Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries

2021-01-06 · open the original ↗

• Azure Storage Explorer is a free Microsoft desktop tool. Giard downloads it from azure.microsoft.com/features/storage-explorer and installs it with the defaults; the version shown came out in December 2020. It can connect to a local storage emulator or to storage accounts in the cloud.
• A connection string is Giard's simplest way to connect. Of the several connection methods, he copies a connection string from the storage account's Access keys in the portal and gives it a display name. The account then shows nodes for blob containers, file shares, queues and tables, and changes made in the tool show up in the portal's in-browser storage explorer, and vice versa.
• Blob containers support uploads of files or whole folders. Giard creates a container, uploads a file and then a folder of two text files; a refresh may be needed to see them. Opening a blob downloads it and opens it in the program registered for its extension, and blobs can be multi-selected for deletion, copied, and inspected for history and statistics.
• Table entities need a partition key and row key. The combination must be unique within the table, and other properties can be typed, such as integer or Boolean. Entities can be added one at a time or imported from a CSV, whose rows need not share the same properties, then edited, deleted or exported back to CSV.
• Its main advantage is juggling several storage accounts. Giard says the portal means separate tabs or constant switching, while in the Explorer multiple accounts are each a click away.

2021-01-05 · open the original ↗

• The kit is a complete computer built into a keyboard. It is a Raspberry Pi 4 with its ports moved to the back. The $100 (MSRP) kit includes the keyboard unit, a USB-C power supply, the official mouse, a roughly 250-page beginner's guide, a micro SD reader, a 3 ft micro HDMI cable and a 16 GB card preloaded with Raspbian. Inside are 4 GB of RAM, a 1.8 GHz quad-core 64-bit CPU and wireless. On the back are Ethernet (the host is unsure it is gigabit), two unlabelled micro HDMI ports, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port and GPIO. It has no power switch.
• It plays HD video well but is no media PC. It is claimed to play 4K video, but the host found 4K playback stutters, so he would not use it as a 4K media PC. Full-screen 1080p YouTube played fine, although it was sluggish to get started compared with a desktop PC. Setup took him through a first-boot partition resize and a wizard covering locale, the default password, screen black bars and Wi-Fi.
• He recommends it as an all-in-one beginner's learning computer. He finds it friendlier than a bare Pi board, which needs a case and other parts gathered separately: this needs only power and a monitor. He suggests it for learning to code and the GPIO, or for email and web browsing.

2021-01-05 · open the original ↗

• GitHub Actions is an alternative to Azure DevOps pipelines, tied to GitHub. Benkovich, a consultant who helps clients move applications to Azure, says both script build, test, packaging and deployment steps in YAML; Azure DevOps pipelines can work with code in Bitbucket, GitHub, Team Foundation and elsewhere, while GitHub Actions requires the code to be in GitHub.
• Right-click publish works but is not repeatable. Clicking through the publish dialog, which the host notes has been in Visual Studio for about 10 years, is hard to repeat or hand off. A preview setting in Visual Studio 16.8 or later, "GitHub Actions support in publish", lets the same publish wizard generate a GitHub Actions workflow instead, so every commit to the chosen branch triggers the deployment.
• The generated workflow deploys without the developer writing YAML. In his demo the wizard downloaded the Azure publish profile, stored its credentials as a secret in the GitHub repository, and created an editable workflow file in the repo; after a commit, the build and deploy to Azure ran in about a minute. His point is that "I don't have to be a DevOps engineer to do this"; the feature works only with GitHub today, and he speculates it may someday come to Azure DevOps pipelines.
• The generated workflow can be extended with marketplace actions. He added a third-party replace-tokens step before the build that injects GitHub variables such as run ID, run number and commit SHA into a CSHTML page, and uses the same idea to stamp dates and versions on his documentation. Visual Studio's editor does not connect to the actions marketplace, but editing the workflow file on GitHub offers IntelliSense over marketplace actions.

2021-01-01 · open the original ↗

• .NET Conf exists to hand the community a microphone. Lozano, its executive producer, says it shows .NET through both the product team and the community, and 2020 was its 10th year. It began in 2010 as MVC Conf, became ASP Conf, and was renamed .NET Conf three or four years in at Scott Hunter's suggestion. Day one is product team from 9 to 5 Pacific. From 5 p.m. Pacific on day two, community speakers run around the clock for 24 hours, with hosts taking shifts near each region's time zone; 2020 drew many speakers from Africa and Asia.
• They ran a virtual conference a decade before 2020 made it normal. In 2010 it ran live on Live Meeting, whose rooms were capped at about 1,400 people, a cap they exceeded during a Hanselman keynote. Bandwidth was the main problem until two or three years ago, so speakers also recorded locally with Camtasia, and some sessions, such as one from a speaker in China, were pre-recorded.
• Browser-only streaming makes presenting virtually as easy as on stage. For 2020 Channel 9 produced the event on StreamYard, which uses WebRTC in the browser and needs nothing installed, and restreamed it to YouTube, Channel 9 and other feeds. Lozano's reason is that developers are finicky about installing software, and asking them to configure a tool like OBS raises the bar to present far above plugging into a projector.
• A keynote crashed an under-scaled host, prompting a move to Azure. During a Scott Guthrie keynote, the third-party server hosting the event's web page with the embedded Channel 9 player buckled under the load and returned 503s. It took about 15 minutes to fix with more RAM and a reboot. People already watching kept the stream, but nobody new could get in, and the event moved to Azure the following year.
• Presenters' failures should be met with kindness and preparation. Lozano tells speakers that errors happen and their content can be collected later, because the schedule cannot wait for a fix. After a chaotic 2019, he booked 15-minute tech checks back-to-back on two days, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Central, two to two and a half weeks before the event, plus a day for stragglers, and did 65 of them. He says the conference takes first-time presenters and works with them.

