free ebook: Modern Javascript from O'Reilly

Modern Javascript: JavaScript, HTML5 & CSS conference: O'Reilly Fluent, March 07 - 10, 2016, San Francisco, CA
"This free ebook presents concepts you’ll want to understand before tackling your next modern JavaScript app. This collection of chapters from the latest O’Reilly JavaScript titles covers web components, ECMAScript 6 (ES6), and much more."

Clouds: Azure vs AWS vs Google

Containers:

Containers on Google Cloud Platform - Compute Engine — Google Cloud Platform

Amazon EC2 Container Service – Docker Management – AWS

Azure Container Service: Now and the Future | Microsoft Azure Blog

Storage:

Pricing - Cloud Storage | Microsoft Azure

Cloud Storage - Online Data Storage — Google Cloud Platform

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - Object Storage

PasS:

Pricing - App Service | Microsoft Azure

App Engine Pricing - App Engine — Google Cloud Platform

Udacity: "Nanodegree Plus"

A new program from Udacity, for $299/month, co-created with Google and others.
Also very effective way for Google to select people...

Nanodegree Plus - Get a Job Guaranteed | Udacity
"Get hired within 6 months of graduating or receive a 100% tuition refund"

Senior Web Developer

Android Developer

iOS Developer

Machine Learning

Google AI deep learning: Winning Go, Phone Chip Image Recognition

A Google DeepMind Algorithm Uses Deep Learning and More to Master the Game of Go | MIT Technology Review
"Google has taken a brilliant and unexpected step toward building an AI with more humanlike intuition, developing a computer capable of beating even expert human players at the fiendishly complicated board game Go."

Google AI algorithm masters ancient game of Go : Nature News & Comment

Google Teams Up With Movidius To Bring Deep Learning To Mobile: Here’s What An Artificially Intelligent Phone Can Do : PERSONAL TECH : Tech Times

"Google's most recent partnership with Movidius will make our smartphones smarter.
More specifically, the cameras in our smartphones could soon be equipped with machine learning technology that could help assist the blind and quickly translate foreign signs.

Google to Make Smartphones That Recognize Faces - Digits - WSJ
Soon, smartphones will not only take snapshots and videos but also recognize the objects pictured. Google is working with a Silicon Valley chip designer to let mobile devices do that kind of heavy computing internally rather than relying on remote data centers.

Irish chip design company Movidius signs 'substantial' sales deal with Google - Independent.ie

Google And Movidius Partner To Propel Computer Vision In Next-Generation Devices | TechCrunch

Movidius and Google Bring Machine Intelligence to Devices - YouTube

"Multiply your time" (!)

  How To Multiply Your Time | Rory Vaden | TEDxDouglasville - YouTube

"There is no 'time-management', there is only 'self-management'"

"3-dimensional-thinking" multiplier: 

• Urgency: how soon does it matter
• Importance: how much does it matter
• Significance: how long does it matter

roryvaden.procrastinateonpurpose.com

How to make decisions based not only on Importance and Urgency but also on Significance

Rory Vaden | Procrastinate on Purpose (Episode 424) - The Art of Charm

book review: Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

Optimize with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time: Interview - Multiply Your Time with Rory Vaden

The art of doing twice as much in half the time | Jeff Sutherland | TEDxAix - YouTube

Jeff Sutherland - Google Search
Dr. Jeff Sutherland is one of the inventors of the Scrum software development process. Together with Ken Schwaber, he created Scrum as a formal process at OOPSLA'95. Jeff helped to write the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Wikipedia

How Azure Works

An excellent overview of Azure fundamentals:

How Windows Azure Works

this is a chapter from book: Manning | Azure in Action

Azure-SampleCh-3.pdf

visual programming: "Blockly" @ Google Developers

google/blockly: The web-based visual programming editor. @ GitHub

Blockly | Google Developers
"Blockly is a library for building visual programming editors."

