News

MSDN December 2012- Lots Of C#   Wednesday 05 December

What does the December MSDN Magazine hold for us? Could it be anything to do with Microsoft technologies? The good news is that there is a lot of C# code.

Jelly Bean Makes Promising Progress   Wednesday 05 December

Google's latest statistics for the Android platform distribution shows that Jelly Bean is making a stronger start than Ice Cream Sandwich did.

GStreamer Media SDK Now Does Android   Wednesday 05 December

The well known GStreamer open source media framework is now available in an easy to use Android SDK.

Amazon Big Data   Tuesday 04 December

Support for Windows-based software has been added to Amazon AWS Marketplace, along with new software categories including Big Data solutions.

Norad To Track Santa With WebGL - IE Users Left Out   Tuesday 04 December

Every year Norad uses its radar to track the progress of Santa so that children everywhere can know where their presents are. This year the operation goes even more high tech with the use of WebGL to create a 3D location map. The only problem is that IE users can't view the page because IE doesn't support WebGL. So instead of a 3D lollipop, IE users get a blank screen cinder from Santa.

Mozilla Demos Realtime Sharing Features In Firefox   Monday 03 December

Mozilla has produced a video to showcase what happens when you combine its new Social API with WebRTC. The result is realtime video calling and data sharing - all at the click of the mouse or by dragging

Bandwidth Savvy Apps With New W3C API   Monday 03 December

An API that will make it possible to write apps that are clever when it comes to bandwidth has reached the W3C's Working Draft stage.

Grants Awarded To Kivy and NLTK To Boost Python 3   Monday 03 December

 The Python Software Foundation has made grants to help both the Kivy project and the Natural Language Toolkit port to Python 3. As missing libraries is often a reason for not moving to Python 3 this is the sort of action we need to say goodbye to Python 2. 

HEARBO - A Listening Robot   Sunday 02 December

Researchers at the Honda Research Institute in Japan have been working on robot audition - the ability of robots to detect sounds and understand them. Two videos show impressive progress.

The Truth About Spaun - The Brain Simulation   Sunday 02 December

Spaun is a 2.5 million neuron model of the brain that can do useful things - recognize numbers, do arithmetic and write the answers using a simulated arm - but is this the breakthrough it seems to be.

Windows 8 - How Is It Doing?   Saturday 01 December

It's over a month since Windows 8 was launched and there are conflicting reports about how well it is doing in terms of uptake. We try to make sense of the statistics.

RIM Strengthens Developer Commitment   Saturday 01 December

RIM has changed the name of its app store, announced plans for a QWERTY device for developers, and guaranteed a return of $10,000 on apps for BlackBerry 10.

Babbage Difference Engine In Gigapixels   Saturday 01 December

If you know even a little about the history of computing you will know that one of the first calculating engines was Babbage's Difference Engine. Now you can view a reconstruction in Gigapixel glory. Even if you have no interest in the subject matter, it's an eye opening experience of Gigapixel imagery.

Amazon Redshift Big Data   Friday 30 November

Amazon is launching Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud for a starting price of under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Indigo Studio - Free UI Prototying tool   Friday 30 November

Indigo Studio is a new interaction design tool from Infragistics that enables you to explore and create functional, animated UI prototypes. It is free to download and has video tutorials.

Pong At 40 - Still A Player   Friday 30 November

Atari announced the video game Pong on November 29, 1972. It quickly became the craze responsible for success of the Atari and the inexorable rise of the microcomputer. To celebrate its 40th anniversary we have a "classic" version you can play.

Bitcoin Hits 10.5 Million - Mining Payment Halves   Thursday 29 November

Bitcoin, the distributed digital currency has just hit one of its pre-programmed epochs. Now that there are 10.5 million bitcoins in circulation, the production of new bitcoins is halved and this has implications both for inflation and for processing.

Firefox 18 Beta - Introducing IonMonkey   Thursday 29 November

The biggest addition in Firefox 18 is  Mozilla’s new JavaScript JIT compiler called IonMonkey. This promises a  noticeable performance  improvement whenever Firefox is displaying Web apps, games, and other JavaScript-heavy pages.

Nokia's Tips For App Developers   Wednesday 28 November

If you are creating apps for Windows Phone Nokia wants you to succeed. After all, the success of the Nokia Lumia depends on there being winning apps available for it.

Professional Programmer

IE The Browser You Loved To Hate   Friday 30 November

Microsoft has a new, clever, witty and funny campaign designed to convince us that while IE9/10 might not be perfect, it is a lot better than most of us think it is. So is the disapproval of IE simply a misguided bigotry? Or is there a real reason we love to hate it?

The Core

Improve SQL performance – An Intelligent Update Statistics Utility   Wednesday 05 December

Keeping statistics up to date is vital to database performance  important. Stale statistics can result in queries taking much longer to run. Here's a utility that will update the statistics in an intelligent manner.

Babbage's Bag

Public Key Encryption   Monday 03 December

Public key encryption is vital to the commercial Internet. We look at how it works and explain the RSA system in detail.