This Week I Learned - Week #206

This Week I Learned -

* L-Series virtual machines are optimized for storage-intensive workloads. S series VMs (S192m offers 4.0 TB RAM & 16 TB storage) are optimized for SAP HANA

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native platform based on open source technology, for building and deploying applications. Pivotal Cloud Foundry can be run on Google Cloud Platform


Google follows the API Design Guide when designing Cloud APIs and other Google APIs. This guide is a living document.

Ionic & PhoneGap are cross-platform mobile frameworks built on top of Cordova

* Xamarin comes from Microsoft and takes a unique approach to cross-platform app development. Xamarin applications are written entirely in C#. Xamarin then compiles the C# code into native iOS and Android distributions. The underlying layer on which Xamarin is built on top of is Mono and this enables cross-platform development. The benefit of building applications with Xamarin compared to Cordova-based frameworks is that apps built with Xamarin make use each platform's native API's.

* React Native from Facebook allows developers to build native iOS and Android apps with React and JavaScript. Like Xamarin based apps, performance of React Native apps is comparable to true native apps.

* Progressive Web Apps from Google allows developers to add mobile features to existing web applications.

Tableau Public provides 10GB of space for free to save and store your visualizations or Vizzies. Datawrapper also helps create visualizations online. It allows up to 10,000 Chart views with its free version.

* As 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it is an advertising cash cow. Just last year, Google removed "nearly 2 billion bad ads from our systems, removed over 100,000 publishers from our AdSense program, and prevented ads from serving on over 300 million YouTube videos"

SIM Swap is a kind of scam where a fraudster manages to issue a new SIM card against your mobile number through your mobile service provider.

* Around 90% of the world’s rice is consumed in Asia—60% of it in China, India and Indonesia alone. In every large country except Pakistan, Asians eat more rice than the global average - Economist

* The Nordic countries include Norway, Sweden, Denmark (including the Faroe Islands), Finland and Iceland. These five countries coordinate political and cultural activities through the Nordic Council. Denmark, Sweden and Finland are also members of the European Union, but only Finland uses the euro. The other Nordic countries still use their own currency, called krone or krona ("crowns"). Norway and Iceland, which are not members of the EU, are members of NATO. Only Denmark is a member of both the EU and NATO - Wikipedia

* A 2013 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, based on a survey of 43,000 workers, concluded that the disadvantages of noise and distraction associated with open office plans outweighed anticipated, but still unproven, benefits like increasing morale and productivity boosts from unplanned interactions - HBR

Russell Peters voiced the part of Rocky the Rhino in The Jungle Book (2016). Peters' stand-up performances feature observational comedy, using humour to highlight racial, ethnic, class and cultural stereotypes. Russell Peters is of Anglo-Indian descent.

Ben Kingsley is Eurasian, since his father's Indian and his mom is English

* Engelbert Humperdinck, Cliff Richard and Merle Oberon ('30s movie star) are noted Anglo-Indians (AI's)

IndiaSpend is a non-profit & a Charitable Trust that utilities open data to analyse a range of issues with the broader objective of fostering better governance, transparency and accountability in the Indian government. It launched Factchecker.in, a dedicated fact checking initiative to examine statements and assertions made by those in public life for both accuracy and context.

* Indian banks were estimated to have received 14.97 trillion rupees (around $220 billion) by the December 30 deadline to return 500- and 1,000-rupee notes to banks, or 97% of the 15.4 trillion rupees’ worth of currency demonetized. In an analysis of income-tax probes, the highest level of illegal money detection in India was found to be in 2015–2016, and the cash component was only about 6%. The remaining was invested in business, stocks, real estate, jewelry, or “benami” assets, which are bought in someone else’s name. The victory of narrative over data may be the takeaway from India’s demonetization saga - HBR

* Al Jaffee is far from a one-trick pony. Besides the Fold-In, he’s given the world “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and “Mad Inventions,” in which he’s predicted future innovations like smokeless ashtrays, the computer spell-check (or as he called it, “idiot-proof typewriters”), telephone redial, snowboarding, and the TV-remote mute button - Vanity Fair

* Salvador Dali & Andy Warhol have illustrated children's books too.

Stress is caused not by other people or external events, but by our reactions to them.

* "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes" - Mark Twain

Comments