• "Web-based, no Flash.
• 100% client-side.
• Only 150 KB compressed.
• Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE.
• Android and iOS support. 
• Variables, functions, arrays...
• Syntax errors are impossible.
• Basic type checking.
• Extend with custom blocks.
• Open source. 
• Export as JS, Python, and more.
• Clean code generation.
• Execute code step-by-step.
• Translated to 40+ languages.
• RTL for Arabic and Hebrew."

it is like Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share (scratch.mit.edu) and likely better

Blockly Games (blockly-games.appspot.com)

GitHub Goodness with Phil Haack @ .NET Rocks! vNext

"Hour of Code" Join the largest learning event in history, Dec. 7-13, 2015

Code.org - Code with Anna and Elsa

Cloud Storage APIs

Google Drive REST API Overview  |  Drive REST API  |  Google Developers

API Reference  |  Drive REST API  |  Google Developers

.NET Quickstart  |  Drive REST API  |  Google Developers
Google Drive API with C# | Daimto

Get Started  |  API Client Library for .NET  |  Google Developers

Supported Google APIs  |  API Client Library for .NET  |  Google Developers

OneDrive Dev Center - OneDrive API, Pickers and Savers

Microsoft Graph - Home

quotes: Tall Building, Deep Foundation

"You can tell how tall the building will be by how deep is its foundation"

Quotes - Brian Johnson
The Oasis | en*theos

Foundation Quotes - BrainyQuote

Bible quote: Luke 6:48 They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because 
it was well built.


(3) Our cottage property in Northern Ontario is on an island in an area that has clay soil. What's the best method for building a foundation on clay? - Quora


from NJ shore after hurricane "Sandy"

Intro to Azure, Just Azure

A very comprehensive article...

Intro to Azure | Microsoft Azure



A set of about 50 excellent articles about Azure Technologies....

Just Azure: navigate and understand Microsoft Azure (home page)

Microsoft Azure Storage Queues Part 1: Getting Started (parts 1-3)

Azure Blob Storage Part 1: Introduction (parts 1-10)

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services: Part 1 (parts 1-5)

Microsoft Azure Diagnostics Part 1: Introduction (parts 1-4)

Azure Active Directory Part 1: An Introduction - Just Azure (1-6)

Azure BizTalk Services Introduction for BizTalk Devs (1-3)

Azure Virtual Machines Part 0: A VM Primer - Just Azure

Azure API Management Part 1: An Introduction - Just Azure (1-2)

AI, ML: Enterprise and Open Source

AI, Machine Learning Rising In The Enterprise - InformationWeek
"...estimates that about half of large enterprises are experimenting with "smart computing" projects. Organizations are examining problems and deciding whether AI can be applied to the solutions.
...
Tech Companies Donate Machine Learning to Open Source

Last fall, IBM announced that its machine learning engine SystemML for Apache Spark won acceptance into the Apache Incubator program.

Google released its TensorFlow machine learning system to open source, offering it as a standalone library and associated tools, tutorials, and examples under the Apache 2.0 license.

Microsoft announced the release of its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit to the developer community, available on GitHub.

Intel made its open source-built Trusted Analytics Platform, more commonly known as TAP, available last summer, and showcased users of the system at the Strata + Hadoop event in New York last fall.

Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which had already released to open source its deep-learning modules for the open source development environment Torch in Jan. 2015, last month announced another move. This time Facebook said it would release its server hardware design that's been optimized for machine learning to open source. Facebook has submitted the GPU-based system design materials to the Open Compute Project."

JWT: JSON Web Tokens (for Authentication & Authorization)

JSON Web Tokens - jwt.io
"JSON Web Tokens are an open, industry standard RFC 7519 method for representing claims securely between two parties.
JWT.IO allows you to decode, verify and generate JWT."

HEADER:ALGORITHM & TOKEN TYPE
{
"alg": "HS256",
"typ": "JWT"
}

PAYLOAD:DATA
{
"sub": "1234567890",
"name": "John Doe",
"admin": true
}

VERIFY SIGNATURE

HMACSHA256( base64UrlEncode(header) + "." + base64UrlEncode(payload), ) secret 

base64 encoded, separated by dots

eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiIxMjM0NTY3ODkwIiwibmFtZSI6IkpvaG4gRG9lIiwiYWRtaW4iOnRydWV9.TJVA95OrM7E2cBab30RMHrHDcEfxjoYZgeFONFh7HgQ

course: Introduction to OAuth2, OpenID Connect and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) | Pluralsight

The Anatomy of a JSON Web Token | Scotch

JSON Web Token - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Storage Class Memories (SCM)

Non-volatile Storage - ACM Queue
"The arrival of high-speed, non-volatile storage devices, typically referred to as Storage Class Memories (SCM), is likely the most significant architectural change that datacenter and software designers will face in the foreseeable future...

