Programmer Puzzles

Towers Of Hanoi Mutants   Friday 19 October

Towers of Hanoi is a classic puzzle and is often used to illustrate the idea of recursion. Here Melvin Frammis challenges you to attempt to find solutions to some variations - but first he explains the original version.

News

New Entrants to Robot Hall of Fame   Wednesday 24 October

Nao, Big Dog, PackBot and Wall are the latest robots to be inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame.

Flossie - A Working Computer from the 1960s   Wednesday 24 October

British computer conservationists have restored a 50-year old mainframe to working condition. In now needs a new home to complete a  project to recover its software.

Firefox Gets A Social API - Why?   Wednesday 24 October

The latest beta of Firefox has a new facility that might puzzle many. The social API allows developers to integrate social networks into the browser. The real question is why is this part of the remit of a browser at all?

Patent Office Invalidates Apple's Rubber-banding Patent   Tuesday 23 October

The patent office has seen fit to agree that Apple "rubber-banding" patent is silly, using the technical term "invalid". This is good news, but the bad news is that a prior patent is part of the reason.

W3C Publishes Push API Draft Specification   Tuesday 23 October

The Web Applications Working Group (W3C) has published the first public working draft of a Push API.

Mono 3.0 Brings C# Up-To-Date   Tuesday 23 October

Mono 3.0 has been released with a complete C# 5.0 compiler with asynchronous programming support, improved garbage collection and the incorporation of Microsoft's open-source framework for Web development.

Google Supersonic Released As Open Source   Monday 22 October

Google has open sourced Supersonic, a query engine library that is described as extremely useful for creating a column-oriented database back-end.

New Udacity Classes On Games, Graphics, Parallel & Chips   Monday 22 October

Udacity has details of four courses that are now open for enrollment and will start in early 2013, plus titles of three others that will follow at a later date. They also signal a slight shift in emphasis.

SharePoint Connections Amsterdam 2012   Monday 22 October

The European SharePoint Connections conference will take place less than a week after the launch of SharePoint 2013.

New Powerful Arduino Due   Sunday 21 October

After six years in the making, the Arduino Due is finally becoming available and, with a price tag of $49, is bound to give a boost to the platform.

A New Chromebook - Is This The Tipping Point?   Sunday 21 October

Samsung's new Chromebook is cheap, fast and very usable. It might be all that the majority of users need, and it could be the real cause of the end of the current era of computing.

Meet NimbRo-OP, Teen Size Open Source Robot   Sunday 21 October

An open-source robot, size compatible with the RoboCup Humanoid League's Teen Size class, has been launched by the University of Bonn.

Campaign for Recognition of Polish Enigma Codebreakers   Saturday 20 October

Poland's parliament has launched a campaign to restore justice to the Polish men and women who first broke the Enigma codes, but who have tended to be overlooked with the limelight going to the Bletchley Park codebreakers.

Van Gogh Meets Turing   Saturday 20 October

Don't yawn! Art and computers make a great team and there is a lot to be interested in if you are in computing and not art. Put simply - it's a lot of fun.

Life Programmed In Life   Friday 19 October

Every programmer likes a good self reference, a recursion, a bootstrap - but this one is mind-boggling. We have an implementation of Conway's game of life in Conway's game of life. Or put more simply Life in Life.

New APIs for Location Intelligence   Friday 19 October

Google has released two API for developers to use in third party geolocation apps. You can use the APIs to make your apps location aware, even if the app doesn’t have access to GPS information.

Mozilla Opens Firefox Marketplace - A Little   Friday 19 October

Mozilla has opened a beta of its HTML5 app Marketplace, but only for the Aurora Android version of Firefox.

Google's Disavow Link Tool   Friday 19 October

A new tool that allows website owners to "disavow" low quality links that might be reducing their PageRank has been added to Webmaster Tools. It comes with the warning "only to be used with caution".

Chrome Native Debugger For Visual Studio   Thursday 18 October

NaCl is one of the many things that makes Chrome stand out amongst browsers. Now Google has released a debugger addin for Visual Studio in an effort to make it even easier to create native applications.

Hidden Benefits of Online Machine Learning   Thursday 18 October

Three recent prize winners of Kaggle competitions have taken the Coursera class in Machine Learning and this seems to be more than a coincidence.

WOWZAPP 2012 Students Code for Windows 8   Thursday 18 October

Microsoft is organizing a worldwide push to create Windows Store apps with a Worldwide Hackathon for "students and other developers" to be held at over 30 locations over the weekend of November 9-11.

The Core

Dangerous Logic - De Morgan & Programming   Wednesday 24 October

Programmers are master logicians - well they sometimes are. Most of the time they are as useless at it as the average joe. The difference is that the average joe can avoid logic and hence the mistakes. How good are you at logical expressions and why exactly is De Morgan your best friend, logically speaking?

Creating Web Apps - The Camera API   Sunday 21 October

If we are going to make web apps as powerful as native apps we are going to have to explore some of the less well known areas of HTML5. In this article the main topic is how to take a photo, but we also learn a lot about the file API.