News

Stanford Engineers Build A Water Droplet Based Computer   Wednesday 24 June

It is well known to every computer scientist that you can implement a computer in many different ways - but drops of water? Yes of course you can and the result is really fun to watch. 

Flowering Success   Wednesday 24 June

Microsoft Z3 Theorem Prover Wins Award   Wednesday 24 June

Microsoft Research’s Z3 theorem prover has been awarded the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award.

New Android Bug Bounty Scheme   Tuesday 23 June

Google has initiated Android Security Rewards covering vulnerabilities discovered in the latest available Android versions for Nexus phones and tablets currently available for sale in the Google Store in the U.S.

Racket 6.2 Released   Tuesday 23 June

Racket 6.2 has been released, having been reorganized into a small core repo with other features separated into a number of packet repos.

Unicode 8 Released   Monday 22 June

A new version of the Unicode standard has been released with new emoji characters and scripts.

Coursera Data Science Sepcialization Starts Today   Monday 22 June

If you want to take advantage of the boom of interest in data science then you'll be interested in the series of Data Science courses from John Hopkins University that run on the Cousera Platform.

First Peppers Sell Out   Sunday 21 June

SoftBank's friendly humanoid robot finally went on sale in Japan yesterday and the first batch of 1000 Peppers sold out in under a minute.

Inceptionism: How Neural Networks See   Saturday 20 June

Neural networks achieve great things, but it is slightly worrying that we don't really know how they work. Inceptionism is an attempt to make neural networks give up their secrets by showing us what they see. It creates some amazing artwork along the way.

AWS Adds Java Lambda Support   Friday 19 June

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has updated AWS Lambda to let you write Lambda functions in Java, including Java 8.

PHP At 20   Friday 19 June

As the alpha of PHP 7.0.0 is announced, it’s worth contemplating that PHP has now reached its twentieth anniversary.

JavaScript 6 EcmaScript 2015 Final Approval   Thursday 18 June

At last we have a new version of JavaScript, even if it is called EcmaScript 2015.

Microsoft Updates T&Cs   Thursday 18 June

Microsoft has emailed customers of its cloud services informing them of important changes to their terms and conditions.

WebAssembly Has Mozilla, Microsoft,Apple and Google Backing It   Thursday 18 June

When the history of this era of programming is written, what happened will seem like the drunken lurchings of a lunatic. First we have JavaScript, then asm.js and now WebAssembly. Is there no planning, forethought and vision in web development? Apparently not.

Professional Programmer

Python Books For Beginners   Thursday 18 June

Python has become a popular language for complete beginners. It is always a tall order to teach programming from scratch - and these days books increasingly take a back seat to interactive online methods. Even so, having a book on a topic is a good way to consolidate a practical approach to learning a computer language.

The Core

Custom Attributes In C#   Tuesday 23 June

The role of custom attributes in C# can be confusing. They are easy to use when supplied, but how do you go about creating custom attributes? And when are they useful?