Programmer Puzzles

Overriding Problems A C# Puzzle Saturday 25 February

Objects are indispensable but exactly how a language implements them and makes them available to the programmer matters. Sometimes the class-based approach complete with inheritance makes things complicated. So much so that it is easy to misunderstand and make mistakes.

News

Google Summer of Code 2012 Seeks Smaller Organizations Wednesday 29 February

Mentoring organization applications are now being accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code and Google is looking for newer, smaller open source organizations to get involved

Raspberry Pi Stampede Wednesday 29 February

Raspberry Pi, the low cost ARM bare-board computer has gone on sale and sold out in less than two hours. The demand was so great that it caused the web sites of its retail partners, Farnell and RS Components, to crash.

Kotlin Goes Open Source Wednesday 29 February

Kotlin, the alternative to Java developed by JetBrains, is now open sourced under the Apache 2 License.

Google Offers $1 million for Chrome Hack Tuesday 28 February

Due to the change in rules for this year's Pwn2Own competition, Google is offering its own prizes for a Chrome Hack in its Pwnium contest. $1 million says you can't hack Chrome.

Mozilla's Boot To Gecko Has a Chance to Change Mobile Landscape Tuesday 28 February

Mozilla has found the two partners it needs to change the mobile landscape. Boot to Gecko is now more than an interesting idea, its a challenger to Android and iOS.

AI Does Chemistry Tuesday 28 February

The AI approach to chemistry might have you thinking of robots doing experiments, but in this case the machine learning predicts the properties of molecules from their basic construction.

Turing Year: The Legacy Explored Monday 27 February

Even though the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth isn't until June, Nature has already published its Turing Special. The first presentation of this year's IET/BCS Turing Lecture has also already taken place and can be viewed online.

Adobe Maps Out Future for Flash Monday 27 February

Adobe isn't giving up on Flash and as well as giving a schedule for forthcoming releases, has unveiled plans to make it a platform suitable for developers for the next five to ten years.

Mozilla HTML5 App Marketplace Monday 27 February

Mozilla Marketplace, a new store for applications designed to run across any HTML5-enabled device or platform, is about to open for developer submissions.

Interactive Fluid Simulation in WebGL Sunday 26 February

If you need an example that proves that the web without WebGL would be a much duller place, look no further. This is a mesmerising and addictive interactive fluid simulation that you can waste hours playing with.

FlightGear 2.6 Sunday 26 February

Another major update has been made to FlightGear, the free and open source flight simulator that can be regarded as a game or as a research tool.

Natural Language as a Code Sunday 26 February

This week's selected xkcd cartoon should be a real shocker in this day and age. Is it being suggested that a natural language, Navajo, and one that is spoken by a fairly large group of people, can be used as a code? What's happened to Google or Bing translate?

Physics Is NP Hard Saturday 25 February

A paper accepted for Physical Review Letters is currently being credited with the claim that "Physics is NP hard". However, it all depends on what you mean by "Physics".

Oracle's Case Further Undermined As Gosling Patent Topples Saturday 25 February

Oracle suffered another blow regarding its lawsuit against Google this week when the US Patent Office made a preliminary rejection of yet another of the patents on which it is basing its case.

Android Enters the Digital Classroom Saturday 25 February

A month after Apple announced its plans for entering the digital textbook market, Samsung has unveiled its Learning Hub service which provides an Android alternative. The battle between print books and eBooks intensifies.

Visual Studio 11 Beta - Are We Ready Friday 24 February

As well as the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5 will be released on February 29th.

New Identity for Google Developers Friday 24 February

Google Developers isn't new - but it has a new identity - a new look, a new logo, a new blog, and a video to introduce it all.

Intel Supports LibreOffice Friday 24 February

Intel has become a Member of the LibreOffice Advisory Board and a version of the open source office suite is now available from the Intel AppUp Center.

Domain Specific Modeling Extension for Visual Studio Thursday 23 February

Domain-Specific Modeling company, MetaCase, has released a free Visual Studio extension for integrating models and code with MetaEdit+, together with source code and documentation.

Turing's Biological Pattern Theory Proved Thursday 23 February

In Alan Turing's Centenary Year, a team of researchers from King's College London is investigating one of his less-well known hypotheses and have demonstrated his theory of morphogenesis which has implications for future stem cell research.

Bing Translation Learns Hmong Language Thursday 23 February

Microsoft has added Hmong to the list of languages supported by Bing Translator. This was achieved using new features of Microsoft Translator to train a new translation engine using parallel documents.

Professional Programmer

Windows 8 at DevWeek 2012 Tuesday 28 February

With Windows 8 Consumer Preview about to be available we ask "Is Windows 8 really the big new thing?" and look forward to the DevWeek 2012 Conference which opens on March 27th.

History

Herman Hollerith and the punch card Wednesday 29 February

In the field of business computing one man can be credited with inventing automatic data processing, but these days his name is hardly known. You might even call Herman Hollerith, the forgotten giant of computing. He was born in Buffalo, New York on February 29th, 1860.