News

Google I/O Sold Out Within 30 Minutes   Wednesday 28 March

It took less than 30 minutes for tickets to this year's Google I/O to sell out, beating last year's record of less than an hour.

ASP.NET MVC Open Source Development   Wednesday 28 March

Microsoft has announced that it is releasing the source code for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages  under an open source license. What doe this mean for .NET developers?

LibreOffice Work In Progress Towards Collaboration   Wednesday 28 March

In a nice example of open source collaborative effort, a gang of four developers has been paving the way for this summer's student interns to add collaborative editing to LibreOffice.

Oracle v Google - A Final Demand for Settlement   Tuesday 27 March

With the date for a full jury trial fast approaching, Oracle and Google have been ordered to have one last go at settling their differences out-of-court.

Cartoon - Why Compile Time == Play Time?   Tuesday 27 March

This week's selected xkcd cartoon has raised an unexpected issue. Why exactly is it that programmers were, and are, allowed to treat compile an other non-productive times as play time? Why aren't they expected to get on with something useful?

Q.bo and the Xtion Pro Live 3D sensor   Tuesday 27 March

The Q.bo robot has been experimenting with using the Xtion Pro to provide it with 3D vision.

Lego Lab Robots   Monday 26 March

Lego is a great toy and Mindstorms is a great robotics/embedded control education tool. As well as educating it also can be used as a very effective prototyping system - but do you feel a little ashamed when you end up using the prototype for real?

Amazon Route 53 Adds Latency Based Routing   Monday 26 March

Amazon has added Latency Based Routing to its Amazon Route 53, its distributed web service that provides DNS lookup.

Notepad++ 6 Released   Monday 26 March

Today sees a major new version of Notepad++, the free text editor and source code editor for Windows. Version 6 has three new plus points for developers - but this adds to a long list of welcome features.

Developer Preferences for Reading eBooks   Sunday 25 March

A survey from O'Reilly about ebook reading habits reveals facts that might come as a surprise if you thought that the future of ebooks is completely determined by the rise of the dedicated eReader.

Open Source Kinect Skeleton Tracking   Sunday 25 March

If you have been frustrated with the lack of an open source skeleton tracking system for the Kinect your wait is over.

CodePlex Adds Git Support   Saturday 24 March

Git is the established favorite for distributed version control. But Microsoft adding Git support to CodePlex is still something of a surprise.

What Users Want From Photo Apps   Saturday 24 March

When you want to enter the market with an app that's going to compete with existing, established products, it's a good idea to know what features users value. This infographic has some interesting insights.

Mono Lives On   Friday 23 March

A beta version of Mono 2.11 has been released after a year of development. It features complete support for async programming in C# 5.0 and better Mac support.

Did Chrome Overtake IE?   Friday 23 March

According to StatCounter, Google's Chrome browser overtook Microsoft's IE last weekend. Microsoft was quick to point out the flaws in the methodology that invalidated this result. But has StatCounter revealed an interesting pattern?

Szemerédi Awarded Abel Prize   Friday 23 March

This year's Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, has gone to Endre Szemerédi, a pure mathematician who has provided a number of results that have been important in computer science.

Militarizing Your Backyard with Python and AI   Thursday 22 March

Shooting squirrels with a water cannon might not seem to be a serious project, but it involves AI and a lot of hardware. 

Android Emulator Faster, More Capable   Thursday 22 March

The Android SDK has been updated to revision 17. It includes two interesting experimental features: support for multi-touch input and x86 is now supported natively in the emulator on Windows and OS X.

PHP and Git Deployment for AWS Elastic Beanstalk   Thursday 22 March

Amazon’s AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports a PHP runtime and Git deployment letting users manage both  Java and PHP applications with load balancing and managing server instances.

The Core

The Python Dictionary   Wednesday 28 March

Python is quite well provided with data structures but arguably the most sophisticated is the dictionary. In this article we take a beginner's look at what makes it special.

Executable Code Injection in Linux   Monday 26 March

While code injection to patch existing software is often frowned upon, it is sometimes unavoidable. What you might not realize is that code injection is perfectly possible and often easier than you would imagine. Find out exactly how easy it is in Linux.

eBooks

Kinect SDK 1 - Skeletons   Friday 23 March

The ability to extract and track the positions of the human body is a remarkable feature of the Kinect, but how do you use it? It seems more complicated than the more basic video and depth outputs. Fortunately, once you understand the structure of the data returned, it isn't much more involved. We look at the simplest possible example.