News

Intel $1 Million RealSense App Challenge   Wednesday 30 July

Registration has opened for a new contest in which devs are challenged to design perceptual computing apps for Intel's RealSense platform. All you have to do at this stage is submit an idea to be in with a chance to receive a developer kit to take it further. 

Tracking.js Computer Vision In The Browser   Wednesday 30 July

The only real problem with tracking.js is that potential users might ignore it, thinking it has something to do with marketing. It doesn't. It is an open source computer vision library in JavaScript and it makes it fairly easy to add sophisticated image processing into your web apps.

Open Source Code Puts Android At Risk   Wednesday 30 July

A flaw in the Apache Harmony project has come back to threaten every version of Android from 2.1 to 4.4. It makes it possible to load apps that claim to be from almost any legitimate authority.

Update: The Next Version Of PHP And The Status Of PHPng   Wednesday 30 July

UPDATED If the current version of PHP is 5.x, what should the next version be called? Obviously it should be 6.x. Why then is there a proposal that it should be 7.x? And as PHPng gets ever faster, is it PHP 5.7, PHP 6.0 PHP 7.0 or even PHP 8.0?

Mozilla Appoints New CEO   Tuesday 29 July

Chris Beard, who has been acting CEO of Mozilla on an interim basis since the departure of Brendan Eich in April, has been appointed to the role on a permanent basis.

GraphLab Create   Tuesday 29 July

Software designed to let data science teams gain insights into big data up to 10,000 times faster than rival products has been announced by GraphLab and is downloadable for free.

The Canvas Fingerprint - How?   Tuesday 29 July

There is currently a lot of fuss going on about an additional method of fingerprinting browsers to track users as they move from one website to another. The technology is very simple but the real question is - how can it work well enough to be useful?

The Display That Does Away With Glasses   Monday 28 July

The light field approach to computational photography has more uses than capturing 2.5D images - it can create a display that you can view clearly without your glasses.

GCC Gets An Award From ACM And A Blast From Linus   Monday 28 July

The venerable GCC compiler got itself into the news by winning an award from the ACM and by attracting a typical Linus Torvalds blast of rhetoric for an "interesting" bug.

Cat Photos - A Potential Security Risk?   Sunday 27 July

A website called I Know Where your Cat Lives uses the latitude and longitude metadata from photos of cats posted websites like Flickr to place the photos on Google maps with remarkable accuracy. Should we find this alarming?

Jibo Over $1 Million On Indiegogo   Saturday 26 July

When we reported on Jibo, the friendly helpful robot, earlier in the week who could have guessed that it would attract more than $1 million in so few days? Is the demand for a robot really so big?

Node.js Tools for VS Updated   Friday 25 July

Microsoft has released the second beta of Node.js Tools for Visual Studio 1.0, making it available for download.

NASA’s Asteroid Tracker Challenge   Friday 25 July

A 14-day Marathon Match with $15,000 in prizes at stake starts today. Join other competitors to devise algorithms to help NASA track asteroids that would cause cataclysmic devastation were they to impact Earth.

TypeScript Goes Light, Moves To GitHub   Thursday 24 July

The TypeScript team has reworked the compiler core of TypeScript to be lighter and faster and has moved the project to GitHub.

UK Government Adopts Open Standards   Thursday 24 July

The UK Government has selected ODF (Open Document Format) as a required standard for sharing and collaborating on documents across all governement bodies. PDF/A and HTML are the selected standards for viewing government documents.

Visual Studio 14 CTP 2 - NO CAPS   Thursday 24 July

It seems almost silly to lead a story about the next version of Visual Studio with the fact that it might have dropped the ALL CAPS menu items, but it is an indication that the team is trying to fix VS and turn it into the IDE we all loved. 

Professional Programmer

Spreadsheets Are Special   Tuesday 29 July

Don't dismiss the spreadsheet. It not only brought programming to the masses but was an early entry into rapid application development, functional programming and an easy and natural approach to parallel programming, reactive programming and cellular automata.

Projects

Accessing Salesforce Data from Angular.js   Friday 25 July

In this tutorial we show you how to sign up for a Salseforce developer account and build a connected app that gets contacts from the user’s Force.com account and shows them using twitter bootstrap.