TWIL - Week #13

This Week I Learned:

• Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows Azure Web Sites are now "generally available". Auto scale, alerts and monitoring are now available in preview.
• The Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server delivers Windows Azure technologies for you to run inside your datacenter, enabling you to offer rich, self-service, multi-tenant services that are consistent with Windows Azure. It is available to Microsoft customers at no additional cost. 
• SQL Server treats table and columns names case-sensitively if the database has a case-sensitive collation.
• Earlier this month, Flipkart.com sold one million books in a single day. According to a Nielsen survey, it occupied an average 40 to 45 percent share of the book trade in 2013. 
• Collaborative book-writing is just the latest in a growing list of unexpected use for GitHub, the social network for hackers that now boasts 3.6 million users.
• YouTube now can play some videos at 144px - this is the opposite of HD but it could be helpful to those on a low bandwidth or for just previewing a video.
• Life spans rose by nearly 50 percent, from 47 years in the 1950s to 69 years in 2010. In most rich countries today, the average life span is over 75 (in Japan it’s over 80), while in the poorest it is only 58.

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HOW TO extend MSDN Subscription Azure benefits while retaining production usage facility

Following a recent announcement, folks with a MSDN Subscription can get enhanced Azure benefits. However, the catch is that those Windows Azure MSDN benefits are intended for development and test purposes only. Usage within that Windows Azure MSDN subscription does not carry a financially-backed SLA.

However, if you want to continue using the older MSDN benefits subscription (which has less features and a higher per-compute rate - but does support production usage) you can go to your accounts page and opt-out of the new MSDN plan.  That will allow you to continue using your existing benefits for another 12 months.

But where is the "accounts page"? Either use this direct link to the Account page or click on your account name that's on the top right after you login to the Azure portal. Select View my Bill from the menu that slides down to be redirected to your Account page

You can then opt to have your subscription transition to the new MSDN benefit immediately or continue using your existing MSDN benefit offer until August 1st 2014

If you choose the later, you will see this message -
Thank you. We have received your request to stay on the existing MSDN benefit offer. You can continue to enjoy it through August, 2014. 

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TWIL - Week #12

This Week I Learned:

• A new version of Employee Info Starter Kit, a basic CRM-like application, built with ASP.NET MVC 4 is out. It's a good resource for developers to learn from and re-use.
• The ultimate guide to mobile emulators & simulators
• 50% of Fortune 500 are using Windows Azure 
• Microsoft now offers direct cash payouts in exchange for reporting certain types of vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques.
• The website IFTTT is indeed a good, simple way to start programming. “We always had the idea that IFTTT could be the world’s simplest programming language,” says company CEO Linden Tibbets. “But we don’t call it that because people would have a reaction to the word ‘programming.’”
• If you open a Google Plus link while you have Gmail open and you've set yourself to be invisible in the Chat app within Gmail, you'll be made visible. You'll then see this message several minutes later in Gmail Chat - "Oops! You are not invisible because you're logged into Google Talk from another client, device or location that doesn't support invisibility."
• This Google ad appears to be generated using its auto-translation service. The sign-up button reads "Abhi sign aap karein" which is syntactically incorrect Hindi. Problems with grammar have I too.
  
• Google heavily relies on data for decision-making. It found out that how an interviewer scores a candidate and how that person ultimately performed in their job did not correlate. Brainteasers in interviews, G.P.A.’s and test scores are worthless as a criteria for hiring. Some Google teams have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college. An average team has 6 members.
• Headline in Times of India - "TN CM Jayalalithaa announces Amma water plants that will provide drinking water at cheap rates". Nearly seventy years after Independence, a natural resource and basic requirement like drinking water has to be purchased. Is this really Independence? 

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HOW TO track Indian Stock Exchanges (BSE, NSE) via SMS

Try these inexpensive ways to find out Stock Exchange indices via a text message:
1. IFTTT (If-This-Then-That website) - IFTTT has "recipes" powered by Yahoo Finance, to set a trigger so that whenever a stock (the symbol for BSE Sensex is ^BSESN and that of NSE Nifty is ^NSEI)  is rising or falling beyond a pre-set figure, you can be alerted by a text message or email or other ways. Looking at this public recipe for NSE, you can build your own for BSE or any other stock traded in the Stock Exchanges.

