News

Last Chance to Win an eBook   Wednesday 30 May

There's still time to enter May's prize draw where O'Reilly has provided 10 copies of "Making Things See" for those who can answer the simple question "What is it about?"

ModKit Micro - Visual Programming for Hardware   Wednesday 30 May

Modkit Micro is a graphical programming environment for microcontrollers which provides a plug 'n play visual programming interface to a wide range of hardware.

Google's F1 - Scalable Alternative to MySQL   Wednesday 30 May

Google has moved its advertising services from MySQL to a new database, created in-house, called F1. The new system combines the best of NoSQL and SQL approaches.

Wolfram SystemModeler   Wednesday 30 May

A large-scale system modeling environment has been released by Wolfram. SystemModeler is intended as a very general environment that handles modeling of a wide range of systems.

Mono Kills Open Source Silverlight   Tuesday 29 May

The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET and developing it, but in an interview Miguel de Icaza has admitted that Moonlight, the Mono version of Silverlight isn't worth the effort any more.

Google's Ongoing Campaign Against Scam Ads   Tuesday 29 May

Google has posted some facts and figures about its progress in preventing bad ads from displaying on its own site and on its AdSense partner sites.

Turing and His Times   Monday 28 May

An event held last month at Bletchley Park as part of the Alan Turing Centenary celebrations, centered largely on the ACE, the computer Turing designed.

Irises Change Over Time - Problem for Biometric Testing   Monday 28 May

Iris scanning may not be as reliable an identification technique as previously assumed, New research has discovered that irises are susceptible to the effects of aging, causing them to change over time.

Kintinuous - Kinect Creates Full 3D Models   Monday 28 May

If you have seen the KinectFusion algorithm in action,  you know it's an exciting and powerful technique - but it just got better. Kintinuous uses a Kinect to build a very big, mesh-based, model simply by pointing the Kinect at the environment.

Internet Defense League - Bat Signal for the Internet   Sunday 27 May

Website owners are being invited to sign up to a project that will enable them to participate in future protest campaigns. The banner logo for the "bat-signal" site is a cat for reasons to be explained.

When Tetris Bricks Go Bad - A Movie   Sunday 27 May

If you can have a movie based on the Battleships game, then why not one on Tetris? This is the premise of the latest viral video trailer.

Patent Wars   Sunday 27 May

An infographic showing who is suing whom and who is selling patents to whom shows that patents are indeed a source of much friction and the only likely winners are the lawyers.

Imagine Cup Worldwide Finalists   Saturday 26 May

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Imagine Cup, Microsoft has announced which student teams will be travelling to Australia for the 2012 finals.

Intelligent Robotic Fish Takes to the Sea   Saturday 26 May

A team of large, yellow robotic fish developed by SHOAL, a pan-European ICT project, to detect and stop pollution at sea, is undergoing trials in Spain.

Mozilla Webmaker Promises Summer of Coding Fun   Friday 25 May

Mozilla wants us move from using the web to making the web. It has launched Webmaker, an online project with new and existing tools from Mozilla and plans a summer of collaborative and community events.

Future of Gamification   Friday 25 May

Gaming techniques to encourage user interaction and loyalty will be of increasing importance in everyday apps, according to a new survey of tech stakeholders and analysts.

Google Now Searches JavaScript   Friday 25 May

Google has been improving the way that its Googlebot searches dynamic web pages for some time - but it seems to be causing some added interest just at the moment.

Oracle v. Google: Jury finds No Patent Infringement   Thursday 24 May

After more than a week of deliberations, the jury in the Oracle v. Google lawsuit presented its verdict yesterday. Its unanimously denied all eight of the patent infringements asserted by Oracle. 

Visual Studio 11 Express Is Metro Only   Thursday 24 May

Microsoft has finally demonstrated its corporate insanity for all to see. The next version of VS Express 11 will only produce Metro and not desktop apps - and it gets worse.

Siri a Security Risk for IBM   Thursday 24 May

IBM includes Siri on the list of apps it disables on its employees iPhones. Public file-transfer services iCloud and Dropbox are also banned.

Professional Programmer

Microsoft's Extinction Event   Friday 25 May

Programmers tend to celebrate the new. There is nothing more exciting than a new language, a new API or even a new operating system but there are costs when the new replaces the old. Windows 8 may be an exciting new "re-imagining" of the Windows OS but the effects on the ecosystem are nothing short of a mass extinction event.

eBooks

Java - Command Line Programs   Wednesday 30 May

Command line programming can be doing things in the simplest possible way. We take a careful look at how data types and code build a program.

History

Alan Turing's ACE   Monday 28 May

Alan Turing is known for the "Turing Machine" but this is a theoretical device used to prove what computers can do. What is less well known is that he designed a real physical computer - the ACE.