1. The age-old assumption that I/O is slow and computation is fast is no longer true: this invalidates decades of design decisions that are deeply embedded in today's systems.
2. The relative performance of layers in systems has changed by a factor of a thousand times over a very short time: this requires rapid adaptation throughout the systems software stack.
3. Piles of existing enterprise datacenter infrastructure—hardware and software—are about to become useless (or, at least, very inefficient): SCMs require rethinking the compute/storage balance and architecture from the ground up."

HP, SanDisk partner to bring storage-class memory to market | Computerworld

Storage Class Memory at Almaden - IBM

IEEE Xplore Abstract - Storage-class memory: The next storage system technology

Software-defined memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Software-Defined Memory (SDM) is an evolving concept for the convergence of Storage and Memory, which for decades were two separate computing domains. Storage is a multi-layer software implementation outside of the realm of Computer Architecture (i.e. I/O subsystem). The memory subsystem is the exact opposite, it is an integral part of Computer Architecture & Microarchitecture and implemented by hardware engineers."

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) vs...

Accelerated Mobile Pages Project

What Is AMP?

"AMP is a way to build web pages for static content that render fast. AMP in action consists of three different parts:

• AMP HTML
• AMP JS
• AMP CDN

AMP HTML is HTML with some restrictions for reliable performance and some extensions for building rich content beyond basic HTML. The AMP JS library ensures the fast rendering of AMP HTML pages. The AMP CDN (optionally) delivers the AMP HTML pages."

The driving idea behind AMP is to cut the loading time for web pages to a duration users will tolerate."

Google's AMP Will Make the Mobile Internet Faster Early Next Year | WIRED
"The project is in part Google’s answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles, which launched earlier this year. As phones become the main way people access the Internet, several tech giants have been looking at how to make the web work better on mobile devices. Google says that 40 percent of users will abandon any website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Mobile pages often take at least 8 seconds to load.

Accelerated Mobile Pages – A new approach to web performance

"AMP HTML is built on existing web technologies, and the documents written in it render in all modern web browsers and web views."

Google AMP battles ad-blocking, Apple and Facebook by cutting load times | Media | The Guardian

Google’s AMP Poised To Take The Lead From Facebook’s And Apple’s Walled Gardens | Monday Note

How Google’s AMP project speeds up the Web—by sandblasting HTML | Ars Technica

Mozilla co-founder unveils Brave, a browser that blocks ads by default | Ars Technica

99u books: "Make Your Mark","Maximize Your Potential","Manage Your Day-to-Day"

Make Your Mark - 99u
"Build a business that matters"

"a business book for makers, not managers"

Make Your Mark by - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes
Ideas:

• (start with) Purpose driven, conscious business,
  to make significant impact, change the world;
  (meaning) is intersection of:
• what you love to do
• what can you be great at
• what the world needs (and is willing to pay for)
• (Eat your own) Dog Food: use your own product or service;
  product or service build by passionate individuals who what to use it,
  that you and the team is exited about
• (are you) Ready to Serve, when the customers come
  be in the "game" for the long run, building customer relationships one a time
  "profound service" is about customer "astonishment" with commitment to serve
• it's all about the Character
  Leadership, perseverance, stand up when failing
• Start! don't wait to be "ready", it will almost certainly be too late

"doing the right thing creates more shareholder value"

Maximize Your Potential - 99u
"Success is not about being the best, it is about about always getting better"

Maximize Your Potential by Jocelyn K. Glei - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

• Permanent beta (Gmail, Amazon "day one")
• Praise: "Smart" => -25%, "Work Hard" => +25%
• Work hard to prove you made a right choice (instead of second guessing) 
• Setbacks as motivation, retry 
• Consider "better you" (little better, "believable possible") in every situation

Manage Your Day-to-Day - 99u

Manage Your Day-to-Day by Jocelyn K. Glei - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

• Daily Routines: must be "boring"
  (must change something that you do every day to change your life)
• ReaCtive => CReative (same letters; do "creative" work first, before "email")
• Weatlh of information leads to poverty of Attention;
  sustain attention on "deep work" (vs "shallow work") will make huge difference; attention is most important asset for happiness, well being
• "Screen Apnea": work technology as a tool rather than being slave of technology
  when seating in front of a screen, holding breath => not healthy
  "fight or flight" behavior, more impulsive and compulsive behavior
• Rats + Email: craving "random reinforcement" "rewards"  

Video Archive - 99u

Good To Great - Concepts


Blue Badge - Scott Hanselman

course: Deep Learning @ Udacity

Deep Learning | Udacity (free)

"Machine learning is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting fields out there, and deep learningrepresents its true bleeding edge. In this course, you’ll develop a clear understanding of the motivation for deep learning, and design intelligent systems that learn from complex and/or large-scale datasets.