2020-12-30 · open the original ↗

• Wi-Fi 6 is worth buying new, but rarely worth a forced upgrade. The host says its gains are in capacity in dense environments, not speed to one client: a home with 20–30 devices will see little over Wi-Fi 5, one with 50–100 might. He would go Wi-Fi 6 for a first UniFi purchase, to replace pre-802.11ac gear or ISP-supplied Wi-Fi, or to replace access points three to four years old.
• The rated aggregate throughput is one no client will ever see. The 1.5 Gbps figure is 1.2 Gbps on 5 GHz (2x2 MU-MIMO) plus 300 Mbps on 2.4 GHz (2x2 MIMO) added together, and the U6-Lite's only uplink is a single gigabit Ethernet port, so the host says even a perfect environment will not reach it.
• The U6-Lite reuses the nanoHD's form factor, but it is indoor-only. At $99 MSRP (U6-Lite-US), it takes the nanoHD's mounting bracket and skins, runs on 802.3af or 48 V passive PoE at 12 W maximum, and is rated -30 to 60 °C, but it has no weather seal. Ubiquiti recommends ceiling mounting for dense client loads and wall mounting toward the area you need covered for range.
• In the host's tests the U6-Lite beat the 3x3 UAP-AC-Pro throughout. Testing one access point at a time in the same wall position, with four Intel AX200-based clients, he measured it about 50–100% faster in iperf. Some Windows clients got more than twice the throughput on OpenSpeedTest, and four clients downloading at once together reached 213 Mbps against roughly 163 Mbps on the AC Pro.
• Aggregate throughput collapsed when four clients downloaded at once. A desktop that reached about 650–700 Mbps alone was one of four machines totalling only 213 Mbps when all pulled files simultaneously, with all clients on 802.11ax. The host suspects the overhead of scheduling packets to several clients on a 2x2 access point, and expects the 4x4 U6-LR to do better.

2020-12-23 · open the original ↗

• Unit tests should replace hot-reload checking in Blazor. Charbeneau, a Progress Software developer advocate for Telerik UI for Blazor, calls the design-time loop Blazor's weak point: because the app must recompile, saving a change reloads the whole browser tab rather than re-rendering just the edited component as JavaScript hot reloading can. Developers who check their work by eye in the browser are doing manual tests that are never saved; unit tests give the same fast iteration and also remain as regression tests for the life of the application.
• bUnit tests rendered components by comparing HTML semantically, not as strings. He says whitespace or class attributes in a different order do not fail a test, and the library has helpers for button clicks and for checking single attributes, such as that accessibility attributes are present. The tests run without loading the app in a browser. bUnit covers the UI only, and it can also test several components together, such as cascading dropdowns with a mock behind them.
• The whole test suite can be C#, written in one style. Back-end and shared logic go in xUnit or NUnit, components go in bUnit, and services can be mocked with JustMock, a Progress product with a free option, so no HTTP calls hit a real back end. He contrasts this with Angular or React, where validation written in a C# API is rewritten in JavaScript and tested in TypeScript under Jest and its configuration files.
• bUnit does not remove the need for end-to-end tests. He names Selenium and his employer's Telerik Test Studio, whose recorder lets a QA tester point and click to build functional tests in C#, then run them on Edge, Chrome and Firefox, with screenshot comparison, OCR of rendered PDFs and responsive-design checks. Such tests are slow, so he places them before a release, and xUnit and bUnit during coding; with all three tiers he calls an application "pretty much bulletproof".

