Programmer Puzzles

Merkles and Social Engineering   Thursday 26 September

Joe Celko has come up with a math puzzle based on one of the current political hot topics - but let the team from International Storm Door & Software explain the problem of faced by planners who want to introduce policies to reduce segregation and discrimination.

News

RyuJIT - The Next Gen JIT .NET Compiler   Wednesday 02 October

There isn't much news about .NET proper these days, so let's celebrate that fact that there is a new JIT compiler to try out.

Fun Kaggle Challenge To Tell Dogs From Cats   Wednesday 02 October

Dogs vs Cats is recently launched Kaggle contest that is both practically and theoretically interesting - and while it has a serious side it's also a chance to show that machine learning can be fun. Can you devise an algorithm to automatically distinguish dogs from cats?

Oracle Cloud Expands   Wednesday 02 October

Oracle has announced ten new cloud services including Database as a Service, Java as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service.

Android Overtakes iOS In Tablet Market   Tuesday 01 October

During the second quarter of 2013 sales of Android-powered tablets surpassed iOS-based ones in volume for the first time and in terms of revenue there was a 50-50 split between Apple and Android.

PhysicsJS - Physics In Pure JavaScript   Tuesday 01 October

PhysicsJS may only be in alpha, but it's already very impressive. You need to see it in action and when you do you will probably end up writing some app or other. It's not just fun - it's easy fun.

October MOOC RoundUp   Monday 30 September

If you want to find a Computer Science, or perhaps a non-CS, course to join during October there's a huge range of new, updated and ongoing ones to choose from. How do you make a choice?

Help Reform Education In A Virtual Hackathon   Monday 30 September

A 48-hour hackathon will take place next week in which teams are being asked to build creative solutions to improve education. Three winners will share $5000 in cash prizes.

Browser Swarm - An Easy Way To Test JavaScript   Monday 30 September

Microsoft has got together with appendTo and Sauce Labs to create BrowserSwarm, an open source, cloud-based automatic testing tool for JavaScript.

Your Smartphone Spies On What You Type   Sunday 29 September

All you have to do is place your phone next to your keyboard to provide a direct channel for anyone to read what you are typing - and it's all down to the vibration of the keys.

Flight Gear 2.12 Released   Saturday 28 September

You can now take to the skies in the latest release of the free, open source flight simulator, Flight Gear. Highlights of version 2.12 include a cockpit tooltip system for new users, an improved air-to-air refueling system and continued development of the Canvas rendering toolkit.

More Support For Firefox OS   Friday 27 September

China-based ZTE has revealed plans for second-generation Firefox OS phones to be available in the US in the first half of 2014. Mozilla meanwhile has posted more videos to help and encourage developers to produce apps for its HTML5-based platform.

Hummingbird - A New Google Search Algorithm   Friday 27 September

Along with the celebrations for Google's 15th year of providing users with the information they are looking for, it was announced that its search algorithm had been updated. The new algorithm is called Hummingbird to signify its precision and speed. 

Oracle VMs On Azure   Friday 27 September

Preview versions of virtual machine (VM) images running Oracle Database, Java Development Kit and WebLogic Server are now available on Windows Azure.

Ceylon 1.0 and Ceylon IDE 1.0 Released in Beta   Thursday 26 September

Ceylon is a language designed for writing large programs in teams. Ceylon 1.0 beta, codenamed Virtual Boy, a reference you will understand if you're familiar with its elephant logo, has been released this week.

GPU For Java   Thursday 26 September

GPU acceleration is coming to Java, according to speakers at the annual JavaOne conference.

New jQuery Betas Released   Thursday 26 September

While jQuery has seen a lot of internal changes in the two newly released beta versions, jQuery 1.11 and 2.1 there are no changes to the APIs, so developers should not face any disruption in taking advantage of  improved performance and fixed bugs.

Babbage's Bag

Magic of Merging   Tuesday 01 October

The merge sort is an under appreciated algorithm - yet it is neat, clever and it still has its uses. With the rise of big data, parallel methods and online processing you can even argue that it is growing in importance. Let's take a look at how it works and when you should use it.