News

Google Has Software To Make Cameras Worse   Wednesday 23 April

Google has an algorithm that can take a photo with a large depth of field and create something that looks as if has been taken with a wide aperture on a professional camera. Exactly how this is done is an amazing application of advanced image processing using a 3D model.

Scala 2.11 Released   Wednesday 23 April

The latest release of Scala focuses on stability, makes Scala faster and smaller as well as continuing to refine experimental language features.

Telerik Kendo Goes Open Source   Tuesday 22 April

Telerik has released an open source version of Kendo UI. The release consists of an open source package of UI and JavaScript tools that also includes Telerik Kendo UI Mobile.

Climate Data From the Cloud   Tuesday 22 April

FetchClimate,  a new Azure service developed by Microsoft Research, makes finding a displaying data from thousands of available datasets as easy as search for a hotel or a visitor attraction.

QEMU 2.0.0 Released   Tuesday 22 April

Version 2.0.0 of the open source machine emulator and virtualizer QEMU has been released introducing support for the KVM emulator on ARM systems..

Google's Deep Learning AI Knows Where You Live And Can Crack CAPTCHA   Monday 21 April

A while back we reported on Google's attempts at creating machine vision that was good enough to read house numbers photographed in Street View. Performance has now got a whole lot better since the team switched to a deep convolutional neural network. 

Open Source Better Than Proprietary Code   Monday 21 April

On the basis of scanning million of lines of code Coverity has discovered that in 2013, the defect density in open source code was lower than that in proprietary code. This may be less than reassuring given the ongoing Heartbleed threat.

Survey Reveals American Public Suspicious Of Tech   Sunday 20 April

The American public is split down the middle over whether they would be prepared to ride in a driverless car and whether computers will match humans when it comes to creating works of art.

LiquidFun Is Fun!   Saturday 19 April

Forget simple 2D physics. Why not add some fluid excitement to your game? LiquidFun is an easy to use physics simulator that includes fluid and soft body simulation. 

Drones On Demand   Friday 18 April

Now this really is an interesting iOS app. Gofor is a new company that is promoting the idea of drones on demand. You want to take the ultimate selfie? Scout ahead to see if the road is clear or just find a parking space? You need an on-demand drone and a mobile app. 

F12 Changes With Windows 8.1 Update   Friday 18 April

The F12 developer tools in Internet Explorer, have been updated by Microsoft to accompany the new releases in IE11.

Red Hat Project Atomic Is A Docker Host   Thursday 17 April

Distributing your complex app is getting some assistance from Red Hat in the form of a cut-down operating system that acts as a docker host. 

Azure Intelligent Systems Service   Thursday 17 April

Microsoft is adding a new cloud service to Azure for managing machine-generated data from sensors and devices.

Mozilla Wants To Recommend The Best Tools   Thursday 17 April

Mozilla is putting together a core set of tools and recommendations that it considers the most useful for making Web apps and is asking for input from the developer community.

Windows 8.1 No Longer Supported - UPDATE   Thursday 17 April

Microsoft has announced that the Windows 8.1 Update 1 that was released on April 8th is being treated as a "new servicing/support baseline". What does this mean?

Babbage's Bag

Advanced Hashing   Tuesday 22 April

Hashing is arguably one of the great ideas of computing and it has hidden depths. Extensible hashing and perfect hashing are ideas that are worth exploring.

Projects

Getting Started With Azure Linux VMs   Thursday 17 April

If you are a Visual Studio user there are lots of advantages to making use of Azure as your Virtual Machine host. In this article the general ideas of using Azure and how to work with Linux VMs is described.