Programmer Puzzles

The Best Sub-Array Problem   Friday 31 August

At first glance this puzzle seems trivial, all you have to do is find a sub-array, in an array of numbers,  that sums to the largest value. It sounds almost too easy to need a solution, let alone an algorithm. But try it and see if you can write a fast and beautiful solution. It is harder than you think.

News

CORFU - Flash Fault Tolerant Distributed Storage   Wednesday 05 September

Researchers at Microsoft are working on a NAND flash based data storage system that is both strongly consistent and high performance, and that can be used in designs that are impractical on hard disk or too expensive on RAM.

Imagine Cup 2013 - With Bigger Prizes   Wednesday 05 September

Microsoft has announced the competitions for next year's student competition. The prize money has increased and Microsoft is going to fly every finalist team to St Petersburg, Russia for the Worldwide Finals.

Cloud Numerics   Wednesday 05 September

There’s a new version of Microsoft’s Cloud Numerics lab that you can use to deploy and run data analysis C# applications on large data sets on Windows Azure.

Kinect@Home Builds A 3D World   Tuesday 04 September

If you have a Kinect you can join in a new project to map the entire world in 3D - well at least a as much of it as possible. Kinect@Home is a community effort to input 3D models to a server. 

SharePoint 2013 Preview SDK Available   Tuesday 04 September

The SharePoint 2013 preview software development kit (SDK) includes documentation and code samples.

Open webOS Back From The Dead With Beta 1   Monday 03 September

Only a short time ago HP dumped webOS into the convenient arms of the open source community. Now, as Beta 1 rolls out, it seems to want to revive its interest - but why?

MongoDB 2.2 Released   Monday 03 September

An Aggregation Framework, Data Center Awareness functionality and improvements to concurrency are the major features in the latest release of MongoDB.

Find Prior Art Added to Google Patent Search   Monday 03 September

Google has extended its Patent Search facility to include European patents and has added a Prior Art facility. With the patent war over Android going on one has to wonder whether this was to meet an in-house need.

Windows 7 Overtakes Windows XP   Sunday 02 September

Microsoft has been doing its best to get users of Windows XP to update to Windows 7. Now, just weeks away from the launch of Windows 8, Windows 7 has finally overtaken XP, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.

Robot Termites Build a Castle   Sunday 02 September

Next time you see a craftsman building a wall brick-by-brick, remember that his days are numbered. No not by the Terminator, but by TERMES, a project to create a swarm of builder robots.

Atari Arcade Games Reimagined With CreateJS   Sunday 02 September

Part of Atari's 40th anniversary celebrations, Atari Arcade breathes new life into classic titles with new graphics and sound. For developers the important thing to note is the use of CreateJS, a suite of JavaScript libraries and tools.

Google Places API Developer Challenge   Saturday 01 September

We missed the original news about the Google Places API Developer Challenge, and presumably so did many others. There is still plenty of time to enter to win a VIP trip to Google I/O 2013.

55 New Features In Java 7 (video)   Saturday 01 September

If you want a quick and easy way to find out what exactly is new in Java 7, take a look at this short series of videos.

The Sound Of Coding   Saturday 01 September

There are sites that help you get to sleep, or just feel warm and safe, by playing rainstorm sounds. What about getting in the mood for some coding by listening to others do it?

Firefox 16 Goes Back To The Command Line   Friday 31 August

Even before the bits have dried on Firefox 15, Mozilla want to talk about Firefox 16. One of its big "innovations" is a command line for debugging but this isn't your father's command line - it's all new and reinvented.

Pascal IDE Lazarus 1.0 Released   Friday 31 August

Lazarus, the free cross-platform Delphi-like IDE for the Free Pascal Compiler, has reached Version 1.0 after more than ten years of development.

Frankenstein - Stitching Code Bodies Together To Hide Malware   Friday 31 August

A recent research technique manages to hide malware by stitching together bits of program that are already installed in the system to create the functionality required. It makes malware more difficult to detect by creating a Frankenstein version.

Amazon Appstore Opens in Europe   Thursday 30 August

On the same day that Amazon announced that stocks of the Kindle Fire had run out, it also, finally, launched its Appstore in UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Website Designers Take Note - Users Love Simple and Familiar   Thursday 30 August

It takes less than 50 milliseconds for users to make a snap judgement about whether they like the look of a website. First impressions count and the message is - keep it simple and don't be afraid of looking like other sites.

Amazon RDS For Oracle Update   Thursday 30 August

New features have been added to Amazon RDS for Oracle and you can now use a free web application development tool to create apps for Oracle database.

Apple Patents Disable The Starship Enterprise   Thursday 30 August

Many people are of the opinion that the Apple patents that downed the Samsung Android phones are plainly silly, but there is nothing like satire to bring the point home. What if, in the future, Apple still held the same patents and pressed its legal rights - where would Star Trek and the Enterprise be then?  Watch the video and cringe.

The Core

JavaScript Web Workers   Wednesday 05 September

A sure sign that you are writing a web app, rather than just a web page, is when your JavaScript brings the whole show to a stop. The problem is that, unless you make use of additional threads, JavaScript can only do one thing at a time. We look at Web Workers - the safe and easy way to create multi-threaded JavaScript.

History

The Story Of The Apple Macintosh   Monday 03 September

If you think of Apple, you probably think of the iPhone or iPad and perhaps even the MacBook Air, but the name Mac was once much more important to Apple. The Mac was a groundbreaking computer that introduced the world to the GUI and many things we now take for granted.