2020-12-18 · open the original ↗

• Hand-drawn slides revived his speaking when he felt ineffective. Neal says that around 2015 he was burnt out and thought about taking a year off, because audiences were kind but did not seem to act on his talks. A YouTube talk at Google by Dan Roam, author of Show and Tell, on simple stick-figure illustration led him to draw slides for a new Kanban talk at Orlando Code Camp with a cheap stylus and an old iPad. He says he knew within minutes that it was a game changer: the audience was more engaged.
• Drawing a slide fixes what he will say, so he needs no notes. He likens it to handwritten school notes that bring back more detail than they contain: while drawing he thinks through his points, and when the slide comes up he recalls them, so he uses no bullet points. His workflow is to export each drawing as a transparent PNG onto a plain white PowerPoint slide, mostly in black and white for the best contrast on an unknown projector.
• The drawing app mattered more than the hardware. He uses an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, though he says any recent iPad now works, with Sketches Pro for slides (its pens improve his poor handwriting) and Procreate, which has a steeper learning curve, for avatars, stickers and swag. He used a Surface Pro for three or four months and found the pen good but the Windows drawing apps far behind at the time; today he would pick Adobe Fresco or Concepts.
• Practice, not natural talent, is what builds the skill. Neal is self-taught and draws 10 to 20 minutes almost daily, as writers write every day, and says his style emerged over time rather than by design. He studies drawings he likes the way a developer reverse-engineers an app, by asking how he would reproduce them with his own techniques. He tells anyone starting a craft that with patience and practice they will be surprised by their progress in six months or a year.
• A pretend Twitter sale turned drawing into a paid side business. Around Christmas 2017 he offered avatars for $20 or $25 as if he normally charged $30 to $40, though no one had paid him before. He was filling orders into early February and refunded some unhappy buyers, and the proceeds bought him a new iPad. Since then he has drawn stickers, t-shirt designs and conference artwork, including work for Connect.Tech in Atlanta used across its venues.

2020-12-14 · open the original ↗

• Data engineering is a new role still being formally defined. Bunting defines it as moving data from disparate sources into a common store, in Azure usually a data lake, then cleaning, transforming and joining it so data scientists and analysts can use it. Hulen says it takes over much of the database administrator's data work, and that he went through a job task analysis with Microsoft the month before to define the role for new training and certification. He grounds the demand in his figures that 90% of today's data is unstructured and 90% of the world's data was accumulated in the last two years, and in the "four Vs": volume, variety, velocity and veracity.
• Synapse Analytics is more than a bundle of existing Azure tools. Hulen describes it as one web-based workspace for data engineers, scientists and analysts. It combines dedicated SQL pools (the successor to Azure Data Warehouse), serverless Spark pools, serverless SQL pools that extend PolyBase from SQL Server 2016, Synapse pipelines built on Azure Data Factory's code, and Power BI. When the host suggests it is a repackaging, Bunting says the tight integration makes it a new product: he can query lake files in T-SQL without a database, and use a dedicated pool for heavy reporting, which can be paused because compute is separate from storage.
• Synapse Link gives analytics on Cosmos DB without spending its resource units. Hulen says heavy analytical queries against Cosmos DB's transactional store can be prohibitively expensive. With Synapse Link, a hidden columnar analytical store in Parquet format is kept automatically, replacing the manual change-feed-to-data-lake approach, and can be queried from Spark or T-SQL. He says this is available only with Synapse.
• Versioning data means keeping a copy of every enrichment stage. Bunting says they almost never work against the source system: they copy raw data into the lake in a format close to the source (XML, CSV, JSON), then write each transformation to its own folder level, with file- and folder-level permissions to keep users out of the raw data. Hulen adds that Synapse Studio had just gained Git integration, which he noticed the week before, so pipelines, notebooks and SQL files can be committed and branched as JSON or YAML artifacts.
• Data engineers should stop using SQL for everything. Hulen says Python and SQL are the main languages, and that Python's open-source libraries can do in one or two lines what takes dozens in SQL; the guests' firm, Solliance, develops Synapse training for Microsoft and stresses this mindset shift. Bunting points to C# in Synapse's Jupyter notebooks for .NET developers, and to notebooks being pre-connected to the data lake, where Databricks needs account keys and configuration first.

2020-12-12 · open the original ↗

• The label's product number tells Word the whole layout. Hanselman uses Avery labels he reads as 8660; picking that vendor and number under Mailings > Start Mail Merge > Labels sets the label size and how many fit across, so note the number on the package first. He presents the video as a remake of a 2008 blog post he says is still one of his most-asked-about.
• The address list is an Excel sheet with a header row. Columns are name, address, city, state and zip; in Word he chooses Select Recipients > Use an Existing List, picks the sheet, and confirms that the first row contains headers.
• Design one label, then propagate it with Update Labels. After connecting the list, Word shows only "Next Record" placeholders, which he calls the confusing part; he builds the first label from Insert Merge Field entries, using Shift+Enter instead of Enter for tighter line spacing, and Update Labels copies it to every label. Preview Results then shows real addresses.
• Test one page before burning through a sheet run. He checks the printer's marking for which side prints, loads the labels face up and square in the tray, and prints a single page first so a wrong orientation does not waste hundreds of labels.
• Only Finish & Merge performs the actual merge. Printing from the design screen prints the merge commands, so his test page came out as "Next Record" text; Finish & Merge > Print Documents produces the real addresses, and he says he could have limited that to record one for the test.

