News

Optimize Mining Bitcoin   Wednesday 27 November

The focus of mining Bitcoin ever faster is to use custom hardware, but what about the algorithms? How much effort has been expended on optimizing the proof of work task? It is a tough problem, but it could save a lot of energy and make some money.

Google Glass GDK Available To Explorers   Wednesday 27 November

Google has released the SDK for Google Glass, the wearable computer with the head-mounted display.

Windows RT - On The Way Out?   Wednesday 27 November

Most people would agree that Windows RT hasn't had the impact on the market that Microsoft was aiming for, so is it time that Microsoft killed it off? It's a complicated situation, but does Microsoft really need three major versions of Windows?

Codacy - Automated Code Review   Tuesday 26 November

A service that continuously monitors code for problematic patterns has launched in private beta. A full public launch is planned for January.

Spark In Browser Dart IDE Reaches 0.0.15   Tuesday 26 November

If you are interested in building Chrome apps, a Google team is working on an IDE. Codenamed Spark it is built with Dart and has a Polymer widgets library

SQL Prompt - An Add-In To Aid Productivity   Tuesday 26 November

SQL Prompt recently reached Version 6. An add-in for SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio, it is designed to "strip away the repetition of coding". What exactly does it offer the SQL Developer?

Apple Buys PrimeSense   Monday 25 November

After a few days of rumor it has been confirmed that Apple has bought PrimeSense, the company behind the design of Kinect. Where does this leave Microsoft? Where does this put Apple?

Salesforce $1 Million Hackathon Prize Causes Controversy   Monday 25 November

Salesforce hoped to make the headlines for handing out the "biggest single hackathon prize in history" but instead the winners of the $1 Million dollar cheque are being accused of breaking the rules of the contest. Other developers who participated are also outraged that their entries were not even viewed.

Never Ending Image Learner Sees, Understands, Learns   Monday 25 November

The real progress in AI will only occur when the different areas come together to work on understanding and interacting with the world. NEIL is a program that scans the web 24/7 and looks at photographs to build up common sense knowledge of the world. It's machine vision meets semantic graph.

Micromouse In Slow Mo   Sunday 24 November

The Micromouse competition sounds easy - build a small vehicle to run a maze as fast as possible. It gives the impression that it's all dumb and a matter of "wall-banging" at speed. If you think it's all unsophisticated stuff then take a look at this slow mo video of a mouse navigating the maze.

Atlas Walking Over Randomness   Saturday 23 November

Considering how long we have been trying to solve the problem, a robot walking is mostly amusing. Atlas is an impressive robot, evoking, the deepest fears of sci fi. Watch as one of the DARPA challenge teams makes Atlas walk, unaided, on randomness. 

Node.js Tools for Visual Studio   Friday 22 November

Microsoft has released NTVS, a plug-in for Visual Studio that lets you program Node.js within the Visual Studio IDE.

Buy A Pi For $25 And Get Mathematica Free   Friday 22 November

Following on from Wolfram's announcement of a new language that would change the way that we program, the news that Mathematica and Wolfram Language will be bundled with Raspberry Pi is, on the surface at least, electrifying.

CodinGame Contest For Fun and Employment   Thursday 21 November

CodinGame is running a worldwide online contest tomorrow, Saturday November 23. If you miss this one another will be along in a couple of months and there are "training" games to hone your skills.

ABCs Of Firefox Dev In Easy Videos   Thursday 21 November

Getting involved an a big open source project is well worth doing in terms of satisfaction, education and job prospects, but it's a tough thing to do. Now there is a set of "one video per concept" videos to get you started with Firefox development. 

RocksDB - Facebook's Database Now Open Source   Thursday 21 November

The Facebook Database Engineering Team has open-sourced RocksDB, an embeddable persistent key-value store for fast storage that’s based on Google’s LevelDB.

The Core

SQL Workshop - Subselects And Join   Thursday 21 November

SQL Workshop is where we confront the type of problems SQL devs face on a day to day basis. The example here is based on a real problem encountered in Ingres - but it has been simplified for the purpose of illustration. What do you do when you can't use a subselect within a Join?

History

Computer Languages by Committee - the 1960s   Tuesday 26 November

The 1960 saw the growth of interest in computer languages but, unlike today where successful languages are often designed by single-minded enthusiasts, this was the decade of the committee - language by design and consensus.