News

Google AI At I/O   Wednesday 09 May

Google Research has the new name Google AI plus a brand new website and at Google I/O it revealed recent advances on multiple fronts, including Google Assistant making a phone call to make a restaurant reservation using Google Duplex. 

JetPack And Android Studio 3.2 - Not Much New  

Wednesday 09 May

Google I/O used to be an exciting meet up where really new and startling things were announced. Now it's past its best and Googler's have to work hard to package the dull into something that looks exciting. So it is with JetPack and Android Studio 3.2 Canary.

Stack Overflow Teams Now Available  
Wednesday 09 May

Stack Overflow for Teams is a private, searchable archive of the questions and answers that are specific to your team secured in a dedicated network. If you start using it by July 1st you can save $10 per user annually. 

The AI In The IDE - IntelliCode In Visual Studio   Tuesday 08 May

Visual Studio is the old man of IDEs, on Windows at least, but this doesn't seem to mean that it isn't still developing. New at Build 2018 is IntelliCode -  IntelliCode not IntelliSense. It is not the first attempt to put AI at the disposal of the programmer, but it might be the most important so far. 

Azure Extends Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge  
Tuesday 08 May

Attendees at the first day of Microsoft's Build 2018 developer conference, heard CEO Satya Nadella announce, " The world is a computer" .  He also made many references to "the intelligent edge". Let's shed some light on these enigmatic remarks. 

Kinect Is Back!   Monday 07 May

It's not a simple return to what things were but it is still good news. Microsoft has announced at Build that it has decided to make Kinect available to developers. 

What Makes Python Special?   Monday 07 May

Python is currently a trending language. It has ranked as the most popular programming language in more than one survey. It is the most widely used language for teaching computer science and is the language that people who don't already use it most want to learn. Now we have a survey from within the Python community that sets out to discover what it is that makes Python so special. 

AI Thinks Outside The Box And Outsmarts Its Creators   Sunday 06 May

AI has a habit of doing things you never expected, but this isn't creativity - it's generally lack of imagination or analysis on our part. It isn't that AI s creative, it is that that we are not as clever as we think we are. 

It's Raining Drones - Display Of 1374 Breaks The Record   Saturday 05 May

Luckily no humans were hurt, but according to Beijing News a few drones were. The South China Morning Post called it an epic fail, but I don't think I'd go that far. It is worth seeing both the official video and the one where it goes horribly wrong. It still took the Guiness World record. 

Facebook Advances in AI At F8   Friday 04 May

Facebook is one of the big technology companies that is making a big investment in AI and at F8 it was ready to share some of its latest progress. The good news is that Facebook is open-sourcing its AI tools on GitHub and there is a new website for accessing them. 

Try Amazon GameOn For Free   Friday 04 May

Amazon has extended the free introductory period for GameOn, its cross-platform, competitive gaming service, built on the AWS cloud infrastructure, that allows developers to create competitions within their games until June 1st. 

Are You Ready For GDPR?   Friday 04 May

GDPR is European legislation that comes into force on May 25th and will affect any business, online or otherwise, that keeps personal data on European citizens. If you don't know how this affects you, Future Learn has some short courses that could help. 

Facebook F8 - We Are The Enemy!   Thursday 03 May

F8 is a strange developer conference and it's the conference and the developers who are strange. The first reason it's strange is that most of its announcements that make the headlines are user-oriented. The second reason it is strange is that developers are the enemy. 

Jupyter Receives ACM Award   Thursday 03 May

The Project Jupyter team has been awarded the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award for developing a tool that has had a lasting influence on computing. It is the largest team ever to receive this award.  

Oculus Go and More AR/VR at F8   Thursday 03 May

At Facebook's F8 Conference, an estimated five thousand attendees  were delighted to learn that they would be taking away an Oculus Go headset, which started shipping on May 1st  with a price tag of $199.  

The Core

Getting started with MIT App Inventor 2   Thursday 03 May

App Inventor is the ideal way to get started with programming, but getting started with App Inventor has some small problems all of its own. In this guide we find out the best way to write and run a simple program. 

Projects

Configuring Hadoop High Availability Clusters   Monday 07 May

The big improvements in Hadoop 2.x were the introduction of the YARN framework for job scheduling and cluster resource management, and high availability for the Hadoop Distributed Filing system. We explore how to configure high availability clusters using two architectures. Extract from  Modern Big Data Processing with Hadoop.