2020-12-11 · open the original ↗

• UniFi Access needs a UDM Pro and an 802.3bt switch. As of December 2020 the UDM Pro is the only platform that runs it. The Access Hub draws up to 40 W because it powers the readers, a G3 Flex camera and a 12 V lock, and only a few UniFi switches supply 802.3bt; the host used an XG 6 PoE. He tested on UDM Pro firmware 1.8.3 with Access 1.2.25.
• The $499 starter kit is the sensible buy, at one per door. It holds the hub ($199 alone), the Pro reader ($299), the Lite reader ($99) and 20 cards ($40), and one hub serves only one door. The host's own estimate is $1,000–1,500 per door with labour and lock hardware, excluding the UDM Pro and switches, which he thinks is in line with other access control systems.
• Doors keep working when the hub loses the controller. The host unplugged the switch from the UDM Pro, and cards and visitor passes still opened the door, so access rules live on the hub. Swipes made while it was offline were stored and uploaded once it reconnected, so a UDM Pro reboot or maintenance window does not lock users out.
• The security weak points are physical and network, not software. The hub must be locked away because flipping one wire between NC and NO opens the lock, and a maglock opens on power loss, so it needs battery or generator backup. A UK security consultant who wrote in warned against maglocks on fire-linked exterior doors and favoured door strikes. The host adds a segregated VLAN with no internet access.
• The host rates it a strong first release for small sites, not enterprise. He would use it for a retail store or small office with a few doors, given the network expertise to segment it. His gripes are software: holidays are all-day or nothing, so no half days; expired visitor cards are not returned to the pool; and editing existing users in the portal failed for him.

2020-12-08 · open the original ↗

• Replacing ISP equipment came first; an extra access point fixed the dead zone. At a family friend's house the host put the Comcast modem in bridge mode behind a UDM, which left one lower-level room without Wi-Fi. A roughly 120 ft outdoor cable run along the existing coax to a spare UAP-AC-Lite took just over three hours and gave 66 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up where there had been nothing.
• Off-the-shelf Wi-Fi 6 desktops were scarce and overpriced for testing. Best Buy had none with Wi-Fi 6. At Costco the host bought a Lenovo Legion T5 for $699, down $200 from $899, with a GTX 1660, a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB drive. He later regretted it, after finding two spare PCs and ordering Wi-Fi 6 PCIe cards, since he says Wi-Fi 6 USB adapters did not yet exist.
• The host hires out large cabling jobs to licensed electricians. He says he is not certified in low-voltage electrical work and handles only small runs himself. His kit for those includes a Platinum Tools pass-through crimper he rates highly, a rotary stripper for outdoor Cat6, a spare access point, a cheap gigabit switch and a USG. He prefers screw-in cable clamps because nail-in ones work loose over time.
• A nanoHD in a hot attic should stay within its rated temperatures. The host mounted one on a rafter at home and cites a rated range of 14–158 °F, against an attic he expects to reach 120–130 °F in summer. A pre-made 10 ft cable fell about a foot short, so he made one up to a keystone patch panel instead.

2020-12-08 · open the original ↗

• An IP address is a phone extension, unique only within its network. Hanselman starts offline, with "name not resolved" in the browser and an instant ping failure, and uses ipconfig to show there is no address; after joining his demo Wi-Fi he gets 192.168.3.109. Addresses like 192.168.x.x or 10.x are reserved for inside use, like movie 555 numbers, so viewers can have the same one.
• Addresses are leased, not owned. His phone showed a 12-hour lease, and after a disconnect his laptop happened to get .109 back, which he likens to a phone store reissuing your old number or not; a static lease pins a device to one address.
• The default gateway is the router and the only way out. The router has a LAN side inside the house and a WAN port (usually yellow) outside, and its LAN address (192.168.3.1 here) hosts its admin page. His laptop, Raspberry Pi, iPhone and Apple Watch could all join and see each other, but nothing reached the internet until the WAN port was plugged in; he chained this router behind his house router, where its WAN address was 192.168.1.142. He also recommends wired over Wi-Fi for reliability and changing the router's default password.
• DNS turns names into numbers, and you can check its answers. The router runs a local DNS server that caches answers and falls back to upstream servers; nslookup against 8.8.8.8 (Google) or 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) should return the same address for a site. The hosts file under Windows\System32\drivers\etc overrides DNS, which he uses to point local.hanselman.com at 127.0.0.1 while developing, but he warns an entry for something like google.com could silently misdirect you.
• You need not use your ISP's DNS. He says some ISPs practise DNS hijacking, sending mistyped names to their own search page; he runs a Pi-hole, a Raspberry Pi acting as DNS server that blocks advertising, and says it blocks about 10% of his household's traffic. His demo router runs OpenWrt.

