News

Easy 3D Display With Leap Control   Wednesday 03 April

Now and again you see something that achieves a lot with very little. In this case we have an impressive, almost 3D, display created out of standard parts plus a Leap Motion sensor.

Pluralsight Training for Kids   Wednesday 03 April

Developer training company Pluralsight has released two free courses designed to inspire professional developers to teach programming to their own kids and perhaps even in their local schools.

IE11 To Support WebGL?   Tuesday 02 April

The biggest problem with IE10 as far as modern web apps go is its lack of WebGL support. Now we have strong evidence that IE11 will support WebGL.

Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Alpha   Tuesday 02 April

The new version of the free open source plug-in that turns Visual Studio into a Python IDE support for virtual environments and debugging improvements.

MAKE Offers Prizes for Raspberry Pi Projects   Tuesday 02 April

MAKE has announced its first ever Raspberry Pi Design Contest and submissions, from the United States only,  are invited before April 11th.

April Programmer Fools 2013   Monday 01 April

Yes its that time of year again - it's Google Fools Day - no, I mean April Fools day. A day when the tech industry has the right to publicize what ever stupid idea it cares to invent - so much like any other really. Let's see what this year brings in side-slapping laughs...

Biggest SQL Disasters   Monday 01 April

I doubt if there’ll ever be a film version of ‘When Databases Go Bad’, but the people at Xeround have done a good job of making MySQL failures seem a bit more dramatic than usual.

Microsoft's Patent Tracker Goes Live   Monday 01 April

Microsoft has delivered the facility it promised us a few weeks ago in order to provide a degree of transparency into the patents held by the company and its subsidiaries. Patent Tracker is a list of all its  patents, including those for utility, design, and utility models.

Forget Raspberry Pi - RFduino Is Coming   Sunday 31 March

There is a niche that is hardly catered for in the low-cost microcontroller world - the standalone device that can communicate with, say, an Android parent. Now one is about to hit the market - the Bluetooth enabled RFduino.

The Enigma Of XKCD 1190   Sunday 31 March

Randall Munroe's xkcd cartoon site is a hit with programmers and techie types alike. His latest creation, however, is an enigma, a mystery and a piece of performance art.

Google's 10th Code Jam Starting Soon   Sunday 31 March

Google's Code Jam attracts an elite group of contestants - last year's winner Jakub Pachocki, a computer science student at the University of Warsaw, was placed second in this year's Facebook Hacker Cup. But we all have to start somewhere and last year a record 20,613 people tried to solve at least one problem. So why not see how far you can get!

Mozilla's DevDerby - Multi-touch Web Apps   Saturday 30 March

Mozilla has announced the winners of its February DevDerby which challenged contestants to produce demos for multi-touch interaction using the Touch Events API.

Festo's Dragonfly   Saturday 30 March

Festo has a reputation for building amazing robotics platforms that are based on nature and the latest, a dragonfly, has to be seen to be believed. It is a masterpiece of engineering and a showcase for microprocessor-based control. 

GCC 4.8 migrates to C++   Friday 29 March

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is now fully implemented in C++ following the release of GCC 4.8.0. The new version also adds performance improvements and new tools.

JS1K 2013 Amazing 1K JavaScript Programs   Friday 29 March

If you have never heard of JS1K then you are missing a treat. It is a competition for the best JavaScript program in under 1024 bytes.

Google's Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge   Friday 29 March

Google has announced  a new initiative whereby it promises not to sue developers, distributors, and users of open source software utilizing its patents "unless first attacked".

Firefox Runs JavaScript Games At Native Speed   Thursday 28 March

Mozilla seems to be intent of making Firefox run JavaScript at close to native speeds. The latest news is that OdinMonkey is currently in Firefox Aurora and heading toward the final version of Firefox 22. To show just how good it is, the Unreal 3 game engine was demonstrated at GDC.

PHP 5.5 Beta1 Released   Thursday 28 March

PHP 5.5 has been released in beta with new features including the integration of the Zend Optimizer+, support for non-scalar iterator keys, and an array_column function.

Professional Programmer

Why PyWeek: An Interview with Richard Jones   Friday 29 March

The April 2013 PyWeek Game Programming Challenge opens in a couple of week's time. We asked its organizer, Richard Jones, an active member of the Python community, what inspired this event that is open to both teams and individuals.

The Core

Getting Started With Ruby - A Functional Language   Wednesday 03 April

Ruby has many faces - well just two main ones really, object oriented and functional. Everything in Ruby is an object and every expression returns a value. Functional thinking isn't as easy to acquire when you are trying to learn a new language so let's take a careful look at functional Ruby.

History

John Von Neumann The Great Polymath   Tuesday 02 April

John Von Neumann is perhaps the first computer age polymath. He seemed to be capable of getting involved in just about any subject. Not content with inventing game theory, cellular automata and putting down the foundations of quantum mechanics, he invented the computer architecture we use most often today.