30 January 2020

Event Monitoring

Open:
  • DiffEngine
  • Edgi
  • Huginn
  • Klaxon
  • Lighthouse
  • Newsdiffs
  • Nytdiff
  • Pagelyzer
  • Siteseer
  • Beehive
  • Memorious

Premium:
  • ChangeDetect
  • ChangeDetection
  • ChangeTower
  • Diffbot
  • Distill
  • Fluxguard
  • Followthatpage
  • OnWebChange
  • PageFreezer
  • TheWebWatcher
  • TimeMachine
  • Tackly
  • Versionista
  • Visualping
  • Wachete
  • WatchThatPage

26 January 2020

Azure Sucks

Office politics, blame games, misrepresented costing, and misguidance are the result of why organizations still continue to use Azure. Microsoft has never been great with networking or anything that relates to internet services. The below highlights the many reasons why one should stay well clear of Azure.
  • Cluttered, unclear and inconsistent documentation
  • Active Directory use is everywhere so a nightmare to manage with resource groups
  • Tight coupling is literally in every aspect from implementation demos to service integration
  • Riddled with bugs across the service stack
  • Sometimes even Azure Consultants get the horrible blue screen while doing their demo on their shiny Windows machine
  • Nothing ever works properly, lots of unnecessary time wastage interfacing with their UI
  • Even the UI for their services violates basic human factors of interaction design
  • Metrics are totally useless, unresponsive, and meaningless
  • Support is useless, one could be spending time being re-routed and re-routed
  • Lack of consistency across services so the entire platform has bad integration and lacks coherence
  • Constant pestering from sales reps to convert to their enterprise plan without applying any said discounts
  • Platform uses ancient desktop methods which don't quite work in the Cloud
  • For every hosted service they provide, one can find an even better open source solution
  • All their implementation demos have a bias towards Windows, C# and Powershell use cases
  • Their AI and Bing services are utterly horrendous, even Azure Consultants think Bing sucks 
  • In fact, one has a slower time to market while being less productive and efficient
  • All their services have a Microsoft bias over Linux use cases
  • Usage costs on services and breakdowns is rarely very clear and transparent
  • Microsoft has a way of overly complicating simple things by creating UI experiences that don't work towards usability and responsiveness
  • Often people find moving away from Azure to AWS a pleasant experience
  • Azure is like an evil maze controlled by a circus clown
  • Too many services with little quality assurance that rarely work properly
  • Almost every service experience seems like a half-hearted effort
  • Increase in support costs as a result of an unstable and unreliable platform
  • For many cases 'this only works on Windows' continues to apply on Azure
  • Most of Azure's Quick Start Guides take longer to understand, will be easier to Google for even better guides outside of Microsoft realm, which not only will be quick but also clear
  • Almost every implementation demo seems to focus on Visual Studio, what about other IDEs like Intellij, and others.
  • Sometimes services may not shutdown when Azure says it has done it
  • Deployments and Builds are not simple but deceptively cryptic
  • Lots and lots of hidden fees and the costs pile up
  • Missing documentations that will make one pull out their hairs in frustration
  • Things break, aimlessly, and constantly like the entire platform is running in beta mode
  • Many of the Azure Services are box standard Microsoft desktop software that has been re-purposed and re-mapped for the Cloud

22 January 2020

SemEval

SemEval

Hire a Robot

In the world of work, job specs are changing face. When you see job spec requirements that say:

 "linear execution and lateral problem solving skills"

You know you need a robot not a human.

Do most people even know what linear vs lateral thinking is?  In fact, there is even a third type of thinking called diagonal. Keep job descriptions to the point, honest, simple to read, and simple to understand. And, no need to embellish on the role - candidates have a way of finding out the truth.

2 January 2020

Google Cloud Is It Really GDPR Compliant

Google has notoriously been a consumer and a provider of data through its proprietary search technology. In fact, they have even violated EU laws on many occasions and are still under scrutiny for outstanding cases. Also, they have even been under scrutiny for violations of privacy laws with patient health records at the DeepMind-NHS collaboration. Why then should we assume that Google Cloud is GDPR compliant when they cannot keep their own storage and processing of data in check? Who is to say that anything that Google Cloud Customers store and process would not necessarily get leaked into other parts of Google Services like Search. Just to make a 'right to be forgotten' request or to request an update to an outdated data on Google can take an eternity in some cases. In fact, image search is one such service that has outdated cached index of links of images which don't even exist for many people at the source anymore. But, who is to say that maintaining outdated image links is not really an issue but a feature to assist in their third-party initiatives in building computer vision datasets and models. One has to be weary of cloud providers who claim to be GDPR compliant while violating such mandates across their own systems of accurately storing and processing data within the bounds of consent.

Hoply

Hoply