2020-12-03 · open the original ↗

• Students get the problems a company would give a new hire. Cooper, who has worked at the Illinois Science and Technology Institute (ISTI) for over six years, says companies in its STEM Challenge, run since the 2013–14 academic year, are asked what a project team hired tomorrow would work on, not what would be fun for students. This year 13 companies across Illinois are each paired with up to four high schools: 20 schools (usually 18 to 25) and about 900 students. Over a semester, company mentors work with students each week on an open, interdisciplinary problem with no right answer, using design thinking, which she says builds communication, teamwork and deadline skills.
• The program values process over product, so mentors flag unworkable ideas. Problems this year include reusing coal ash for an energy company near East St. Louis, medication adherence, safer sensor-equipped construction sites, and challenges from Northrop Grumman and the new partner John Deere. She says students tend to jump to apps, but one team working on the patient journey for adults with Alzheimer's built a board game instead, and students in Williamsfield, near Peoria, worked with a solar company on what is now a solar energy community there.
• The program targets students underrepresented in STEM. Cooper says about 75% of students tell ISTI's yearly evaluation that it is their first ongoing contact with a professional ("you can't be what you can't see"). The end-of-year showcase is not a contest, both because competition was found to put off underrepresented students and because different industries' solutions cannot be compared; one team per school presents.
• Schools wait on a list, and the limit is companies. She says demand from schools exceeds supply, so ISTI recruits companies near schools it wants to reach and in regions it does not yet serve, such as Moline and Rock Island, new this year. Each company commits mentors to weekly contact for a semester. Teachers commit to a year-long process: professional development in the fall, planning, mentor training, then work in earnest from January.
• An existing mentoring platform made the pandemic pivot small. Its Mentor Matching Engine, built in 2012, connects students and background-checked mentors by discussion and video, with a teacher in every project. With it this year's kickoff, company site visit and final presentations, the usual three or more in-person events, went virtual along with training and the showcase. It also runs as a separate program where students pick their own research projects, which she puts at 23 high schools and over a thousand students.

2020-12-03 · open the original ↗

• A Raspberry Pi 4 no longer needs beta firmware to boot from USB. The host says much of the online guidance, which calls for a beta bootloader, is out of date. An up-to-date Raspbian install can be copied from the microSD card to a USB 3 drive and set to boot from it.
• Use an SSD or SATA M.2 drive, not a thumb drive or NVMe. A flash stick is little more reliable than the microSD card it replaces. The M.2 enclosures he shows, including the Argon One M.2 case, accept SATA M.2 drives but not NVMe. His first Argon USB 3 jumper was faulty, and an ordinary short USB 3 cable worked in its place.
• Copy the card to a blank drive, then set USB boot order. Delete any existing partitions on the target in GParted, clone the card with SD Card Copier, and choose Advanced Options > Boot Order > USB Boot in raspi-config. Then shut down, remove the card and power on; the Pi waits about 20 seconds for the card before booting from USB.
• Update the Pi before copying, or the boot-order setting fails. The boot-order option returned an error until the host ran apt upgrade, which also moved it from Boot Options to Advanced Options. Anything installed on the card after the copy, such as hdparm, is missing on the drive and has to be installed again.
• External storage was far faster than microSD in a quick hdparm read test. The microSD card read at 44.5 MB/s, a 2 TB Seagate USB SSD at 108 MB/s, and a 128 GB SATA M.2 drive at 347 MB/s. The host calls this a rough before-and-after check, not a rigorous benchmark.

2020-11-25 · open the original ↗

• Remote teaching needs more communication bandwidth and less friction. Kellerman, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of New South Wales teaching classes of 300 to 500, demos a setup that joins one Teams meeting from three devices and switches XSplit scenes (camera, full-screen PowerPoint with ink, OneNote worked examples, a physical beam held in front of the slides) with a Logitech remote mapped to hotkeys. He says moving to a dedicated space for classes, rather than one chair all day, restores the intentionality of walking to a meeting room.
• Digital delivery can bring every student to the front. In his account, students solve a free body diagram on paper, post a photo to the Teams chat, and he taps each one on his big touch screen and critiques it moments later, with students in Mongolia, Italy and the US. He argues it is easier to get 500 people to the front of a class virtually than in a lecture theatre.
• Students can take lab measurements in augmented reality. With students barred from the lab, his team made a 3D capture of the lab and digitized and animated an experimental rig inside SharePoint Spaces, then in private preview, so students take measurements from the rig instead of watching a video.
• These setups should become buttons for ordinary teachers. Kellerman says engineering's job is democratizing the possible, and that the hardware cost is justified: a Microsoft contact told him a cubicle costs $9,000 per employee per year, so equipping home workers amortizes in a year. Hanselman adds that switching webcams through device settings is enough friction to stop an average teacher.
• Integrating separate apps is, he predicts, the next decade's frontier. His example: a bot searches the machine-generated, time-indexed transcript of a recorded Teams lecture and answers a student's chat question with a link to the moment, say 53 minutes 22 seconds in. He did not code it; Sydney firm Antares Solutions builds his ideas, and he says knowing what is possible and learning what you need is what an engineering degree teaches.