We’ll show you how to train and optimize basic neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and long short term memory networks. Complete learning systems in (Google) TensorFlow will be introduced via projects and assignments."

"(Udacity) developed this course with Vincent Vanhoucke, Principal Scientist at Google, and technical lead in the Google Brain team."

Approx. 3 months Assumes 6hrs/wk (work at your own pace)

Putting Deep Learning To Work

ASP.NET Core 1.0 and .NET Core 1.0

ASP.NET 5 is dead - Introducing ASP.NET Core 1.0 and .NET Core 1.0 - Scott Hanselman
"naming is hard" 

"ASP.NET 5 is now ASP.NET Core 1.0.
.NET Core 5 is now .NET Core 1.0.
Entity Framework 7 is now Entity Framework Core 1.0 or EF Core 1.0 colloquially.

Why 1.0? Because these are new. The whole .NET Core concept is new. The .NET Core 1.0 CLI is very new. Not only that, but .NET Core isn't as complete as the full .NET Framework 4.6."

Inside ASP.NET Core 1.0 with Damian Edwards on the Hanselminutes Technology Podcast: Fresh Air for Developers

.NET Core - Terminology you need to know @ InfoQ


Hello World Road Show !
by Shawn Wildermuth

ideas: The Stack Fallacy (!)

Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy | TechCrunch

"Stack fallacy has caused many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you see a database company thinking apps are easy, or a VM company thinking big data is easy  — they are suffering from stack fallacy.
Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours."

"The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs. Database engineers know almost nothing about what supply chain software customers want or need. They can hire for that, but it is not a core competency.

In a surprising way, it is far easier to innovate down the stack than up the stack.
The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers."

UC Berkeley CS188 Intro to AI

Berkeley AI Materials
"The Pac-Man projects were developed for UC Berkeley's introductory artificial intelligence course, CS 188. They apply an array of AI techniques to playing Pac-Man. However, these projects don't focus on building AI for video games. Instead, they teach foundational AI concepts, such as informed state-space search, probabilistic inference, and reinforcement learning. These concepts underly real-world application areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics."

cloud storage: Azure Backup vs Amazon Glacier

Azure and AWS: Side-by-Side Feature & Services Comparison

Amazon Glacier - Cloud Archive

Cloud Backup – Online Backup Software | Microsoft Azure

Amazon S3 vs Microsoft Azure vs. B2 Cloud Storage Pricing

Google Nearline vs. Amazon Glacier. Best Practices

Azure vs. Amazon AWS - Datamation

$199 3D printer @ CES

CES 2016: Monoprice $199 3D Printer, DLP 3D Printer, CNC Mill | PC Perspective


link from: This Week in Computer Hardware 346 Wrapping Up CES | TWiT

Microsoft Azure: $1B / 3 years for nonprofits

Microsoft plans to donate $1B in cloud services to nonprofits | The Seattle Times

"In a major expansion of its corporate philanthropy efforts, Microsoft announced plans Tuesday to donate about $1 billion worth of cloud-computing services to nonprofits during the next three years.

The program, which goes well beyond Microsoft’s current software donations, will make many of the company’s next-generation Web tools available to select nonprofits. It also extends Microsoft’s existing donations that support academic projects and Internet connectivity initiatives."

Microsoft will donate $1 billion in cloud services to nonprofits, researchers | PCWorld

books: "Fully Charged" & "Eat Move Sleep"

book: Are You Fully Charged? - Tom Rath

Are You Fully Charged? by - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

• 3 keys to live 'fully charged': Meaning + Interactions + Energy
• Meaning: intersection of: 
• Strengths: focus on what you are good at
• Interests: and that interests you
• Needs: and what the world needs
• Interactions: 
• live in 3 seconds moments, 500 million of them
• remove iPhone effect
• Energy: 
• Eat, 
• Move, 
• Sleep

FULLY CHARGED movie trailer

Eat Move Sleep by - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

Azure xplat-cli @ GitHub

All Azure features are available via REST APIs.
Usual access to them is from portals ("classic" and "new"), as well from PowerShell from Windows.
There is a "cross-platform" open source tool xplat-cli based on Node.js, that can run on all major OSs.

