News

Join The Fruit Fly Brain Hackathon   Wednesday 22 February

Sounds like the weirdest hackathon you could imagine. The topic is the fruit fly, that's  Drosophila melanogaster to you, and specifically its brain. And there is no need to turn up with lots of rotting fruit and a scalpel, this really is software hacking.

New Amazon Alexa Skills Contest   Wednesday 22 February

Amazon has launched a new contest, with over $40,000 in prizes,  asking developers to create new skills for Alexa that makes life more enjoyable, organized, and/or convenient. Can this work?

Eyeshot, The CAD Control For .NET   Tuesday 21 February

Eyeshot 10 is the latest release of a development tool for the engineering industry that works with Windows Forms and WPF. It adds Solid3D object booleans to its existing wide range of modeling tools. 

//No Comment - Turmits are Turing-universal, The Whale Swarm Algorithm & Rules That Govern Fish   Tuesday 21 February

• Nontrivial Turmites are Turing-universal

• Whale swarm algorithm for function optimization

• What Is the Rule that Gives Rise to Coordinated Swimming in Fish? 

Apple Dev Conference Moves To San Jose   Monday 20 February

 Apple has moved its Worldwide Developers Conference to San Jose to get more space, having outgrown the Moscone West Conference Center in San Francisco.

Patently Ridiculous - Google Ordered To Pay $20 Million Plus   Monday 20 February

Software patents are usually patents on the obvious wrapped up in as obscure, vague and technical a language as possible. In this case Google has been found guilty of infringing a "sandbox" patent in Chrome. 

Raspberry Pi For Teachers on Future Learn   Monday 20 February

Two 4-week online courses from the Raspberry Pi Foundation have just opened on the Future Learn Platform. Although aimed primarily at teachers, anyone can enroll and the discussion boards are already buzzing.

//No Comment - Kinect & HoloLens, People Tracking & Kinect Calibration   Sunday 19 February

• Scanning physical objects with an Xbox One Kinect to use as Holograms in HoloLens

• Online People Tracking and Identification with RFID and Kinect

• Robust Intrinsic and Extrinsic Calibration of RGB-D Cameras

Find Your 2000-Year-Old Double With Face Recognition   Saturday 18 February

Wouldn't you like to know if you look like Caesar or Venus? It's now possible thanks to advanced face recognition software. Discover how the Quebec Musée de la Civilisation is using the Betaface API to find lookalikes of its collection of classical sculptures.

Microsoft Open Sources Drone Simulator   Friday 17 February

An open source simulator that you can use to crash-test drones and robots has been released by Microsoft. The simulator can be used to test the devices virtually rather than wrecking them in the real world. The kit can also be used on autonomous self-driving vehicles.

Go 1.8 Goes Faster   Friday 17 February

Google's Go is still going and its latest destination is the new 1.8. After more than seven years of existence thing have settled down and the new version is as much about consolidation as anything else.

SQLite 3.17 Adds SHA1 Extension   Thursday 16 February

The latest regular update to SQLite, the widely used embeddable SQL database library that is found in many memory constrained gadgets such as cellphones, PDAs, and MP3 players, has been released with performance improvements and an SHA1 extension.

Apple Previews App Pitching TV Show   Thursday 16 February

Apple has released a trailer of a new reality TV show, Planet of the Apps.  The show has been described as a mix of Shark Tank and The Voice.

TensorFlow Reaches Version 1   Thursday 16 February

Google's computational package aimed at making AI easier, TensorFlow, is a little over a year old. Even so, at the TensorFlow Developer Summit, it has been deemed grown up enough to be called 1.0. It also has some new toys.

The Core

AWS Lambda For The Impatient Part 3   Monday 20 February

We completed Part 2 of our tutorial on AWS Lambda by calling our Lambda function through an authenticated HTTP endpoint, aided by Postman and leveraging IAM security. In this third and final part, we do the same, only this time programmatically, with the aid of Perl and the Paws module.

How Not To Shuffle - The Knuth Fisher-Yates Algorithm   Thursday 16 February

Sometimes simple algorithms are just wrong. In this case shuffling an array looks like a foolproof task, but the obvious doesn't always work and the correct algorithm is just a tiny change away. Find out about why it doesn't work and the correct way to shuffle.