2. txtWeb is a platform to make content and services available via SMS to consumers with just a basic phone (i.e not a smart phone with a data plan). Developers can build services on this platform for free. @shareprice is one such service on this platform that can get you Stock Exchange indices in almost real-time. You will need to type @shareprice.indices and send the text message to 9243342000. An SMS will pop up within seconds with the desired info.

You can also find weather details(@weather Bangalore), status of a train, content from a Wikipedia article (@www wikipedia {keyword}) using this helpful service.

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Windows Azure - Learning Resources

While the Windows Azure documentation is pretty comprehensive and developer friendly, there are some other great resources as well:

1. Channel 9 Microsoft DevRadio 21-part video tutorial series - Looking to get started with Windows Azure without poring over text? Check out the 21-part video tutorial series "Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil":

1. Azure Basics: 11 minutes, 13 seconds
2. What to do with Blobs?: 15 minutes, 14 seconds
3. Why do we need Drives?: 9 minutes, 23 seconds
4. Using the Content Delivery Network (CDN): 10 minutes, 33 seconds
5. Table Storage Overview: 15 minutes, 44 seconds
6. Windows Azure SQL Database: 19 minutes, 25 seconds
7. SQL Database Federations: 18 minutes, 42 seconds
8. SQL Data Sync: 18 minutes, 3 seconds
9. Windows Azure Web Sites: 11 minutes, 35 seconds
10. Web Roles: 15 minutes, 36 seconds
11. Worker Roles: 8 minutes, 26 seconds
12. Caching: 17 minutes
13. Windows Azure Queue Storage: 13 minutes, 12 seconds
14. Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Part 1: 21 minutes, 23 seconds
15. Windows Azure Virtual Machines – Part 2: 15 minutes, 33 seconds
16. Traffic Manager: 13 minutes, 53 seconds
17. Identity: 18 minutes, 59 seconds
18. Service Bus: 11 minutes, 26 seconds
19. Virtual Networks: 13 minutes, 10 seconds
20. SQL Reporting: 13 minutes, 31 seconds
21. HDInsight Service: 15 minutes, 59 seconds
22. Windows Azure Marketplace
23. Windows Azure Media Services
24. Windows Azure Mobile Services
25. Conclusion 

2. Free Windows Azure ebooks in the Technet E-Book Gallery for Microsoft Technologies - Detailed, though not beginner-level, freely download-able ebooks. "Introducing Windows Azure for IT Professionals" is a new book that hasn't yet been added to list. This book explains most of the Windows Azure services in detail with screenshots.

3. Channel 9 hosts video recordings of TechEd sessions conducted around the world. To catch the latest developments in Azure, pick the most recent TechEd events in the list and filter search for sessions on Azure.

work in progress...

Also see:
Free Pluralsight videos
Free 42 episode video series on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript for Absolute Beginners

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Book Review: Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter (O'Reilly, 2010)

My Wife and I share a love for good, healthy food and cooking. We analyze (mostly vegetarian) recipes we find online, on TV or in print. Not only that, we occasionally hang out in the Seasoned Advice forum, a Q & A discussion board in the StackExchange family, to learn about what people around the world are cooking. This kind of fascination for cooking, made us jump at the idea of reviewing "Cooking for Geeks" when I spotted it in the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program's list of books. We enjoyed it during the first reading and will keep going back to it.

The author Jeff Potter's mixes science and cooking to dish out an educational and entertaining book that helps you "understand cooking". Cooking for Geeks has numerous tips, food science facts, recipes and interviews with cooking experts and aficionados, all mashed-up into 7 chapters that will keep you engaged all through out. Among the passionate people he has interviewed are Maureen Evans (Twitter handle - @cookbook) who posts recipes as a single tweet of 140 characters (Hummus:soak cdry chickpea8h.replace h2o;simmer3h@low.drain. Puree/season to taste+1/3ctahini&lem&olvoil/½t garlic&salt/cayenne. Chill.) and Nathan Myhrvold, a former CTO of Microsoft who took a sabbatical to go to cooking school in France.

Though this book is presumably written for an American audience and predominantly focuses on Western cuisine, it touches at least briefly all the popular cuisines (Chinese, French, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Latin American, Southeast Asian). Readers who are not interested in varied cuisines or have special requirements (vegan, vegetarian) will have to skip a lot of pages. I found it bizarre that the author informs Quinine ("Quinine in anything other than minute quantities is poisonous"), liquid nitrogen and dry ice, are dangerous and then proceeds to show uses for them in cooking.