Azure/azure-xplat-cli: Microsoft Azure Cross Platform Command Line @ GitHub
Features:

• Accounts Management
• Azure Service Management
  • Storage
  • Websites
  • Virtual machines
  • Network
  • Mobile Services
  • Service Bus
  • SQL Database
• Azure Resource Management
  • Generic resource groups and deployments management
  • Role based access control
  • Cmdlets for individual resource providers, including compute, storage, network, redis cache, insights, etc
  • Datalake
• Key Vault

Install the Azure Command-Line Interface | Microsoft Azure

Use the Azure CLI with Service Management | Microsoft Azure

Using the Azure CLI with Azure Storage | Microsoft Azure

Use the Azure CLI with Resource Manager | Microsoft Azure

Design Thinking => The Achievement Habit (book)

Design thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Design thinking is a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result. In this regard it is a form of solution-based, or solution-focused thinking – starting with a goal (a better future situation) instead of solving a specific problem. By considering both present and future conditions and parameters of the problem, alternative solutions may be explored simultaneously."

book site: The Achievement Habit
by Bernard Roth (Stanford professor, teaching design)

The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

1. Design Thinking (about your life)
• Empathize
• Define problem
• Iterate
• Prototype
• Test!
2. "Do", don't "try"
3. Ignore "odds"
4. Be aware of "final countdown"
5. Being the cause

Bernie Roth: "The Achievement Habit" | Talks at Google - YouTube

Google IoT: Brillo, Weave, Beacons

From the Google Ubiquity Dev Summit 2016: Brillo, Weave and Beacons
"Google has organized this week the Ubiquity Dev Summit 2016 with sessions on their IoT technologies - Brillo, Weave, Beacons – and other technologies for wearable, TVs and Auto.
...
Weave is a device-to-device communication protocol developed by Nest, and later acquired by Google, which we covered in a previous post. Brillo is an embedded OS accompanied by core services and a development toolkit. It supports OTA updates which Google considers as mandatory to deal with eventual security issues and communicates with other devices over Weave. The Android HAL makes it run on various hardware. The basic architecture of Brillo is depicted in the following chart:"

"Beacons, representing smart devices placed indoors to provide semantic location information."

Beaconstac starter kit with iBeacon hardware, software and mobile app
iOS & Android SDKs, Beaconstac app for iOS & Android

book: "Make It Stick" ==

Make It Stick by by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger & Mark McDaniel
- Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

1. Fluency (memorizing) vs Mastery (understanding)
2. Active Retrieval (quiz yourself)
3. Interleave (mix)
4. Elaboration (write in your own words, "explain as I am 5 year old")
5. Think you can ("mindset" growth vs fixed)

Make It Stick - The Book



Peter C. Brown: Make It Stick on Vimeo
3 big ideas, counter-intuitive:

1. "retrieval practice": easier to learn by trying to get knowledge or skill it out of the brain (retrieve to apply) than to put in the brain (save, remember)
   it takes time for information to go from short term memory to long term memory
   consolidation, connection to what you already know
   
   to remember something, need to retrieve from memory periodically
   "every time you recall memory you change the memory" (it is re-consolidated)
2. "desirable difficulties": certain difficulties (that can be overcome)
   slow learning down but make it better
• spacing out practice (much more powerful than re-reading)
• mixing up practice of multiple things in a random fashion
• elaboration: take and idea, put it in your own words, visualize
• "generation": try to solve problem before being thought how to solve problem, struggle, and then get shown the solution, then learn it better
3. "mental effort builds mental ability"
• 10000 hour rule: experts spend great deal of time studding with complex material in particular area 
• mental effort builds connections in the brain ("mental models")

Great learning advice from Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning - YouTube

Interview: Make It Stick with Peter Brown - YouTube

• learning happens when you getting info out, not getting it in
• some difficulties make learning deeper and longer lasting
• "mental effort builds mental abilities," "growth mindset" is highly motivating 

book: 'Presence' by Amy Cuddy

PRESENCE - Amy Cuddy

Author has #2 most viewed talk on TED, is a professor on HBS

Presence by - Brian Johnson's PhilosophersNotes

Presence by Amy Cuddy - YouTube


1. Self-Affirmation: => your best 3 qualities and when demonstrated
2. Expand: posture, 'power pose' => confident behavior
3. iHunch: using 'small' iPhone => much less confidence than when using 'large' desktop
4. I'm excited: => when stressed, don't 'calm down', but switch from - to +
5. Boldest you: => why wait to win, behave as you already did

