News

How to Read Wikipedia Through the Blackout   Wednesday 18 January

If you support the anti SOPA movement but still want to read Wikipedia today then it isn't difficult - a single keypress reveals all.

Microsoft's New File System ReFS   Tuesday 17 January

Microsoft releases details of Resilient File System which is being introduced in Windows 8 which promises all sorts of improvements but its most important is the introduction of storage spaces - just add more disks for more storage. Could this be the end of RAID?

Anti SOPA - How To Black Out   Tuesday 17 January

The news that Wikipedia has announced that it will go dark might encourage others to protest in the same way - but be careful how you do it. There is a right way and a wrong way to black out a website.

DataFu for Pig and Hadoop   Tuesday 17 January

User-defined functions for performing data analysis on Hadoop using Apache Pig have been put together in an open source library called DataFu, courtesy of LinkedIn’s engineering group.

SOPA Shelved - But What About Protect IP   Monday 16 January

Congress has put off action on SOPA. Although there is no explanation, I think we can attribute this to  pressure from online petitioners and strike action threatened by Reddit and other prominent websites.

The Perfect Fit - thanks to Kinect-technology   Monday 16 January

A body-mapping product that promises online shoppers the chance to buy clothes that are the perfect fit was demoed at CES. It has been developed by Bodymetrics in partnership with PrimeSense, the company that invented the Kinect.

Web Blackout As SOPA Protest   Monday 16 January

Some high profile web sites will be blacked out for 12 hours on Wednesday January 18 in opposition to SOPA, the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act that is currently being considered by Congress in the United States.

Google Style Guide for Android Apps   Monday 16 January

Android Design is a new website launched by Google to  help developers get a more consistent and portable user interface across devices.

Smartphones, Apps and Advertising   Sunday 15 January

Recent research from Nielsen has come up with some interesting insights about app usage including the fact that only 6% of time spent using Androids is for phone calls. 

Oracle v Google faces further delays   Sunday 15 January

After the Oracle/Google lawsuit was postponed at the end of October 2011 it dropped out of the headlines for a while. There have been recent developments so it's time for a catch-up.

Open Souce Kinect Fusion - Instant Interactive 3D Models   Sunday 15 January

Kinect is an amazing piece of hardware, but without software it is nothing. KinectFusion is the most exciting Kinect application yet. Now with the release of the Point Cloud Library, an open source project, we can all make use of this realtime 3D model builder. Here's a video that explains how it all works.

A Kindle App For Document Files   Saturday 14 January

A new free app makes it easier to read personal documents created on your PC to your Kindle. What possibilities does this open up?

Your Next App Could Run On A Window   Saturday 14 January

No the title is not a typo - it should read window and not Windows. Samsung has a really off-the-wall, or should that be window, idea for bringing computing into new locations.

The Writing Is On The Wall For Silverlight   Saturday 14 January

At the start of the year the Silverlight Blog kicks off with a juicy article on ... ?. You might expect it to be about Silverlight, but in fact it is all about Windows 8 without any mention of Silverlight, except for some bad news.

Raspberry Pi Goes Into Production - Why?   Friday 13 January

The latest news is that the Raspberry Pi low-cost computer has gone into production. This is cause for celebration, yes, but it is also the point, well perhaps it is beyond the point, to ask the question, why?

Ceylon IDE Officially Released   Friday 13 January

The first public version of an IDE for the Ceylon language project has been officially released. The IDE, which, is delivered as an Eclipse plugin for the language, was engineered in less than six months with support from French Java specialist, SERLI.

Taking the Pulse of PHP Developers   Friday 13 January

A survey of PHP developers has identified mobile, social media, cloud and big data as the key areas developers say they’ll be working on in the coming year.

Om Nom Online - New HTML5 Craze?   Thursday 12 January

Microsoft has launched its answer to Angry Birds. Will an IE9/HTML5 version of Cut the Rope, starring the green monster called Om Nom, be enough to propel IE9 to dominance?

Dart Does Physics - Just To Prove It Can!   Thursday 12 January

Google has ported the Box2D physics engine to its new language, Dart.

Is it really proof of life for Dart?

Drive to remove unused code in LibreOffice   Thursday 12 January

Thanks to the efforts of its volunteer taskforce, over half the unused code in LibreOffice has been removed over the past six months. It's good to see this clean-up operation but it does raise questions about the amount of dead code lurking out there in the wild.

Professional Programmer

The One Addition That Would Make HTML5 Great   Friday 13 January

HTML5 is all the rage and yet it could be so much better. There is one single change that could be made that would make it much more useful and the change wouldn't break any existing web pages or applications.

The Core

WinRT JavaScript - Templates & Data Binding   Wednesday 18 January

The Template object is useful in its own right but add it to data binding and you have a easy to use way to present data to the user.  It also happens to be the easiest way to find out about data binding in general.

A Generic SQL Performance Test Harness   Monday 16 January

Do you know how to measure the impact on performance of your SQL changes? Do you know which parts of your stored procedures (or batch of SQL statements) you need to optimise? Both of these questions are answered in this article.