Overall, I rate this book 4.5 out of 5. The author discourages giving kitchen tools as gifts but you can very well gift this book to anyone even remotely interested in cooking and they will get hooked to cooking.

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TWIL - Week #11

This Week I Learned:

• .. a Ph.D. student named Thomas Knoll started working on a revolutionary program for making images. Photoshop, as it was eventually named, turns 25 this year, and has been so successful that it has made the rare transition from brand name to verb.
• BSNL, the Indian Government-run telecommunication company, has discontinued the 160-year-old telegraph service. Telegrams encouraged concision. British General Sir Charles Napier is said to have sent home a one word telegram, "Peccavi", Latin for "I have sinned" after claiming Sind.
• When you purchase a Kindle from Amazon India, it is sold by Cromaretail and fulfilled by Amazon.
  
• There doesn't seem to be anything stopping Indian Parliamentarians from having a conflict of interests. Many of them build good careers by having an alignment of personal interests.
• The total amount involved in frauds relating to credit card, debit  card and internet banking rose 74% to Rs 38.4 crore in 2012 - Indian IT Minister to Rajya Sabha

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Book Review: Instant jQuery UI Starter

Books in the PacktPub Instant series aim to provide "short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results". I found the last two jQuery-related "Instant" books I read very useful as they covered the essentials in less than 50 pages. When I received a review copy of the book Instant jQuery UI Starter by Jesse Boyer, I expected it to be in the same league as the earlier books but it fell short.

jQuery UI, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, simplifies the life of web developers. The elements of the jQuery UI Library are divided into four sections - Interactions, Utilities, Widgets, Effects.

This book provides a casual introduction to jQuery UI which is a vast, continuously evolving topic.

Unlike the other two "Instant" mini-books, I found the content of this to be fluffy and too verbose. Call it nit-picking but the author's choice of words was a little odd at some places ("Let's unpackage the file","unminified file", ".NET driven website"). There could have been more screen-shots to make it easier to follow along.

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Pros and Cons of Single Page Applications (SPAs)

A SPA is a web app contained in a single page – where ‘pages’ are nothing but DIVs being shown/hidden based on the state of the app and user navigation.

Single Page Applications heavily use client side scripting to provide rich functionality to the end user.

Gmail is probably the first well known SPA implementation which has been around since 2004.

ASP.NET MVC 4 provides a basic framework for building SPA applications.

Pros:
The big reasons to do SPA are the 3 R's: Reach, Responsive UX and Reducing roundtrip postbacks.

Cons:

1. Navigation – SPA’s by nature break the normal navigation mechanism of the browser. Normally, you click a link, it launches off a request and would update the url on the address bar. The response is then fetched and painted. In an SPA however, a link click is trapped in JS and the state is changed and you show a different div (with a background AJAX request being launched).
2. This breaks Back/Forward navigation and since the URL doesn’t change, bookmark-ability is also broken to boot.
3. SEO – SEO also breaks because links are associated with JavaScript and most bots cannot follow such links.

A SPA is not a good fit where SEO is important but it can be used for a banking app or an app that shows personalized info where SEO is not required.

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6 things I dislike about MSDN

1. No date of publication/update - I often land up in MSDN via search engines. There have been countless times when I've read half-way through a piece of documentation and then found the article to be obsolete or referring to an older version. In recent years, MSDN does have a drop-down to switch between versions of the product documentation but this is not consistent across its range of products. Does it hurt to have a date of publication/update?

2. Lacks images & illustrations - Realizing the importance of illustrations in quality content, Philip Greenspun, a teacher at MIT, donated $20,000 specifically to fund the creation and improvement of illustrations for Wikimedia. He wrote, “It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be ‘Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.’”.

There are numerous places in MSDN, where I wished there were illustrations to go with the explanation. It is as if an MSDN article template doesn't allow images.

3. Not well-archived - SharePoint 2010 can be made to run on Windows Vista & Windows 7. MSDN used to have a detailed step by step article that I had bookmarked. When I wanted to forward that to a friend, I noticed that the content of the page had got replaced. I couldn't believe MSDN could remove it just like that instead of archiving it! Thankfully The Wayback Machine has a copy of  Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. There is no assurance that some nugget of MSDN info that you bookmarked will not lead you to a broken URL.