Rugby All Blacks NZ Haka 2012 - YouTube
(power presence before the game, starts about 0:30)

Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges: Amy Cuddy: 9780316256575: Amazon.com: Books

wisdom: "A Philosophers Notes": ebook, podcast, book reviews, videos

free book: A Philosopher's Notes - Brian Johnson

podcast: brianjohnson.libsyn.com/rss

PhilosophersNotes - Books - Brian Johnson

example book review video:
Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger & Mark McDaniel - YouTube

IoT Messaging Protocols @ Azure

Very informative podcast:

Messaging is Forever with Clemens Vasters @ .NET Rocks! vNext

Suggested primary protocols for IoT

• HTTP(S)
• AMQP
• MQTT
• CoAP

Links:

Azure IoT Hub 

Developer guide topics for IoT Hub | Microsoft Azure

Azure Service Bus 

Azure Service Bus Relay

Azure IoT protocol gateway | Microsoft Azure
"Azure IoT Hub natively supports communication over the HTTPS and AMQP protocols. In some cases, devices or field gateways might not be able to use one of these standard protocols and will require protocol adaptation. In such cases, you can use a custom gateway. A custom gateway can enable protocol adaptation for IoT Hub endpoints by bridging the traffic to and from IoT Hub. An Azure Internet of Things (IoT) protocol gateway enables protocol adaptation for IoT Hub. It also implements an MQTT protocol adapter to enable communication between an IoT device and IoT Hub over the MQTT protocol."

Overview of Azure IoT Hub | Microsoft Azure

Azure/azure-iot-protocol-gateway @ GitHub

Apache Qpid 

RabbitMQ 

OASIS 

"Fog Computing" (!)

Fog computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Fog computing[1] or fog networking, also known as fogging,[2][3] is an architecture that uses one or a collaborative multitude of end-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of storage (rather than stored primarily in cloud data centers), communication (rather than routed over the internet backbone), and control, configuration, measurement and management (rather than controlled primarily by network gateways such as those in the LTE (telecommunication) core).

Fog computing, a term coined by professor Salvatore J. Stolfo,[4] can be perceived both in large cloud systems and big data structures, making reference to the growing difficulties in accessing information objectively. This results in a lack of quality of the obtained content. The effects of fog computing on cloud computing and big data systems may vary; yet, a common aspect that can be extracted is a limitation in accurate content distribution, an issue that has been tackled with the creation of metrics that attempt to improve accuracy.[5]

Fog networking consists of a control plane and a data plane. For example, on the data plane, fog computing enables computing services to reside at the edge of the network as opposed to servers in a data-center. Compared to cloud computing, fog computing emphasizes proximity to end-users and client objectives, dense geographical distribution and local resource pooling, latency reduction for quality of service (QoS) and edge analytics/stream mining, resulting in superior user-experience[6] and redundancy in case of failure.[7][8][9][10]

Fog networking supports the Internet of Everything (IoE), in which most of the devices that we use on a daily basis will be connected to each other. Examples include our phones, wearable health monitoring devices, connected vehicle and augmented reality using devices such as the Google Glass."

What is Fog Computing?

Quoted from Cisco.com (By Dan D.):
"Fog Computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end-users. The distinguishing Fog characteristics are its proximity to end-users, its dense geographical distribution, and its support for mobility. Services are hosted at the network edge or even end devices such as set-top-boxes or access points. By doing so, Fog reduces service latency, and improves QoS, resulting in superior user-experience. Fog Computing supports emerging Internet of Everything (IoE) applications that demand real-time/predictable latency (industrial automation, transportation, networks of sensors and actuators). Thanks to its wide geographical distribution the Fog paradigm is well positioned for real time big data and real time analytics. Fog supports densely distributed data collection points, hence adding a fourth axis to the often mentioned Big Data dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity)."

