hours) per month of Build (XAML) / Build and Deployment services & 20,000 virtual user minutes per month of  Cloud-based Load Testing. By default, you can run one job at a time. One job can run up to 30 minutes long. To run more than one job at the same time, or to run a single job up to 6 hours long, you can buy Build and Deployment Hosted Agents. You can also buy Private Agents. “Basic” access to 5 users is free with your account

* The "Blank App" template in Visual Studio 2015 isn't really blank after all. By default, it includes a number of NuGet packages you might not want in a simple project. Weston Thayer created a Truely Blank App template that has most of the NuGet packages removed and turns off the frame rate counter as well.

* Is Microsoft (with 2014 revenues of $86 billion and 128,000 employees) truly agile?  The Developer Division is about 4,000 people, working in hundreds of teams, each of 10 to 12 people, working in 3-week sprints.It has implemented Scrum at scale...the Developer Division of Microsoft..is not only implementing the regular practices and methodologies of Agile, Scrum and DevOps for itself but also promoting them for others.

* The free Microsoft Press ebook Enterprise Cloud Strategy shows you how to assess your application portfolio, design the programs and processes, and manage the organizational change as you move your IT ecosystem to the cloud.

* OpenAI is funded by a billion-dollar grant from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has been outspoken about the long-term dangers of AI, and other technology heavyweights.

* Rafael Corredoira and Lori Rosenkopf studied the patents filed by semiconductor companies for almost 15 years, from 1980 to 1994. In doing so, they built a database of 154 firms and 42,000 patents. For every patent application filed, the applicant also cites existing patents that the new idea borrows from or builds upon. That allowed the researchers to study linkages formed between companies when talent departed. If employees move from one firm to another, the researchers would be able to see the effect of employees’ ideas on the new firm because those employees would be likely to cite patents from their old firm in their new patent applications..departing employees have a cross-pollinating effect on the ideas of both organizations.

* ..in Malaysia, a country where Islam is the most widely-followed faith but large minorities follow other faiths, including Christianity. In 2007, a court ruled that non-Muslims (and Christians in particular) could not use the word "Allah" although that happens to be the Malay or Bahasa word for God. The Islamic authorities reasoned that Muslims might be confused, and tempted to go astray, if they came across people of other persuasions addressing a deity which only Muslims fully understood - The Economist

* Oscar Pistorius’s (the Paralympic athlete who was convicted of murder) tragic flaw was an excessive paranoia regarding intruders, which manifested itself in an enthusiasm for guns

* Qantas tops the list of safest airlines for the third year running; the Australian carrier has been fatality-free during the jet-engine era (its last crash took place in 1951). It is joined at the top by other big names including United, American, Lufthansa and Emirates

* "If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants" - This has recently been interpreted by a few writers as a sarcastic remark directed at Hooke's appearance. Although Hooke was not of particularly short stature, he was of slight build and had been afflicted from his youth with a severe kyphosis. However, at this time Hooke and Newton were on good terms and had exchanged many letters in tones of mutual regard. Only later, when Robert Hooke criticized some of Newton's ideas regarding optics, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate, and the two men remained enemies until Hooke's death.

* India is the second largest producer (after China) of potatoes. Potato is a modified stem, masquerading as a root vegetable

* State-owned fuel retailers Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL) revise rates of petrol and diesel on the 1st and 16th of every month based on average oil price and foreign exchange rate in the preceding fortnight.

* On the premium paid for self, spouse, children and parents, the maximum deduction that can be availed is Rs 25,000 a year, provided the age of the individual is not above 60. If the premium paid by an individual is towards health policy for his or her parent who is a senior citizen of age 60 or more, the maximum is capped at Rs 30,000. A taxpayer may therefore maximise tax benefit under section 80D to a total of Rs 55,000 if his age is below 60 while parents age is above 60. For those tax payer individuals who are of age 60 or more and are also paying health insurance premium for their parents, the maximum tax benefit under section 80D would therefore be a total of Rs 60,000 - The Economic Times

* The product of a year and a half of writing, the novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for his genius", and draws on Herman Melville's experience at sea, on his reading in whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible. Although the novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel grew during the 20th century.

* Sherlock Holmes was weird in too many well-known ways. G K Chesterton's Father Brown, like Singapore-based detective fiction writer Shamini Flint's Inspector Singh, was short, fat and brainy. Like Singh he, too, was also constantly underestimated. Likewise, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot - pronounced Yaircule Poiro - was also short, stout if not fat and brainy beyond measure. And, of course, no one took him seriously. He was always referred to as that "ridiculous little man" by the British.