GCP console issues with Firefox

While doing the timed qwiklabs google cloud platform assessments on coursera, I found that google cloud shell was taking a lot of time to come up on Firefox. In fact, perhaps it was not coming up at all. Initially I tried the workaround of using the google cloud sdk locally and running gcloud commands from a terminal. Later, found that the cloud shell opens fine when Chrome is used instead of Firefox. So, this adds to the list of google products which don't work properly on Firefox. Can anyone else see some parallels to the bad old days of browser wars with Microsoft?

Chrome and Google Meet issues on Windows

In a previous post, I wrote that Google Meet worked for me on Chrome and not on Firefox. Now, I work on Linux (Mint 18.3) and most of the world works on Windows. Apparently Google Meet had issues with Chrome, video not appearing, even screen sharing not working, on a Windows machine. Nz let me know the solution, which was based on this thread,  https://support.google.com/meet/thread/41815190?hl=en

That thread has so many descriptions of so many different things which can go wrong! Privacy settings, antivirus, etc etc. If you expand and view the entire thread with nearly 300 messages, it makes interesting reading for people who want to mock Windows.

 

So, enable-media-foundation-video-capture must be Disabled, otherwise all sorts of weird video issues with Google Meet. This seems to be a windows-only issue.

add javascript to Blogger

There are many methods proposed at 
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6449733/how-can-i-add-javascript-inside-blogger

The CDATA method above seemed to work for me, from HTML view. 

And preventdefault for stopping the scroll to the top of the page - used 

return false; 

instead, working for me on Chrome also.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13003044/href-going-to-top-of-page-prevent

shifting a website out of google sites and into github pages

Google sites recently announced a shift to "New Sites" with a mandatory upgrade for "Old Sites". Since New Sites had some disadvantages like inability to choose our own font size for particular lines of text (as we would like to do for important announcements, making them large), I looked around for options - whether to move to Blogger or New Sites or do something else. New Sites also had the disadvantage of breaking our photo gallery page when using the migration tool. Blogger would break existing page urls. So, since there was only static content, thought about hosting it on github pages. 

The move was relatively straightforward, though I took a long time since I did a drag-and-drop commit after each change instead of using the commandline. The changes I needed to make were:

1. removed all scripts
2. jpg and css links made relative, uploaded to suitable directories
3. created a template with the above, to which the changes needed for each page were:
   
   1. the title and other header info (at 4 places near each other)
      
   2. the div with id sites-chrome-sidebar-left
   3. the div with id  sites-canvas-main-content
   4. the h3 tags with page heading 

After setting the CNAME records on the domains DNS servers, even 4 days later, the "Enforce HTTPS" was not available, with the message "Not yet available for your site because the certificate has not finished being issued." One of the suggested workarounds was to remove and re-add the custom domain. I did that, and immediately Enforce HTTPS was enabled.

Coursera - a good resource

This post on ClassCentral has a good run-down on some 1400+ completely free Coursera courses. I've been doing some Coursera courses lately, and found some of them very nicely done. Courses I'm taking or have taken are:

Fundamentals of Graphic design

Create your first web app with Python and Flask

Visual elements of User Interface design

Google IT automation with Python

In general, you can speed up some of the courses with the available video speed changer, while for some of the courses, you can learn better by pausing the video, doing some of the exercises and then resuming. 

free cloud hosting how-tos

A link dump for resources on how to host small low-traffic websites for free on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure - the link names are self explanatory.

https://redstapler.co/cost-of-hosting-wordpress-website-on-google-cloud/

https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/free-web-app-hosting-on-azure/

https://build5nines.com/free-website-hosting-in-microsoft-azure/

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoAzureWebsitesMakeSense.aspx

Google's cloud shell and other (free) resources for teaching and learning

Excerpts from an email I sent to a colleague - 

Currently, I have not applied for any Google Cloud grant for the institution, because

1. Google's Cloud credit grants for education are granted on a per professor and per student basis, not on an Institution basis. More info on how to apply is given at

https://edu.google.com/programs/faqs/?modal_active=none#teaching-and-learning-credits

2. Google's Cloud shell (free) may not allow for allows for c programming etc, but there are many  other  c, c++ , python and other language free online compilers/interpreters for teaching and learning -

https://www.google.com/search?q=online+c%2B%2B+compiler

https://www.google.com/search?q=online+c+compiler

issue with imagemagick convert

I had an issue with converting to pdf with convert - error message, convert not authorized. Found that it was due to a Ghostscript vulnerability. 

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1081895/trouble-with-batch-conversion-of-png-to-pdf-using-convert

So I temporarily used the renaming method,
sudo mv /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xmlout

And later I commented out the Ghostscript policy restrictions in the policy.xml.

moving a user from one tenant to another on Microsoft 365

Googling, found that there are different scenarios for tenant* to tenant migration on Microsoft 365 -

• with the help of Microsoft tech support for model driven apps in dynamics 365,
• For Microsoft Teams, by manually by downloading and uploading all assets, manually recreating all users, an involved process
  
• or with the help of third party tools like Sharegate to automate the above manual process. Other 3rd party tools are mentioned in this thread. One of the solutions offers $50 per team pricing.

*Tenant means (loosely speaking) subscription account. "A tenant is a representation of an organization."

moving a domain from one Microsoft 365 tenant to another

As the title says - to move a domain from one Microsoft 365 tenant to another, since I did not have any data to be backed up, I just deleted all the users, then deleted the domain, and recreated the domain in the other tenant. In order to delete the domain in the admin centre at admin.microsoft.com I had to first create an admin user myusername@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com , log in as that user, and then delete the other existing admin user adminuser@mydomain.tld. Only then is the domain deletion permitted.