News

Computer Science MOOC Round Up August   Wednesday 31 July

As you might imagine, there are fewer Computer Science MOOCs starting in August as it is high summer for many students. However, there are some relevant restarts and an agile alpha.

No More Bad Hair Days   Wednesday 31 July

If you’ve ever wasted time with image editing software trying to make your hair look more presentable in a digital image, help might be at hand.

HipHop VM - Facebook's PHP Virtual Machine   Tuesday 30 July

Facebook has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it's making available for general use. HipHop VM (HHVM) is open-source and uses just-in-time compilation to combine faster performance while maintaining the flexibility that has made PHP popular. HipHop VM has realized a greater than five times increase in throughput for Facebook compared with Zend PHP 5.2.

HTTP/2.0 Draft   Tuesday 30 July

The latest upgrade on HTTP has been issued by the IETF. What does is offer the eager programmer?

Delayed Beta 4 Of iOS 7 Available   Tuesday 30 July

Now that the Apple Dev Center is up and running again after the security breach that forced it to close down for over a week, Apple has released the latest beta version of iOS 7 to developers, a week later than originally expected.

FSF Fundraising for Free Android OS   Monday 29 July

Replicant is a fully free Android distribution which is currently available on a limited range of devices. Hopefully it may now be able to gather speed as the Free Software Foundation has  launched a fundraising initiative on its behalf.

Chaos Found In Weather Forecast -Same Code, Different Computer, Different Results   Monday 29 July

We all know that the weather is a chaotic system - recall the origin of the phrase "the butterfly effect". Even so, it comes as a shock to learn that you can take the same model code and run it on different machines and get very different answers.

Xamarin Brings Async To Mono   Monday 29 July

Mono 3.2 is a major update to the Xamarin platform and brings C# 5.0 to all its supported platforms, including Android and iOS. The gives mobile developers the async and await keywords that simplify the creation of responsive user experiences.

Use That Spare Android Time To Solve World Problems - BOINC   Sunday 28 July

You almost certainly know about SETI@home which uses otherwise idle CPU cycles to search for "little green men". Now the Android little green robot can join in as well.

RHEX Better Than Walking   Sunday 28 July

While there has been a lot of progress in humanoid robots that walk like us, there is the alternative view that the whole "robots that look like us" is a silly idea. RHex is a hexapod that goes places that two legs would have a lot of difficulty with.

Turing's Curse - Is There Nothing New Under The Sun?   Saturday 27 July

The pace of technological change has never been faster, but perhaps it is not quite as fast as you might think. John Graham-Cumming's talk at OSCON presents evidence that it's all been done before. 

A Robot With A Hypodermic Needle   Saturday 27 July

Would you let a robot take your blood? The answer to this question illuminates our real relationship to machines that aspire to rise above the robot vac. Is there another sort of uncanny valley?

Ubuntu Touch SDK Beta - A New Way To Program Linux   Friday 26 July

Canonical has just announced the beta SDK for Ubuntu Touch. While this might look just like another attempt at getting developers to work with yet another mobile operating system - it is much more. In fact you should be interested in this SDK even if you have no interest in mobile.

AWS SDK for .NET Version 2   Friday 26 July

Amazon has released the developer preview of the next major version of AWS SDK for .NET.

IE 11 Developer Preview For Windows 7   Friday 26 July

Microsoft seems serious about IE11 and to prove it there is now a developer preview for Windows 7. Given how long we had to wait for IE10 on Windows 7, perhaps this is another reason to be optimistic.

Updates to OpenGL and OpenCL   Thursday 25 July

The Khronos Group has announced details of new specifications of both OpenGL and OpenCL.

Home Grown Games Allowed On Every Xbox One   Thursday 25 July

Microsoft has altered course on a number of its decisions for the Xbox One. Now it has announced that you will be able to run your own program on any Xbox One. But the devil is in the detail.

New Flavor of Jelly Bean - Android 4.3 Is Here   Thursday 25 July

Although Android 5 is eagerly awaited, Google has released an update to the current version. While Android 4.3 is only a minor upgrade it caters for Nexus 7 tablets that are expected to ship shortly and adds features that make current Jelly Bean devices more functional.

The Core

Axiom Of Choice - The Programmer's Guide   Monday 29 July

This week's xkcd cartoon is all about the axiom of choice. It sounds complicated or trivial depending on what you read into it. We just think it's a good opportunity to explain a really interesting idea.

Where is Perl Heading? Interview with Jonathan Worthington   Friday 26 July

There a lot going on in the Perl World. Nikos Vaggalis talks to Jonathon Worthington and asks: Why yet another VM?  How does Perl 6 stack up against other modern languages like C#?  Is there any room in the programming world for it, after all?

Babbage's Bag

XOR - The Magic Swap   Wednesday 31 July

We all know that if you want to swap the contents of two variables you need a third temporary variable to do the job - but it can be done with just two with the magic XOR swap.