News

Santa Sets Off - Track His Progress Across the Globe   Wednesday 24 December

It's official Santa Claus has set off to deliver presents to children anywhere in the world where children believe in him and thanks to NORAD, Microsoft and Google you can watch his journey and play games on your computer, your tablet, your smartphone and even your smartwatch.

See Invisible Motion, Hear silent sounds. Cool? Creepy?   Wednesday 24 December

Computational photography provides all sorts of clever tricks but how many of them are actually useful? In this TED talk Michael Rubinstein explains the "motion microscope" which is, perhaps, really useful.

NTP The Latest Open Source Security Problem   Tuesday 23 December

NTP - Network Time Protocol (or SNTP - Simple Network Time Protocol) is one of the un-sung heros of the Internet. Put simply, it provides the time and data for servers and clients so that they know when something happened. Now we have another security problem to deal with in the Linux NTP code.

Bing Developer Assistant Released   Tuesday 23 December

A free Visual Studio extension that provides developers with smart contextual help to search for projects and code samples and resolve code errors has been released by Microsoft.

Wolfram Alpha Comes to Windows 8.1   Monday 22 December

A new Windows 8.1 and Windows phone app brings Wolfram Alpha to users in a packaged form. Well worth having if you do math - if you can find them!

PostgreSQL 9.4 Released   Monday 22 December

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released PostgreSQL 9.4, with improved JSON support, replication and index performance.

The Snake Robot Arm Gets Everywhere   Sunday 21 December

To be honest - this robot makes the cut because watching it is hypnotic. It moves like something out of a science fiction movie and is very impressive. But be warned, if you don't like wiggly things or the Martian probes from War Of The Worlds, look away now. 

Jeff 1000 And Summer Glau   Saturday 20 December

This is just for fun - but we wouldn't have you miss it. See the first three episodes of Jeff 1000, the everyday story of a robot that just wants to make good in Hollywood and in the human world in general.

Google To Close Freebase and Open Up Knowledge Graph   Friday 19 December

Google is shutting down Freebase, its semi-structured database of well-known people, places and things, but plans on offering access to Knowledge Graph.

Upgrade Git Client To Avoid Vulnerability   Friday 19 December

If you use Git or GitHub then you need to upgrade you Git client to avoid a potential security breach. 

Microsoft Updates Data Platform   Friday 19 December

Microsoft has updated a number of components in its data platform including Azure SQL to offer better analysis of big data. The services that are being updated include Analytics Platform System (APS), Azure SQL Database and other Microsoft Azure services.

Mozilla Goes Its Own Way On Web Components   Thursday 18 December

Mozilla has decided not to stick strictly to standards in implementing Web Components. When you look a little more carefully at what is going on it seems to be inevitable that it has to break out of the standards. 

Skype Translator Cracks Language Barrier   Thursday 18 December

Skype has started to roll out the "first phase" of its live speech translating feature. It is between Spanish and English for now and there is also text translation for instant messaging in more than forty languages.

Projects

SNTP time class   Tuesday 23 December

SNTP is a network protocol for obtaining an accurate time and it is an interesting exercise to build an SNTP client. In this article the language used is C# but it is easy enough to generalise to a language of your choice and extend the ideas to an SNTP server if you need to. The main aim is to describe and show how to implement the basic protocol.