2020-11-24 · open the original ↗

• Teach cloud concepts, not the names of products. Hanselman says Azure is usually introduced as a diagram of services to memorize, and that moving a machine from under your desk into a cloud VM ("lift and shift") gets none of the cloud's benefits. He uses Azure as the example but says the concepts hold for any cloud.
• Every service ultimately rests on storage and virtual machines. A VM does not know it is virtual, and a byte written to cloud storage is copied several times, possibly worldwide. That storage may be slower than a desktop SSD and need not sit next to the VM, so disk-heavy code in Chicago should not be talking to storage in Ireland.
• Higher layers hide the VMs but do not remove them. App Service, containers, Kubernetes and serverless functions ("think about your servers less") all run on VMs someone else patches; he walks this up a "Pizza as a Service" chart from on-premises to SaaS. Even with a provider's SLA (five nines is about five minutes of downtime a year), making a site resilient stays the architect's responsibility.
• Knowing what is underneath lets you pack it tighter. An App Service plan is a VM, and he calls one app per plan a fundamental misunderstanding. His $32-a-month, 2 GB basic Windows plan runs six sites at about 60% memory, his Linux plan runs his blog, home page and podcast at around 12% CPU, and he can scale up or drag a slider to scale out.
• Cloud observability gives one person an IT department's tools. On basic plans with out-of-the-box Application Insights he sees response times, availability tests, costs (about $400 in his dashboard) by resource, and failed requests that show bots probing his non-WordPress, non-PHP blog for PHP files. Azure Front Door routes hanselman.com and /blog to separate app services, configuration he says once took flown-in specialists.

2020-11-23 · open the original ↗

• Treat ADHD as traits to manage, not a yes-or-no diagnosis. Kergosien says the clinical definition dwells on the negative (he cites the DSM-5 as requiring several, he thinks five, areas of impairment for at least six months), whereas his talk asks which tendencies go with this kind of brain and when each helps or hurts. Knowing yourself, and re-checking that as you learn more, lets you choose your situations; if your efforts never fix a struggle such as mundane tasks, he says that can free you to look for a different job or activity.
• The same ADHD traits can be strengths in the right setting. He lists hyperfocus alongside distractibility; an "out of sight, out of mind" form of object permanence that he says could even make losing a loved one less difficult; a fearlessness he says is common among successful entrepreneurs; and a brain that notices more around it, which distracts but also feeds intuition. He suggests some people work late at night simply because there are fewer distractions.
• Lean harder on lists and reminders than most people do. Kergosien says people with strong ADHD often end up using project-management techniques on their own lives, which for him led into leadership roles, and that checking items off supplies a reward that helps build the habit. He was diagnosed borderline as a child and again as an adult, and takes his prescribed medication selectively because it makes him worse at observing his surroundings and switching tasks; he also decides in advance, the way someone with alcoholic tendencies avoids the bar, not to start an absorbing project when he will need to stay alert.
• Rein in perfectionism by defining "done" before starting. He says the urge to make everything 110%, which developers call gold plating, leads him to take on less so as not to spread himself thin. His remedies are breaking work into micro tasks, setting milestones that mark when a task meets its needs, and routine check-ins, such as every few days on a month-long task or every 10 minutes on an hour-long one.
• Explaining the struggle turns a frustrated partner into an ally. Kergosien says he could walk past a full trash can 20 times without once thinking to take it out, which his wife read as not caring. Talking it through did not remove the difficulty, but it let her help rather than assume, and he says both benefited.

2020-11-22 · open the original ↗

• The healthcare cloud bundles existing services around an interoperability standard. Naik, a Microsoft data and AI specialist for health customers, calls Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare the company's first and only industry cloud: Dynamics 365, Power Apps and Teams on the common data model, using Azure's FHIR service as a standard, API-accessed schema so payers, providers and processors can share records. He names Epic as the first customer, using Teams with its application for telehealth; on the host's paraphrase, he agrees that Microsoft supplies the raw tools and partners assemble the solutions for each provider.
• COVID raised hospitals' costs while cutting their main revenue. Naik says elective surgeries, where most hospitals make their money, fell by 70%, while costs rose to treat COVID patients and protect caregivers. He presents the product as Microsoft's answer: better patient engagement, coordination of care teams, and operational insights, within Azure's HIPAA and HITRUST certifications; he also claims Azure has the highest market share in healthcare.
• The health bot already runs a public COVID symptom checker. Naik says the CDC website's symptom-checker bot is built on Microsoft's bot framework. Providers can also use the health bot to schedule patients' next appointments and to work with insurers and payment processors, alongside ready-made Teams apps, portals, dashboards and workflow templates.
• Speech and text analytics aim to cut doctors' charting time. Naik says speech-to-text, sentiment analysis and text analytics from Cognitive Services can let doctors and nurses spend more time listening to patients and less time typing notes. He ties this to patient satisfaction, citing the common complaint that the doctor typed more than listened.
• The product is now generally available as a per-user licence. Naik says it went into preview in May, when it was announced at Ignite, and reached general availability on October 28 as its own licence at $95 per user per month. HealthBot and Cognitive Services are billed separately as metered Azure services, and he refers buyers to their account executive on pricing.

