News

Wolfram Language Cloud Launched   Wednesday 25 June

The next step in the conversion of the Mathematica symbolic math package into a programming language has just been launched - Wolfram Programming Cloud. Try it for free...

Sirius In Eclipse Luna   Wednesday 25 June

Eclipse Luna is released today, June 25, 2014. It has full support for Java 8 and among its new projects includes Sirius which allows architects to easily create their own graphical modeling workbenches using the Eclipse modeling technologies. 

Google's Push To Attract Girls To Programming - Good Or Misguided   Wednesday 25 June

Only one percent of computer science majors are women, and anything that can increase that percentage has got to be a good thing. However, some assumptions in Google’s latest plan to attract more women into technology smack of condescension.

Khronos WebGL Widget Contest   Tuesday 24 June

Khronos has launched a contest to design a animated WebGL widget to be displayed on its home page. The winner will be announced at WebGL BOF at SIGGRAPH and will receive a Mali-based tablet device, courtesy of ARM, which is a member of the Khronos Group.

Visualize.js   Tuesday 24 June

A new JavaScript framework for embedding graphs and reports in apps has been released by Tibco.

Firefox Evolves Into A Full IDE   Monday 23 June

Firefox Nightly has introduced WebIDE. You have to switch it on to use it, but you will want to switch it on if you have any interest in creating web apps.

The Machine In The Ghost   Monday 23 June

OK, the title really should be "the machine in the differential equation" but... A recent paper reveals that the clue to one of the seven most important problems in mathematics and what is more the approach suggests that computers might be hidden within physical phenomena.

Ki - Lisp for JavaScript   Monday 23 June

A new functional language has been released for JavaScript. Ki enables the use of functional idioms and data structures directly in JavaScript.

Microsoft Refuses To Open Source VB6   Sunday 22 June

VB6 was once the most used programming language on the planet and then Microsoft killed it. Now that they no longer have any interest in it one way or another, and with a new commitment to open source, why not let the community have VB6?

Pulleys As Logic Gates   Sunday 22 June

You would be surprised at the different things that can be used to implement logic - crabs, slime mold, water droplets, and now pulleys. Anyone want to build a mechanical computer using pulleys?

Is Agile Justin The Most Capable Robot Yet?   Saturday 21 June

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) built Rollin Justin in 2009 and it evolved into a fast and capable robot. Its latest variant, Agile Justin, has just received an upgrade and it can do even more impressive things. 

Go 1.3 Released   Friday 20 June

A major release of Go, Google's fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language,  is available with better performance and improved tools.

Microsoft's Catapult Fabric Turns Software Into Hardware   Friday 20 June

Microsoft is trying a radical approach to speeding up its Bing servers by using hardware that can be reconfigured to implement the ranking algorithms. It could be the way forward to better performance in a range of situations.

SharePoint Connect Early Bird Discount Offer   Friday 20 June

The best SharePoint Conference in Europe is back this November in Amsterdam, and by booking before the end of June you will qualify for the Super Early Bird discount. Like last year, the event will include an Office 365 track as part of its forty seminars and workshops.

Fire Phone - The First AI Phone   Thursday 19 June

Amazon has, as expected, announced a new Android phone but it isn't the cheap one we predicted. Instead it has AI and software smarts all over it and guess what - there are SDKs for that. 

Apache CouchDB 1.6.0 Released   Thursday 19 June

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Apache CouchDB 1.6 is now available for download.

Unicode 7.0 Released   Thursday 19 June

The Unicode Standard specifies the representation of text in software products and standards. The newly released version adds 2,834 more characters to the existing set of 110,187. Some of these are amusing, others seem so obvious you are surprised to discover they were not already there.

The Core

Android Adventures - Custom Dialogs Using DialogFragment   Thursday 19 June

Dialogs in Android can be confusing because there are two ways of working with them. The modern way is to use the Fragment mechanism but this seems a lot more difficult than simply using the Dialog class. As long as you understand the basics of creating and using Fragments,  it is a lot easier and a lot more powerful to use them to create dialogs.  

Babbage's Bag

The Working Programmer's Guide To Variables - Scope, Lifetime And More   Tuesday 24 June

Many programmers are confused by the range of variations that there are on the humble variable - mainly because the idea is so basic that we just "pick it up" as we go along. This explanation doesn't cover all of the possibilities but enough of them for you to understand the rest.