Programmer Puzzles

Taxicab Geometry Problems   Friday 16 August

In the conference season, developers face the perennial problem of getting from one hotel to another to meet colleagues. How good is your ability to write procedures to find shortest distance in a city block setting.  Let's look at how the team at International Storm Door & Software set out the problem of Taxicab Geometry.

News

Windows Phone Updates   Wednesday 21 August

Two weeks after its release, there is an update to the Windows Phone App Studio beta with one of the improvements being that you no longer need to wait for your access code.

Facebook Refuses Bounty, Internet Raises Over $10K   Wednesday 21 August

A campaign to recompense Khalil Shreateh, the security researcher who posted a message on Mark Zuckerberg's personal Facebook page in order to prove the existence of a serious security flaw, exceeded its target of $10,000 within a day. What does this tell us about the bounty system?

BlinkDB Alpha of Approximate Query Engine Released   Wednesday 21 August

The developer alpha of a massively parallel, approximate query engine for running interactive SQL queries on large volumes of data has been released.

Groklaw Shuts Due To Impossibility Of Email Privacy   Tuesday 20 August

In a surprise announcement, that came as a blow to her many followers, Pamela Jones, founder of the legal analysis site broke the news that she has shut Groklaw because there is no way to continue it given the threat of NSA surveillance of email sent to the site.

Lightweight Analytics from SAP   Tuesday 20 August

SAP BusinessObjects is working on a new design framework called LAVA (Lightweight Applied Visual Analytics), a methodology that will change the way data is displayed to move away from traditional dashboards.

Deep Learning Applied To Natural Language   Tuesday 20 August

To promote research on how machine learning can apply to natural language problems, Google Knowledge is  publishing an open source toolkit called Word2Vec that aims to learn the meaning behind words.

Firebase Leaves Beta   Monday 19 August

Firebase is an online service that you can use to build realtime web apps including collaboration tools and multiplayer games without worrying about servers or writing server code.

Microsoft Tag Bows Out   Monday 19 August

After three years in which it hasn't made as much impact as might have been expected, Microsoft has decided to withdraw its mobile barcode service, Microsoft Tag, on August 19, 2015.

Code By Voice Faster Than Keyboard   Sunday 18 August

Is it possible that we have been wasting our time typing programs. Could voice recognition, with a little help from an invented spoken language, be the solution we didn't know we needed?

Turn Any Surface Into A Touch Screen With Kinect   Sunday 18 August

Ubi Interactive has created a system that uses a projector in combination with a Kinect to create a virtual touchscreen that can be displayed on any flat surface. It is now going commercial as a Windows 8 app. 

MSDN - Just Another Marketing Option?   Saturday 17 August

Microsoft has renovated the MSDN site to try and make it a more attractive home for developers. The attempt seem to have been miscalculated with accusations that marketing has its place, but not in a technical site.

WebGL - Trojans, Snakes And Real Time Textures   Saturday 17 August

WebGL is now one of the standard parts of the web app environment and programmers keep doing impressive things with it. This month's Mozilla's DevDerby winners are good examples of what you can do.

Microsoft Open Sources Big Data REEF   Friday 16 August

Microsoft is opening up its big data framework REEF as open source. REEF uses Hadoop’s new YARN resource manager, and can be used to build jobs where you need to maintain state even after the job is ended.

Java - Write Once, Pwn Anywhere   Friday 16 August

How serious is the Java security situation? Probably fine as long as you update to the latest version, but how many do and even if you do are you still safe from old versions? This  infographic might make you more worried about the situation.

Google Blocks Windows Phone YouTube App Again   Friday 16 August

Google seems determined to stop Microsoft from providing a YouTube experience on Windows Phone that is comparable to that on Android and Apple and is using HTML5 as its weapon of choice.

Operator Billing Has An Impact on App Revenue   Thursday 15 August

Bango has gone live for Mozilla's new Firefox Marketplace, which means that yet another player in the mobile app ecosystem  offers operator billing, allowing its customers the choice of charging the cost of digital purchases to their phone bill.

Huffington Post Chooses MongoDB, Scala and Angular JS   Thursday 15 August

The rise of MongoDB continues with the news that the Huffington Post is moving from its current MySQL/PHP stack to use MongoDB, Scala and AngularJS.

Babylon.js - A WebGL Game Engine From Microsoft   Thursday 15 August

Even though Microsoft is very late to the WebGL party, support in IE 11 seems to have released some pent-up enthusiasm for the technology. Babylon.js is an open source 3D engine produced by Microsofties, mostly in their spare time. 

Babbage's Bag

Dates Are Difficult   Wednesday 21 August

Date and times follow their own regularities, and they have nothing at all to do with binary or even simple decimal counting. First, clock and watch makers had to find ways of working with hours, minutes, seconds;  and then programmers had to find ways that were much simpler. Join us on a quick tour of the time and date system and how it can be mastered using the mod function. 

Projects

Reading A BMP File In JavaScript   Monday 19 August

Reading in a graphics file that HTML doesn't support is fairly easy using JavaScript's new typed array feature. In this project we read, decode and display a BMP file.