2020-11-17 · open the original ↗

• Pull lightweight polyline first, then pull the cable with it. The host, who calls himself a novice at fishing walls, failed to push two Cat6 cables up an insulated exterior wall with both the magnet puller and the rods; the cables came off the rod and he skinned a knuckle. Polyline tied to the magnet shuttle slid through the insulation easily and then pulled the Cat6 behind it.
• A wall cavity's capped top blocks any pull into the attic. Pushing rods up from his office only hit the timber the host describes as a 4x4 capping the cavity, and roof and HVAC ducting made it impractical to drill down into that exterior wall. He moved the cross-connect about six feet over to an uninsulated interior wall that he could reach from the attic.
• Drill down from the attic, then drop the shuttle in free fall. He bridged the joists with plywood, drilled a 3/4-inch hole through the top timber, and dropped the magnet shuttle on about eight feet of polyline. He found it from the office with the magnet, drilled there, and pulled the Cat6 down to a keystone wall plate.
• The attic now holds a UniFi USW Industrial switch. The host chose it to cope with his attic's winter cold and summer heat, mounted with a 1U 24-port Cable Matters keystone patch panel on a backboard he built. The cable tested good and the switch adopted into UniFi, giving him a point to fan Cat6 out across a house that is wired mostly with coax.
• The magnet puller impressed him most; the camera rarely helped. The tools were sent free by TechToolSupply.com. The host rates the MagnaPull "the star of the show" and thinks the 30-foot push-pull rod kit could have done most of the same work. The Wi-Fi Cable Ferret camera worked but was of little use in his walls; he leaves its verdict open.

2020-11-17 · open the original ↗

• Set up your physical workspace deliberately. Answering a beginner C# programmer in Ethiopia who gets exhausted and stops coding, Hanselman says overwhelm hits veterans too. He calls the first remedy "nesting": choose your posture and layout so you can work long without hurting yourself, and keep things within reach that "feed your spirit".
• Speed up the developer's inner loop. He demos replacing stop-rerun-refresh with dotnet watch run, noting every language has a file watcher or a tool like watchexec. His rule: once you do something twice, see if you can automate it, and by five or ten times make it a script.
• Learn the few hotkeys that stop repetition, not all of them. He shows multi-caret editing and zooming in VS Code, snapping windows with PowerToys FancyZones, alt-click and Ctrl+W in Windows Terminal, and start . to jump from a prompt to Explorer. He says to put three to five on a sticky note and practise them until they are like a kata.
• Keep small utilities synced and on your PATH everywhere. His utils folder in Dropbox holds zoom and clipboard tools, wget and a resolution batch file, and it is on the PATH on every machine, so a new tool is available on laptop and desktop at once.
• When overwhelmed, step back and build systems you can succeed in. He suggests declaring tab bankruptcy, writing the problem on paper, and rubber-ducking it aloud. He sets goals he can keep, such as not blogging daily so a missed day doesn't sting, and says to know when and how you work best.

2020-11-03 · open the original ↗

• This video advertises Crosstalk's own hosted FreePBX service. The host calls it a "craft" hosting service: Crosstalk says it does not cram systems onto overloaded virtual machines. It also says it will first discuss whether hosting suits a business at all, and tells some customers it does not.
• Cloud hosting suits businesses with phones at several locations. The host says one hosted server lets sites share a phone bill and dial each other by extension. If one site's internet goes down, the others carry on and can take its calls. Each site still keeps its own numbers, 911 service, auto attendant and outbound routes.
• Crosstalk Cloud 50 costs $75 a month; Cloud 100, $120. The phone counts are sizing guides, not caps: Cloud 50 suits up to 50 phones and Cloud 100 suits 50 to 100, and the 51st phone does not stop calls. The host concedes other providers charge less and says the premium pays for support.
• Each server ships hardened, with full admin access and backups. Crosstalk sets up a firewall, a Let's Encrypt certificate for HTTPS and the Sysadmin Pro module, and adds the FreePBX Endpoint Manager on Cloud 100 only. Customers get both the web GUI and SSH. Backups are VM snapshots plus an off-site FTP copy of the configuration only, so voicemails and call recordings are never stored off-site.
• Updates are tested before they reach customers; there is no contract. Crosstalk says it tests new FreePBX module releases on its own servers, under version control, before rolling them out with Linux updates. It claims a 100% uptime guarantee, and rentals are month-to-month. It also advises on SIP trunks, its own Crosstalk SIP among them.