Mentioned on podcast interview: 

Messaging is Forever with Clemens Vasters @ .NET Rocks! vNext

about programming by Alan Kay

one of most prominent computer scientists, creator of term "object programming"

Alan Kay - Programming and Scaling - YouTube

"TCP/IP is universal DNA"...
where complication is matching complexity,
not like most software systems where complication is way ahead of natural complexity.
internet has never been stopped, and was completely updated many times while running
like a biological system

"Outlook:" "Point of view is worth extra 80 IQ points"
(maybe "vision" would be a better term)

"knowledge" is "silver", "outlook" is "gold", IQ is "lead" weight (no place to go)

"enormous amount of the 'noise' in the computing field today"
"computing has now turned to a 'pop-culture'"

"The 'Arts' : Tinkering, Engineering, Mathematics, Science"
"Computing is still mostly on the level of tinkering"

video: Alan Kay: Big Ideas Are Sometimes Powerful Ideas - YouTube
President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Alan Kay, articulates the differences between big ideas and powerful ideas. Taking a look through history, Kay theorizes that a big idea is just an idea, but a powerful idea is a big idea that someone acted upon.
http://bigideasfest.org

squeakland : home of squeak etoys


Viewpoints Research Institute
www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004002_center.pdf

The Center of “Why?” Alan Kay

Design Principles Behind Smalltalk

Federated Identities: OpenID vs SAML vs OAuth

Federated Identities: OpenID vs SAML vs OAuth | Software Secured – Your Trusted Application Security Partner






How to use Access Control (.NET) | Microsoft Azure



(Azure) Access Control Service 2.0

Microsoft JavaScript engine Chakra with Node.js

Microsoft Open Sources Chakra and Wants to Run Node.js on It @ InfoQ

"True to their promise to open up the Edge’s JavaScript VM, Microsoft has made available the source code of Chakra (@ GitHub) under the permissive MIT license. Released under the name ChakraCore, the code is basically the same VM Microsoft uses for Edge and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) minus the bindings to Edge and UWP and some COM diagnostic APIs."

Microsoft is also working on making Node.js run with the ChakraCore engine besides the usual V8 one. They have achieved this by creating a V8 shim on top of JSRT, enabling Node.js applications run as usual without knowledge of the JavaScript VM underneath. The project can be found at Microsoft/node on GitHub."

Azure Storage Encryption

Client-Side Encryption with .NET for Microsoft Azure Storage | Microsoft Azure

"The Azure Storage Client Library for .NET supports encrypting data within client applications before uploading to Azure Storage, and decrypting data while downloading to the client. The library also supports integration with Azure Key Vault for storage account key management."

Transparent Data Encryption with Azure SQL Database

"Azure SQL Database transparent data encryption helps protect against the threat of malicious activity by performing real-time encryption and decryption of the database, associated backups, and transaction log files at rest without requiring changes to the application.
TDE encrypts the storage of an entire database by using a symmetric key called the database encryption key. In SQL Database the database encryption key is protected by a built-in server certificate. The built-in server certificate is unique for each SQL Database server."

Azure Disk Encryption for Linux and Windows Virtual Machines-Public Preview Now Available - Microsoft Azure Security - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

some older info:

Client-Side Encryption for Microsoft Azure Storage – Preview - Microsoft Azure Storage Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Cloud Security - Crypto Services and Data Security in Microsoft Azure

PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) @ Azure

Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration Overview
"DSC is a new management platform in Windows PowerShell that enables deploying and managing configuration data for software services and managing the environment in which these services run.
DSC provides a set of Windows PowerShell language extensions, new Windows PowerShell cmdlets, and resources that you can use to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured. It also provides a means to maintain and manage existing configurations."
DSC Configurations

Windows PowerShell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Introducing PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) - Building Clouds Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs


Getting Started with PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) - Microsoft Virtual Academy

https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/bestprac/configuration-management-windows-powershell-desired-state-configuration-dsc-36167

Azure Automation DSC Overview | Microsoft Azure

"Azure Automation DSC builds on top of the fundamentals introduced in PowerShell DSC to provide an even easier configuration management experience. Azure Automation DSC brings the same management layer to PowerShell Desired State Configuration as Azure Automation offers for PowerShell scripting today.

Azure Automation DSC allows you to author and manage PowerShell Desired State Configurations, import DSC Resources, and generate DSC Node Configurations (MOF documents), all in the cloud. These DSC items will be placed on the Azure Automation DSC pull server so that target nodes (such as physical and virtual machines) in the cloud or on-premises can pick them up, automatically conform to the desired state they specify, and report back on their compliance with the desired state to Azure Automation."

