Professional Programmer

Why the Trope of Anita Sarkeesian Matters   Saturday 14 July

The Core

Lambda Calculus For Programmers   Wednesday 18 July

You may have heard of "the lambda calculus" - it's the reason lambda expressions are so called. You may know that it is something to do with computability, and so any explanation of how it works should be "for programmers". However, lambda calculus is close to logic and pure maths and it can be difficult to see what it is actually all about in practical terms. So there is a need for a plain-spoken guide suitable for programmers.

History

The UK 1970s Big Board Computers   Tuesday 17 July

When it comes to the early days of the personal computer revolution, what happened in the UK was very different from what happened in the US. So don't imagine that the well- publicized stories of what happened around Silicon Valley tell you what happened in Britain.

Oh no, it was much more interesting than that!

News

Stackato 2.0 Adds .NET Support   Wednesday 18 July

Support for .NET has been added to the ActiveState Stackato cloud platform in both its free and commercial versions.

Google Introduces Developer Expert Program   Wednesday 18 July

Google has introduced a new scheme that recognizes and rewards outstanding developers.So far there are 26 members of this elite group - and all of them are men, which seems more than a bit biased.

New Beta of dtSearch   Tuesday 17 July

Version 7.70 of the dtSearch product line is now in beta testing.  The new version adds improvements to document filters including extending hit highlighting to images as well as text in Office documents and emails.

Aldebaran Robotics Is Recruiting And The Video Is Amazing   Tuesday 17 July

OK, so it's just a clip show, but the new Aldebaran recruiting video is a promo for the world of robotics - and not a terminator or an industrial robot in sight.

Microsoft Translator Hub   Monday 16 July

Microsoft has announced the availability of its Translator Hub, an innovative tool developed by Microsoft Research to harness machine learning and unleash its potential for customizing language translation.

Simulation Reveals Best Strategy For Congested Traffic   Monday 16 July

We all know the problem - stick with a slow moving lane or change to the other lane, which usually then slows down even more than the original lane. Now we have a definitive solution via a Monte Carlo Simulation.

aspConf - Free Virtual ASP.NET Conference   Monday 16 July

If you’re interested in ASP.NET, there’s a virtual conference running  July 17 and 18 that you can watch online for free.

Cartoon - Digital Rights or Wrongs?   Sunday 15 July

Digtal Rights Management might seem to be attractive. After all, it stops people stealing your work. But there is a downside and we need to weight the pros and cons.

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Crawl Alerts   Sunday 15 July

A new Crawl Error alerts features has been introduced by Google Webmaster Tools. This means the website owners will now be informed of Site Errors for major site-wide problems.

SwordFight From Microsoft Research   Sunday 15 July

What will Microsoft Research think of next? After giving us the Kinect it has now invented a way to allow us to play sword fighting with nothing more than standard mobile phones. Don't be fooled there is still a lot of technology at work.

GamesCircle for Kindle Fire   Saturday 14 July

Amazon has introduced new games features for the Kindle Fire, along with APIs that will let developers integrate features such as achievements, leaderboards and sync to their games.

Blink(1) - A USB Status Light   Saturday 14 July

This product is either total genius or quite insane. Which it is depends on your point of view.  It is a tiny USB enclosure that houses a USB chip and a full color LED.  You plug it into a USB port and it can be controlled by software to respond to various conditions.

SQLite For WinRT   Friday 13 July

The new version of SQLite has added support for WinRT and Metro style applications for Windows 8, and Windows 8 Mobile will also support the lightweight database.

Companies That Use Spreadsheets Survive   Friday 13 July

The use of spreadsheets and decision analysis software has been shown to be a factor in long term corporate survival. 

New Visual Studio Achievement - For Early Adopters   Friday 13 July

Would you upgrade for a badge and a higher position on a leaderboard? It's an idea that Microsoft is currently testing. The latest addition to its Visual Studio Achievements program  asks you to Run VS2012 RC on Windows8 RP.

Chrome Now Has WebRTC   Thursday 12 July

The new beta of Google's Chrome browser has early support for WebRTC,  an API that promises to deliver a better experience for web conferencing and online video chat services by letting the browser directly access a PC's camera and microphone.

Voracious Bug in MySQL   Thursday 12 July

Oracle to correct a bug where MySQL uses all the available disk space when changing a record.

Google Doodle Turing Machine Now Open Source   Thursday 12 July

Following on from the release of the Moog Synthesizer Doodle code, Google has now released the JavaScript of its Turing Machine puzzle.