News

New Complexity MOOC Started   Wednesday 08 January

Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos, the second course to be offered through the  Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Explorer project started on January 6th and enrollment is still open.

Pebble Appstore To Launch This Month   Wednesday 08 January

Pebble has announced a new premium smartwatch and more details of the developer options for working with it.

Software Carpentry's Best Practices   Wednesday 08 January

Software Carpentry's aim is to make scientists better equipped to work with software just as if it was any other lab apparatus. Now we have its take on "Best Practices" and it is a lesson to us all scientist or not. 

In-Car Android Entertainment   Tuesday 07 January

Google is teaming up with a number of car manufacturers to develop cars with Android purpose-built entertainment systems.

Microsoft Launches Siena   Tuesday 07 January

A free app development program that you can use to create Windows 8 apps has been launched by Microsoft.

Mining Social Images   Monday 06 January

Researchers have published analysis of a study of five million images from social media looking at how people view brands.

MathJS A Math Library For JavaScript   Monday 06 January

What a language is good at depends a little on its basic syntax and semantics, but a whole lot more on what libraries are easily available. If you don't think of JavaScript as a math language then perhaps you need to meet Math.js.

Was Python 3 A Mistake?   Monday 06 January

Almost 5,000 Pythonistas have responded to a survey exploring the popularity and use of Python 3.x compared to 2.x.  And so far the results are looking good for 3.x.

Writing Code As Poetry; Poetry As Code   Sunday 05 January

A high-tech poetry competition that explores how computer code can be read as poetic language is now accepting submissions for its Winter 2014 event.

Benedict Cumberbatch As Alan Turing   Saturday 04 January

The Imitation Game, a film based on Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing, with Benedict Cumberbatch taking on the role of Turing, will be released later this year.

Ruby 2.1 With Better Garbage Collection   Friday 03 January

The latest version of Ruby 2.1 has been released with improvements including better performance deriving from major changes to the garbage collector.

Computer Science MOOCs For The New Year   Friday 03 January

The New Year is a time for taking stock and adopting new resolutions and making plans. After covering scores of MOOCs in 2013 what does 2014 have to offer.

Free Sage Math Cloud - Python And Symbolic Math   Friday 03 January

Mathematica and its associated Wolfram language may be making the news headlines at the moment, but Sage is an open source system for doing math that might be more useful now that it has a free cloud option.

The Top Languages Of 2013   Thursday 02 January

Every January it is traditional to compare the state of the languages as indicated by the TIOBE index. So what's up and what's down this year?

The simple answer is not much!

GUI For GNU Octave 3.8   Thursday 02 January

The new release of Octave, the open source numerical computation suite that is compatible with MATLAB, features a preview of the graphical user interface.

Professional Programmer

Is This What It Now Means To Build A Computer?   Wednesday 01 January

When I was young building a computer was taken to mean soldering chips into place and low level debugging. Now it seems to mean putting a prebuilt computer into a box. 

History

Gene Amdahl   Tuesday 07 January

For computer people of a certain age Gene Amdahl is a legend and a hero who made logic design cool and out did IBM in building advanced computers. IBM may have had the 360 and the 370 but Amdahl built the 470 - clearly a case of turn the volume up to 11.