Microsoft R Server, for Linux, Free & Enterprise

Microsoft delivers free version of its R analytics Server for developers | ZDNet

"Microsoft is rolling out a free version of its R big-data analytics server for developers alongside the rest of the newly rebranded Revolution Analytics servers."

Microsoft’s Revolution Analytics buy pays off, Linux-based R Server launched • The Register

"The Microsoft R Server can be installed on-premises or on the Azure cloud platform. It will be integrated into Azure's HDInsight (Hadoop on Azure) and the Azure Machine Learning analytics suite. R Tools for Visual Studio will support developing R solutions."
R Server | Microsoft

"Use the powerful, statistical programming language—R—in an enterprise-class, big data analytics platform. Microsoft R Server is your flexible choice for analyzing data at scale, building intelligent apps, and discovering valuable insights across your business."

Microservices & Macro-services @ Amazon

I Love APIs 2015: Microservices at Amazon


The Science Behind Why Jeff Bezos's Two-Pizza Team Rule Works

Microservices and Teams at Amazon @ InfoQ

"definition of microservices but also states four constraints:

• Single-purpose.
• Connect only through APIs.
• Connect over HTTPS.
• Largely black boxes to each other.

When comparing microservices with SOA Munns notes some distinctive differences

Microservices	SOA
Many very small components Business logic lives inside a single service domain Simple wire protocols, e.g. HTTP with XML or JSON API driven with SDKs/Clients	Fewer more sophisticated components Business logic can live across multiple domains Enterprise Service BUS (ESB) like layers between services Middleware

"

A new "macro service" for AWS:
 

Amazon Releases Cloud-based Email and Calendaring Service

$4 / month / user, against Microsoft $5 & Google $5. 

Microsoft: EOL IE 8, 9, 10, .NET 4.0, 4.5, 4.5.1, move to IE 11, .NET 4.5.2

RIP: Microsoft is killing Internet Explorer 8, 9, 10 next week - SlashGear

Microsoft slashes IE support, sets 'huge' edict for Jan. 2016 | Computerworld
"In a surprise announcement yesterday, the head of IE's marketing said that after Jan. 12, 2016, Microsoft would support IE9 only on Windows Vista, IE10 only on Windows Server 2012,
and IE11 on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
IE7 and IE8 will drop off support completely, no matter what OS they run on.
The browsers will continue working, but Microsoft will halt technical support and stop serving security updates for the banned versions."

Last chance to upgrade IE or switch browsers as Microsoft's mandate looms | Computerworld

"Nearly 340 million people who run Microsoft's Internet Explorer have just a week to upgrade or switch browsers, or face a shutoff of the security patch spigot."

Support Ending for the .NET Framework 4.0, 4.5 and 4.5.1 on Tuesday

"In less than a week Microsoft will formally end support for versions 4.0, 4.5, and 4.5.1 of the .NET Framework. Users should upgrade to a later version such as the slightly incompatible .NET 4.5.2.

Before we move on, it should be noted that this only affects the 4.x series. The much older .NET 3.5 SP 1 will continue to be supported. In this context, support means having access to technical support, security updates, and hotfixes."

Azure Active Directory Authentication Services

The future of Azure ACS is Azure Active Directory - Active Directory Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Authentication Scenarios for Azure AD | Microsoft Azure


How to use Access Control (.NET) | Microsoft Azure

WazMonkey ("Chaos Monkey" for Azure)

smarx/WazMonkey

"WazMonkey is a simple tool for testing resilience of Windows Azure cloud services.

It's modeled after Netflix's Chaos Monkey. WazMonkey chooses a role instance from your service at random and reboots it."

Jet.com Technology

link from: Functional Microservices with Rachel Reese @ .NET Rocks! vNext

web presentations: impress.js (!)

Impressive web presentations tool !

impress.js | presentation tool based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers | by Bartek Szopka @bartaz

impress/impress.js @ GitHub



I just have a feeling that I have seen "it" before...
And yes, there is a long list. It does not make it less impressive, though :)

Web-based slideshow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

10 Best HTML/CSS Based Presentation Slides | Web & Graphic Design | Bashooka

Reveal.js: PowerPoint, Prezi And Impress.js Alternative For Presentations | PowerPoint Presentation

reveal.js - The HTML Presentation Framework