News

Neural Networks Beat Humans   Wednesday 25 February

Another neural network breakthrough has been announced by Microsoft Research. Its neural network now outperforms humans on the 1000-class ImageNet dataset.

The Emterpreter JavaScript As Byte Code   Wednesday 25 February

This is one of those stories that, if you get what is really going on, might send you screaming for the comfort of a pillow. Does the programming world get any stranger?

IFTTT Reinvents Macro With Do   Wednesday 25 February

IFTTT has launched new apps that let you automate frequent actions for camera, note, and IFTTT recipes.

Nao's Creator Quits Aldebaran As Pepper Goes On Sale   Tuesday 24 February

Bruno Maisonnier, founder of Aldebaran, the French company that brought us the friendly humanoid robot Nao, is standing down as its CEO. This coincides with the availability, in Japan, of company's latest creation Pepper which has quickly established itself in a hospitality role.

Microsoft Band Gets An SDK   Tuesday 24 February

Microsoft Band could be a big win, if only it got the marketing and the support. Now, four months after the launch, there is an SDK. Is it worth investigating?

Qualcomm Releases NoSQL Qizx   Monday 23 February

 Qualcomm has launched Qizx, a noSQL, native XML database for text-intensive projects where you need quick access and searching of documents.

WebRTC Draft Published   Monday 23 February

The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group of W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, has published a Working Draft of WebRTC 1.0: Real-time communication between browsers.

Five Million - That's A Lot Of Raspberry Pi   Monday 23 February

The Raspberry Pi Foundation reports that it has sold over five million of the tiny low cost computer. For any curious person surely this has to raise the question - what are they all doing!?

Colossus Commemorated By Postage Stamp   Sunday 22 February

The UK's Royal Mail has issued a First Class postage stamp  which depicts the code-breaking Colossus computer.

Green Dino Powered By IBM Watson   Saturday 21 February

The CogniToys green dino is internet connected and speech enabled. It is the first of a new generation of smart toy that can respond to children with age appropriate content thanks to IBM's Cognitive Computing Engine, aka Watson.

Yahoo Mobile Development Suite   Friday 20 February

Marissa Mayer unveiled the Yahoo Mobile Development Suite  at Yahoo's inaugural Mobile Developer Conference, held on February 19th in San Francisco. How will it help you?

Fear And Loathing In the App Store 10 - Firefox Gets A Walled Garden   Friday 20 February

Security is important. However the steady creep of the walled garden limits programmer freedom. Now Mozilla has announced that Firefox extensions will have to be signed - by Mozilla.

Azure Machine Learning Service Goes Live   Thursday 19 February

Microsoft has announced the General Availability of Azure Machine Learning service, a cloud-based predictive analytics service.

Facebook's Stetho For Android Debugging   Thursday 19 February

Facebook has released an open source tool for debugging Android code. Described as a debug bridge, Stetho gives developers access to the Chrome Developer tools.

Microsoft Supports asm.js   Thursday 19 February

Asm.js is probably the most important JavaScript technology of the moment. It allows JavaScript to be used as a high level assembler language within the browser, providing near native speed - and now Microsoft has joined Mozilla in supporting it.

The Core

SQL Workshop - Removing Duplicate Rows   Thursday 19 February

Let’s say that we have a heap table without keys, solely used for dumping raw data into. That data at some point is filtered and cleaned up for further use. As time passes and data accumulates, duplicate rows creep in causing all sorts of issues. So, using SQL, how do we remove the duplicates but keep the one row necessary?

History

Codebreaking and Colossus   Tuesday 24 February

In the mid 70s it was revealed that British Intelligence had been using machines to break the German coded communications - and one of the machines was an early electronic computer called Colossus. Can it lay claim to being the first electronic computer?