August 25th is taken to be the official birthday of the Linux. What's so special about 28? Well we managed to miss 21 and 25 so we are making sure we mark it this time around,

Open source is wonderful - except when it isn't. The latest mini-disaster, let's not get carried away, is that the creator and maintainer of wiringPi has given up, frustrated with the way people, aka users, treat his code and him.

Every day for over 10 years I Programmer has had new material written by programmers, for programmers. Each week our digest gives a handy summary of the latest content, which this week includes an exploration of DoEvents and Microtasks in JavaScript and the start of an extended look at Modern Java With NetBeans And Swing.

Freelance developers at the forefront of today's technology are in demand. The global freelancing platform, Upwork, just has published hourly rates for the most lucrative jobs for independent contractors and it's official - freelancers can rake in impressive sums.

There's a major update to Ruby on Rails that adds an action mailbox, action text, ability to use multiple databases, and parallel testing. The new version also supports Webpacker by default and Zeitwerk.

I'm past the phase of being excited at each new Android Studio release. This one is supposed to be much improved - but is it enough?

Researchers have broken Bluetooth's encryption key negotiation protocol using an attack they've called KNOB - Key Negotiation Of Bluetooth. The vulnerability affects almost all devices that support Bluetooth, but Google has already announced patches for Android devices.

CROKAGE, which stands for Crowd Knowledge Answer Generator, is a fledgling tool that finds answers from Stack Overflow Q & A threads that have both relevant code and succinct explanations.

The latest version of Git, the distributed version control system, has been released with around 500 changes, including two new sub-commands that are designed to provide an experimental alternative to git checkout. The git switch and git restore sub-commands are designed to make it clear whether the intention is to change files or to change branches.

Open source projects are increasingly important. But when you don't sell your software you generally don't have an advertising budget so how can you let your potential users, and potential contributors, know about it? 

A security audit of Kubernetes has been made available in an open source format. The project  reviewed the security of Kubernetes, and produced a threat model alongside the security review.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an offline implementation of Scratch 3.0 than runs under Raspbian Buster and performs best on the 2GB Raspberry Pi 4. 

Perhaps the "for $10" part is hype as that is just the cost of the webcam used in the tracking system, but it is low cost. Using acoustic meta-materials a team has managed to focus a beam of sound that can be delivered to a single person.

The idea of analysis by synthesis has been around for a long time, but it is only now being applied to computer vision. Could this be the missing component that makes AI able to see like we do?

If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, our weekly digest summarizes the articles, book reviews,and news written each day by programmers, for programmers. This week, for fun, we also have a coding puzzle.

There's a problem for applications based on Visual Basic for all Windows machines that have installed the cumulative updates for August. The issue, raised by Microsoft, says that apps may stop responding if they use VB6, VBA, or VB Scripting Edition.

Yes, Apache is worth $20 billion by its own valuation of the software it offers for free. But what price can you realistically put on open source code?

PyTorch 1.2 has been released with a new TorchScript API offering fuller coverage of Python. The new release also has expanded ONNX export support and a standard nn.Transformer module.