News

Coding Contest Outperforms Megablast   Wednesday 13 February

A $6,000 coding contest to solve a "big data" problem in computational biology produced a solution that was 970 times faster than existing solutions.

15 Years of XML   Wednesday 13 February

XML (Extensible Markup Language) was first published as a W3C Recommendation in February 1998 which means that it is now 15 years old. How's it doing?

Opera Moving to WebKit   Wednesday 13 February

Opera has confirmed that it is to drop its own proprietary rendering engine, Presto, and switch to WebKit instead, not only for smartphones but also for its desktop browser.

JQuery Mobile 1.3 For Responsive Web Design   Tuesday 12 February

The jQuery Mobile team has announced the first release candidate for 1.3.0. It features a new panel widget, dual handle range sliders, and two different responsive table modes.

Can You Do The Regular Expression Crossword?   Tuesday 12 February

Programmers often say that regular expressions are fun ... but now they can be a whole lot of fun in a completely new way. Want to try your hand at a regular expression crossword?

Improve Performance with SQL Server Pro Magazine February 2013   Tuesday 12 February

This month’s SQL Server Pro magazine sets out to solve your biggest SQL Server performance problem. Here’s a detailed look at the February 2013 issue.

Web Crypto APIs Work In Progress   Monday 11 February

The Web Cryptography Working Group of the W3C has produced further documents describing Crypto APIs and when they might be useful.

RubyMine 5 Supports RubyMotion   Monday 11 February

The latest release of JetBrains' IDE for Ruby development extends syntax and debugging support and now caters for those creating iOS apps.

Real World Racing Using Satellite Images   Monday 11 February

A multi-player racing game that uses aerial images has been released in open beta. It's fun to play and shows what can be achieved.

Insights Into Mobile App Performance   Sunday 10 February

Once released into the wild, apps have to cope with whatever operating systems throw at them. This infographic starts from the premise that it's a war-zone and looks at what can be done to encourage loyalty.

Raspberry Pi Gets A $25 Camera   Sunday 10 February

Raspberry Pi seems to be developing into a complete system for DIY. Now we have a video camera to add to the list of goodies - and it's only $25.

Jelly Bean Attracting Users   Sunday 10 February

Google's latest figures show that Jelly Bean has increased its share of the Android Platform while Gingerbread's has again decreased. Android 4 is now very close to equaling Gingerbread in terms of users - which is good news.

LibreOffice 4.0 Released   Saturday 09 February

LibreOffice 4.0, a milestone in the evolution of the Document Foundation's open source productivity suite, has been released with improvements that will be welcome by both users and developers. 

Most Popular Languages For Challenges   Saturday 09 February

Which language seems to be the most popular depends on how you measure it. CodeEval has some interesting data on which language employers choose when looking to hire someone.

QUnit Javascript Unit Tester Released   Friday 08 February

A new version of QUnit, the JavaScript unit testing framework, has been released by the jQuery Foundation. QUnit 1.11 adds a runtime display for individual tests. 

48th Mersenne Prime Computed   Friday 08 February

Mersenne primes are easier to work with than general primes but the latest, the 48th known, has more than 17 million decimal digits - big by anyone's standards.

Job Trends Via Twitter Activity   Friday 08 February

How would you go about looking for your next programming job? Jobs Tractor suggests searching Twitter and results for 2012 show that PHP and Java have most vacancies.

MySQL 5.6 Released   Thursday 07 February

Oracle has released the General Availability (GA) version of MySQL 5.6, along with version 5.2.46 of the MySQL Workbench GUI tool. The main changes to MySQL 5.6 are the addition of NoSQL access to the InnoDB database engine and faster sub-queries.

Free Online Computer Science Courses Starting February   Thursday 07 February

Computer science seems ideally suited to online courses. Professors seem to think so as well as those who are eager to learn new skills. Here's a round up of some of the CS  MOOCs starting this month.

Blink If You Don't Want To Miss it   Thursday 07 February

Blink is the latest photography idea in app form from Microsoft Research and it means you need never miss the shot, no matter how much things are changing. It might even be a new form of photography.

DevWeek 2013   Wednesday 06 February

Now in its 16 ^th  year, DevWeek 2013, the independent conference for software developers, DBAs and IT architects, takes place March 4-8 in London.

Professional Programmer

Data Typing Is A Relic   Friday 08 February

Most modern languages that are thought to be "respectable" are examples of the same approach - strongly typed class-based languages. This could be the single biggest mistake in the history of programming.

The Core

jQuery - Easy Plugins   Monday 11 February

There comes a point in every jQuery programmer's life when they look at some JavaScript they have just created and realize that it is time to integrate it with jQuery - in short to create a plugin. It turns out to be easier than you might expect!

Babbage's Bag

Programmer's Introduction to XML   Wednesday 13 February

XML is a general purpose markup language that can be used to control the structure of data. Despite the fact that many prefer the simplicity of JSON it still has many advantages. What makes it so good?