2020-11-02 · open the original ↗

• Cloud projects fail from missing ground rules, not bad code. Hepworth, a cloud consultant at Black Marble, says the projects he is called in to rescue went wrong because the technical solution was disconnected from the business's needs and constraints: a surprise bill that blew the budget, a deployment in Central US when the data must stay in Europe, or a preview service with no SLA. He argues governance can start as a few sentences and grow, like bowling-alley guardrails, and that it runs through operation, disaster recovery and business continuity, not only the start of a project.
• Developers should start governance themselves and draw in the business. He gives technology choice as an example: a team of long-time .NET specialists writing its new cloud app in Go takes on risk it may not be able to debug or deploy. If their organisation has no governance, he urges developers to propose guardrails and ask business owners of compliance, data and budgets to lead, saying this is good for both their careers and the business.
• Published frameworks offer a checklist for a cloud operating model. Hepworth points to the Cloud Adoption Framework, which assesses an organisation's maturity and supplies starter governance documents, and the Well-Architected Framework, which questions an application on backup, DR, resilience, data management and risk. He gives aka.ms/governancedocs as the entry point, "if memory serves", and the host checked that it led to Azure's governance documentation.
• Security should loosen development and lock down production. He recommends separate subscriptions, with a loosely regulated development subscription that alerts rather than blocks, and production that developers cannot touch and only automated tooling deploys to. He also recommends least privilege, just-in-time administration (a manager-approved, audited, time-limited elevation of perhaps a couple of hours), encryption at rest, a ready-made identity provider such as Auth0 or Azure AD rather than one you write yourself, and device management such as Intune.
• Policy tooling lets you show a regulator each rule enforced. Hepworth describes grouping subscriptions under management groups and applying Blueprints, which bundle access rules, ARM-template resources such as Key Vault, and Azure Policies written in JSON, for example blocking deployments outside Central US in production but only alerting in development. The portal then reports compliance across all resources and can remediate some failures; baseline policies, compliance-specific blueprints such as UK OFFICIAL, and samples in the github.com/azure/azure-policy repo (located by the host) give a fast start.

2020-11-02 · open the original ↗

• The Dream Machine simplifies Ubiquiti's confusing pro-level lineup. Hanselman ranks the range consumer to professional: AmpliFi mesh kits for non-technical parents, then UniFi, which needed both a Cloud Key for the controller software and a Security Gateway for routing, a split he calls confusing. The Dream Machine combines router, Wi-Fi and controller. He says he never activated a Ubiquiti affiliate signup and gets no kickbacks, though Amazon affiliate links may appear.
• He moved to a Dream Machine Pro for failover internet. With family video calls, terabytes of video uploads for his Microsoft job and conference keynotes, he needed reliability. The roughly $400 Pro adds a camera hard drive and two WAN ports, carrying Comcast plus a fiber line at $60 a month that takes over if Comcast drops. He says link aggregation is being worked on or in beta, and 4G backup is an option.
• Make exactly one device hand out IP addresses. Plugging a new router behind the ISP's all-in-one box creates double NAT, a network behind a network. He says to put the ISP device in bridge mode, or use DOCSIS to bring your own modem, so the UniFi gear gets the external address and runs DHCP.
• A small wall-mounted rack tidied wiring from 2007. He hung a 12U enclosure high in a closet, cut a gang-plate hole to pull out Ethernet laid when the house was built, sleeved the cables and racked the UDM Pro, switches and couplers, using about 22 ports. He calls the coax he also ran a mistake, and uses PoE switches to power a Raspberry Pi with a PoE hat and G3 Flex cameras.
• Mapping tools make an existing network easier to track. Ubiquiti's iPhone app scans a device's QR code and shows in augmented reality what is plugged into each port. For finding lost wires he recommends a Klein Tools network tester with six remotes, suggested by Stack Overflow's Nick Craver.

2020-10-28 · open the original ↗

• YubiKeys are faster to use than phone authenticator apps. With Yubico Authenticator open on the desktop, the host double-clicks a code, touches the key and pastes from the clipboard, which he estimates cuts 25–50% off each 2FA entry. The video carries a YubiKey affiliate link; he says he bought his YubiKey 5 NFCs in 2018, before joining the programme, and switched after a Yubico engineer walked him through them.
• Hardware keys beat SMS and app codes for businesses. The host calls SMS 2FA insecure and dependent on connectivity. Authenticator apps mean supporting employees' personal phones and migrating codes to new devices, and multi-device tokens (Authy) multiply copies of the "something you have". A key has no battery and needs no network.
• FIDO standards go beyond what one-time passcodes can do. He describes FIDO U2F (password plus a key touch, the usual website case) and FIDO2, made of CTAP (key to device) and WebAuthn (browser to site), while saying he is not an expert. He demonstrates U2F on Dropbox with an optional key PIN, a long OTP string on Vultr, and a security-key login on GitHub.
• Keep a second key, but TOTP backups must be set up manually. A QR code loads only one key, so he copies each site's secret key into both YubiKeys by hand; U2F sites accept several keys natively, often up to about five. He keeps the spare in a safe, puts a Tile tracker on his keychain, and says to always save backup codes.
• One key holds 32 TOTP and 25 FIDO credentials. The host uses fewer than 20 TOTP slots. For Windows sign-in: Yubico Login handles local accounts, Azure AD supports FIDO2 (he advises a PIN rather than passwordless), on-premises Active Directory uses smart-card mode, and Microsoft accounts with a key prompt for it at login.