News

Candy Crush Is Harder Than It Sounds - NP Hard   Wednesday 12 March

Candy Crush is a phenomenon, if only for the amount of time the world has wasted on it. It seems to be a simple game but judging by the the number of downloads it has a quality that makes it addictive. Now we know why - it's NP-hard.

NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge   Wednesday 12 March

NASA, in partnership with Planetary Resources, is offering $35,000 in prizes for develop algorithms to identify Near-Earth Objects, aka asteroids, in images from ground-based telescopes.

Google Docs and Sheets Add-On Stores   Wednesday 12 March

Two new Google stores will give developers the ability to sell add-ons for Google’s word processor and spreadsheet programs.

Java SE 8 Imminent   Tuesday 11 March

Java SE 8 will see its General Availability release next Monday, March 18. Although Project Jigsaw won’t make the cut, the release is notable for adding support for lambda expressions and virtual extension methods.

SQL Server Best Practices   Tuesday 11 March

Enhance your SQL Server performance by following the SQL Server Storage Best Practices advice in this month’s SQL Server Pro.

Orion 5.0 Available   Tuesday 11 March

Continuing on its four-monthly release train, the Eclipse team has  released Orion 5.0 with a new look and feel and a new navigation bar.

Student Applications Open for Google Summer Of Code 2014   Monday 10 March

Google Summer Of Code 2014 is its tenth consecutive year of matching up students who want real world coding experience with open source organizations who can make use of their enthusiasm. To mark this milestone 10% more students will be accepted into the program this year.

Nodyn - Node.js On The JVM   Monday 10 March

JavaScript continues its relentless advance on other hapless languages. Now we have Node.js running under the JVM which more or less universal - well as universal as Java. 

Painting in Millions of Colors   Sunday 09 March

A recent contest challenged devs to come up with a program to create an image that contains all the RGB colors exactly once. It produced some stunning results and the winner, by popular vote, was Jozsef Fejes with his Rainbow Smoke image.

Women In Computing   Saturday 08 March

Today is International Woman's Day. Google has a doodle to celebrate it and the Anita Borg Institute has an infographic about  notable women in computing.

Hadoop Adds In-Memory Caching   Friday 07 March

Apache Hadoop 2.3.0 has been released with support for in-memory caching and heterogeneous storage hierarchy for HDFS.

Office 365 SDK for Android   Friday 07 March

It's getting ever easier to bring Microsoft and Android together. Now we have news of the Office 365 SDK for Android, an open source project that helps Android developers access Office 365 data from their apps.

Mozilla Wants To Take A Byte Out Of JPEGs   Friday 07 March

JPEG is well known, well used and well understood. Surely there cannot be anything left to squeeze out of this old compression algorithm? Mozilla seems to think that we can get more if we are careful.

DirectX Not Dead - Version 12 At GDC   Thursday 06 March

The good news is that despite the rumors that there would be no next version of DirectX, and despite Microsoft not being quick to reassure people of the future of DirectX, it seems that version 12 will be outlined at GDC later in the month.

Does John Conway Hate Life?   Thursday 06 March

Conway's game of Life is huge among programmers and mathematicians alike. It has generated a community of "Lifers" dedicated to constructing whole worlds in Life and investigating it as if it was a universe of its own. And yet, in this new video, John Conway, its inventor admits to hating it....

VS Online Free Test Period Extended   Thursday 06 March

Microsoft has extended the early adoption period during which Visual Studio Online developers can make use of the service for free.

The Core

Dynamic C#   Tuesday 11 March

What exactly is C#'s dynamic type all about? Is it dynamic or is it just static typing under cover? And how does it change things like early binding, virtual and non-virtual?

The Monty Hall Problem   Thursday 06 March

The Monty Hall problem is an exercise in probability theory that even experts get wrong. It seems to be subtle and even paradoxical, but when you notice exactly what is going on it becomes obvious. Read this article and I guarantee you will understand the the Monty Hall problem and recognise when it occurs in other settings.