News

Superlinear Productivity In Open Source Projects   Wednesday 18 June

You know the old joke. If it takes one programmer one day to produce some code how long does it take two programmers to produce the same code? The answer is usually two days but depending on how cynical you are it could be two weeks or two months. Now we have evidence that in reality it is better than you might think.

Firefox 31 For Android   Wednesday 18 June

Firefox 30 for Android launched last week with faster load times on 3G connections and accelerated performance thanks to smoothing page panning and CSS3 animations and two major features for developers. Firefox 31 for Android is now in beta.

Facebook Apollo NoSQL Database   Wednesday 18 June

Facebook's latest project is a NoSQL database called Apollo that provides online low latency hierarchical storage.

Udacity Offers Nanodegrees   Tuesday 17 June

Udacity has announced a new credential designed to appeal to employers and those wanting to embark on a high-tech career. The program will launch with nanodegrees for entry-level Front-End Web Developers, Back-End Web Developers, and Mobile iOS Developers.

Machine Learning Goes Azure - Azure ML Announced   Tuesday 17 June

Machine learning as a service isn't new, but when Microsoft offers it as part of Azure you have to take notice. 

Google Open Sources PDF Software Library   Tuesday 17 June

The PDF code in Google Chrome has been made open source and available for use in apps for viewing, printing and form filling PDF files.

IE Developer Channel   Monday 16 June

Microsoft has made public a version of Internet Explorer that shows what features are being developed for future versions.

Firefox 31 Beta Full Of New Developer Features   Monday 16 June

Firefox 31 is now in Mozilla's beta channel and introduces some helpful  features and tools for developing Web content, apps and add-ons. Here we look at what's new for Windows, Mac and Linux in Firefox 31.

Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge On Kaggle   Monday 16 June

A Kaggle contest sponsored by the ATLAS Experiment at CERN is underway to explore the potential of advanced machine learning methods in detecting the Higgs boson.

Dynamic Analysis Of Top 500 Android Apps   Sunday 15 June

Data presentation is difficult when you have a lot of data, but often the only way you can understand anything is to have a lot of data. Clever dynamic presentation allows the exploration of the top 500 Android apps by revenue - and there is a lot to learn.

SCiO The Sensor That Can Tell You What Things Are Made Of   Saturday 14 June

SCiO is a pocket-sized near infra red spectroscope. Sounds almost boring, but it has the potential to identify the chemical make up of anything you point it at. It also has an API, which means you can create apps that tell the user things that were previously impossible to know.

In-Memory Feature Supercharges Oracle 12c   Friday 13 June

Oracle has released an in-memory feature for Oracle 12c that makes it up to 1,000 times faster for some tasks.

Firefox OS Apps Run On Android   Friday 13 June

A recent Mozilla blog post proclaims: Firefox OS Apps Run On Android - well do they? Not entirely, but Mozilla has managed to be imprecise on the exact situation.

Docker Reaches Version 1   Thursday 12 June

Docker could be the feature that the cloud is waiting for and it has just reached a full version 1, which means it is ready for front line duty. It is rapidly become the way to build cloud apps that run anywhere. 

Firebug 2.0 Released   Thursday 12 June

The new version of the open source web development tool, Firebug 2.0, has has a major facelift and is powered by a new debugging engine.

AWS re:Invent 2014 Registration Opens   Thursday 12 June

Amazon's annual conference ASW re:Invent will take place in Las Vegas, November 11-14, 2014. A full conference pass costs $1,299 and registration is now open.

Professional Programmer

Architecture Issues For eHealth Interoperability   Monday 16 June

What architecture do you need to establish the flow of patient medical data, stored in different ways and languages, across country boundaries? The solution involves a common intermediate structure and open sourced components to make implementation by many different countries easier. 

The Core

Just JavaScript - The Object Expression   Friday 13 June

As in most programming languages the expression is an important part of JavaScript, but it isn't quite the same. This is where the idea that JavaScript has some weird type conversions arises. But JavaScript isn't too fussy about type and it doesn't really do conversions.