4. Inconsistent style - Microsoft publishes documentation on a whole range of products. When you switch from say, Azure to C# documentation, I would like the flow, organization and style of presentation to be similar. Instead, some sections have links that redirect you annoyingly to other sets of hyperlinks.

5. Hardly memorable URLs - Wikipedia has over 3 million articles in English (2011 estimate). With a little effort you can guess the URL for a topic once you understand the pattern by which Wikipedia builds URLs. Try doing that for a MSDN article.

6. Can't view output of code samples - The MSDN documentation on Bing Maps has some excellent code samples. However, you will have to copy the code and build your own sample to see it in action. For web-based samples, can't MSDN host those samples online so that readers can also try them out immediately. W3Schools has been letting readers run samples on their site since a very long time.

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TWIL - Week #10

This Week I Learned:

• Google has killed Quick View & Instant Preview features in Search. Instant Previews are page snapshots that allow users to get a glimpse of the layout of the web pages behind each search result, in order to help them decide whether or not to click a link. Low usage has been suggested as the reason for abandoning Instant Preview. Some detractors complain the low usage may have been because the button was almost hidden.
• Foursquare founders, Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley always tried to pitch Foursquare less as a check-in app and more as a “a data-driven recommendations engine which analyzes and rewards real-world behavior.”
• ..articles that get a lot of tweets don’t necessarily get read very deeply. Articles that get read deeply aren’t necessarily generating a lot of tweets.  
• A 20-year-old Indian student from Cornell broke into the  Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE)  database so that his friends could know their results a day earlier. The ethical thing to do would have been to report but that wouldn't get him media coverage or admirers. It doesn't pay to be good. On a related note - Indian Govt websites have been hacked over 1,000 times in past three years.
• National Technical Reasearch Organisation (NTRO) is mandated to collect intelligence on foreign subjects and its operations are meant to be offshore.It reports directly to the National Security Advisor (NSA).Only nine agencies the Intelligence Bureau, Central Bureau of Investigation, Economic Intelligence Bureau, Directorate of Revenue, IncomeTax Department, Defence Intelligence Agency, Narcotics Control Bureau and the National Investigation Agency are permitted by law under the Telegraph Act, 1885, and the Information Technology Act, 2008, to covertly perform electronic surveillance, including telephone tapping, over their targets. Source: Times of India
• The new National Food Security Bill (NFSB), that aims to step up subsidized cereal supply (five kilos per month of wheat or rice) to 67% of the population (Source: Swaminomics). If a whooping 67% of the Indian population can't afford food at market prices that should be something to worry about.
• For people already at risk for heat disease, eating three or more egg yolks per week could be as damaging to arteries as smoking.

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Self-awareness software

A proponent of the Quantified Self movement and the co-founder of Foursquare, Naveen Selvadurai, has published a "personal API" consisting of his day-to-day personal details (related to his sleep, weight, steps, fuel/activity and checkins) as a step towards building self-awareness software. He calls it api.naveen. The data therein has been normalized from various sources: manual capture, nike fuelband, jawbone up, withings, fitbit, foursquare and various apps.

Image from the Human API website

The Quantified Self movement is based on the premise that by measuring and analyzing behavior, one can improve it. You’re less likely to splurge on french fries, say, if life is a game of improving your fitness and all the apps on your homescreen are keeping score.

This GigaOm article informs that there are projects like the Human API ("all human data streams in one open API") which help people find value in their personal data.

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TWIL - Week #9

This Week I Learned:

• JSDelivr is a CDN for developers and webmasters that hosts JavaScript libraries, jQuery plugins, fonts, CSS frameworks. JSter maintains a catalog of (over 1153) JavaScript libraries and tools for web development.
• Microsoft is the first multinational company to make public cloud services available in China.
• Opera 15 will use Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine.
• One of the reasons for the delayed capture of the Boston Marathon bombers was that the databases contained a misspelling of the suspect’s name — “Tsarnayev” instead of Tsarnaev — and two incorrect dates of birth.
• Wall Street Journal columnist, Walt Mossberg is considered the most influential technology critic in the world. He used to be a journalist covering national and international affairs but (in 1991) switched to consumer technology, a field where he had no educational or professional background,  while he was in his 40s.
• With a population of 1.2 billion, India has one sixth the world's population. Bangalore is currently the third most populated city. The Comparisons section of a WolframAlpha search provides a better perspective of facts by making analogies. 
  

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