News

Google Code-In 2014 Announced   Wednesday 08 October

Now in its 5th year Google Code-In is an opportunity for pre-university students aged between 13 and 17 to have an experience of real world coding and making a contribution to an open source project.

Fear And Loathing In the App Store 8 - Apple Takes Down Innovative App   Wednesday 08 October

Programming into the unknown - it is what keeps us all going. The idea that with nothing but some code we can do something that hasn't been done before. In the old days what you did was between you and your intellect. Now there is a third party getting in the way - the gods of the app stores. 

Turing's Bombe Tops Poll   Wednesday 08 October

The Bombe has been voted the favorite recipient of the UK's Engineering Heritage Awards narrowly beating Concorde which came second.

Bing Ads SDK For .NET Beta   Tuesday 07 October

Microsoft has released a new library for users of the Bing Ads platform

Lennart Poettering - Open Source Not A Nice Place   Tuesday 07 October

In a blog post Lennart Poettering, the main force behind the controversial systemd Linux configuration system, explains that any dislike of his software spills over to him personally - and not just hate mail, but hit men. It is a shocking document.

Eve Set To Make Programming Easy?   Tuesday 07 October

Chris Granger is the man responsible for Light Table and what you think about his next project is probably conditioned by what you thought about his previous efforts.

Eric The Python IDE   Monday 06 October

Decimal point updates have recently been released of eric5 and eric4. The latest versions are 5.4.7 and 4.5.25 respectively.

$10K Contest To Solve A Problem Worth Millions   Monday 06 October

VistaPrint is offering $10,000 for algorithms that help it solve its packing problems. Is this a fair challenge or just downright exploitative?

DukeScript - Java Everywhere Again?   Monday 06 October

DukeScript is a Duke's Choice winner at JavaOne 2014 and it is another take on the Java dream of write once run anywhere. In this case the target is mobile and web apps. 

Cirque du Soleil Puts The Spark Into Drones   Sunday 05 October

With a little help from ETH Zurich and its quadcopter flying algorithms. 

Arduino 3D Printing And CNC Machines   Saturday 04 October

October 3rd was National Manufacturing Day in the USA. What has this to do with software? Everything.

Latest On C# 6 And VB 12   Friday 03 October

The latest news from the Microsoft compiler team is that, because the performance and quality of Roslyn is more important, it is time to cut new features from the .NET languages.

Chrome Continues To Gain Ground   Friday 03 October

With the turn of the month the latest statistics from Net Market Share show that Chrome usage increased during September both on mobile devices and on the desktop.

Google APIs Adopt Promises   Friday 03 October

Promises seem to be the way that every JavaScript framework is heading. The latest to embrace the Promise is Google's JavaScript Client Library.

MySQL Extras Released   Thursday 02 October

Oracle has released a number of additional MySQL releases and early access features. The new releases include MySQL Fabric 1.5, MySQL Workbench 6.2, and a plugin that lets HTTP clients and JavaScript users connect to MySQL using HTTP.

Google Increases Maximum Bounty For Chrome Bugs   Thursday 02 October

Google has upped the top payout for its Chrome Reward program to $15,000 and is applying the increased rates to submissions made since July 2014.

Intel IoT Dev Kit   Thursday 02 October

Intel is serious about the whole IoT area including hobbyists and small startups. It is not only providing the hardware you need, but the surrounding software and services. The new Intel IoT Dev Kit is well worth looking at. 

Professional Programmer

A Comment To The Future Me   Thursday 02 October

Comments - the simplest of all programming statements and yet at the same time the most difficult of all. Why is it we all find it so hard to write useful comments? Comments are hard.

Babbage's Bag

Introduction To The Genetic Algorithm   Tuesday 07 October

Genetic algorithms pop up all over computer science and applied computing. They are simple, easy to apply and easy to understand. What mystery remains is why they work at all? How can somthing seemingly so random home in on a one in a million plus solution?