News

VS 11 Grey Goop - Few Happy Without Color   Wednesday 04 April

The latest version of Visual Studio (11) is getting the thumbs down from beta testers who don't like its lack of color and not very much about its overall UI either.

Oracle v Google No Pre-Trial Settlement   Wednesday 04 April

The  last-ditch attempt at a settlement in the Google/Oracle lawsuit ended in failure. The triai is expected to start on April 16th.

Metro Firefox Makes Rapid Progress   Wednesday 04 April

Mozilla's project to get a WinRT/Metro version of Firefox is making very quick progress. A blog post states that they have a prototype running after only a few weeks work.

HTML5 Canvas 5 Gets New Features   Tuesday 03 April

The 2D work horse of the web canvas is on its way to version 5 with some interesting new features. What is surprising is how sophisticated the features are  - suggesting that the Canvas element is now fairly mature.

MSDN Magazine April 2012 - C++AMP, Kinect and Bacteria   Tuesday 03 April

This month's MSDN Magazine is more cutting edge than usual with some parallel programming, Kinect, AI, bacterial algorithms, code generation and some Microsoft technologies.

iOS Tops Popularity Poll for Developers   Tuesday 03 April

At the start of 2012, iOS is still the platform most mobile developers are interested in while enthusiasm for Android has declined. And the majority of mobile developers expect to incorporate HTM5 in their apps.

Ready to Go - Go Reaches Version 1   Monday 02 April

Google has released Go 1, the programming language that’s been described as "Python meets C++".
It promises stability and easy installation.

Joomla Magazine April 2012   Monday 02 April

On the news pages of this issue of the Joomla! Community Magazine there's a milestone to celebrate - Joomla! downloads hit the thirty million mark in March. What else is in this issue?

Chrome 18 Now With 2D GPU Graphics   Monday 02 April

There is no doubt that, with most browsers on a rapid update cycle, there isn't much to say about each release, but Chrome 18 has just rolled out and with it yet more improvements in graphics.

Face Recognition Adds Age Estimation   Sunday 01 April

Face recognition is being increasingly used for all sorts of things, but now you can add age estimation into the mix. Just by analysing a photo of your face, the software can estimate your age and place an upper and lower bound on the possible range.

Project Sentry Gun   Sunday 01 April

After our news item on using Python to shoot water at squirrels, a number of readers wrote to tell us about Project Sentry Gun which has been working on the same problem for some time.

Self-Driving Cars For Stock Car Racing?   Sunday 01 April

We have come to expect that Google will come up with some impressive April Fools jokes to outwit the unwary. This year the one that would have convinced me on any other day is Google Racing

WebGL 3D Graphs on Google   Saturday 31 March

WebGL 3D graphics is becoming a critical requirement for anything impressive on the web, but now Google seem to be pushing it into situations where it can do real work.

Ruby Creator Wins Free Software Award   Saturday 31 March

The 2011 Award for the Advancement of Free Software was presented to Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language, at a ceremony held during the LibrePlanet 2012 conference.

Opera Mobile and Mini for Android   Friday 30 March

Opera Software has released two new versions of its mobile browser for Android, Mini and Mobile.

Oracle v Google - No Offer of Settlement   Friday 30 March

Oracle and Google have managed to agree on a few things in advance of the the trial that is due to start on April 16th. But while Google is willing to accept the damages figures calculated by the court-appointed expert, Oracle refuses to.

Asynchronous Cake Cuttting - a Fair Algorithm   Friday 30 March

The problem to be solved sounds trivial - cut up a cake so that each person thinks they get a fair share. You have to also throw in the observation that people cheat and are greedy to see that their might be a problem. Now we have an algorithm that works even when the cake is being shared over the internet.

Using Google Store Locator   Thursday 29 March

With the recently introduced Store Locator utility library, developers working with the Google Maps API can now add store locators to their apps.

Using a Flight Sim To Test Ocean Debris Tracking   Thursday 29 March

Suppose you want to develop a drone that can roam the seas and spot debris so that ships can be directed to it and pick it up. It's a good idea but how do you test your methods?

Kinect for Windows 1.5 Announced   Thursday 29 March

Version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows SDK will be available at the end of May, together with Kinect Studio, an app that lets developers record, play back and debug recordings of users engaging with their apps.

The Core

Improve SQL Performance – Know Your Statistics   Monday 02 April

Data statistics can have a huge impact on both whether an index is used, and also how it is used. In this article we examine these statistics, in particular identifying if they are up to date, since stale statistics can result in queries taking much longer to run.

eBooks

Kinect SDK 1 - The Full Skeleton   Wednesday 04 April So far we've covered the visual and depth inputs and started to look at skeletonization. In this part we get down to the bare bones of the skeleton and actually draw the whole thing.

Babbage's Bag

Recursion   Friday 30 March

Recursion is often said to separate real programmers from the pack. What is it that makes it so powerful? What is it that makes it so difficult? What is the "shape" of recursion?