News

Learn How To Use Firefox To Debug With Power Surge   Wednesday 15 July

Power Surge is a game that Mozilla has put together to let you discover how good the performance tools in the latest Firefox developer edition are. It is a nice idea.

Million Air Miles Bounty Awarded   Wednesday 15 July

United Airlines has already made good on its promise to pay security researchers in air miles for vulnerabilities found in its web properties. It has just awarded the maximum payout for a Remote Code Execution.

Document Translator Open Sourced   Wednesday 15 July

Microsoft has open sourced an app that lets users translate Word, PDF, PowerPoint, plain text or Excel documents to one or more target languages.

Death Of Flash And Java Applets   Tuesday 14 July

For a set of complex reasons, the final scene is being played out in the life of the Flash and Java add-ins. Many users are celebrating with cries of "good" and "the only thing Adobe can do to fix it is to kill it". What about the programmers?

Bugzilla 5.0 Released   Tuesday 14 July

A new version of Mozilla's defect tracking system, Bugzilla has been released with improvements to its WebServices interface and improved caching.

Project Westminster - Another Web App Format   Monday 13 July

Microsoft recently announced a plan to create "bridges" to allow programmers to covert their existing apps to WinRT apps. The first to be ready is codenamed "Westminster" and it converts websites to apps.

Another Three-Rotor Enigma Machine Up For Auction   Monday 13 July

Three-rotor Enigma machines are considered rare, but they turn up at auction at a rate of around one per year. Sotheby's has one in its sale on 14th July that might easily be overlooked as it is included in a sale billed as being English Literature, History, Children Books & Illustrations.

Amazon Device Farm For Testing Across Devices   Monday 13 July

Amazon has announced tools to let you test your Android and Fire OS apps on cloud-based devices hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Amazon Device Farm service launches today, July 13, and the first 250 minutes are free.

Sliding Blocks Are Turing Complete   Sunday 12 July

Algorithms and computation are at the heart of everything. When cells obey the program in DNA they make a human - but how can they all be following the same instructions and yet do different things? This is the question explored in this video - and if you only watch one video this year make sure it is this one.

Another Chunk of The Art of Computer Programming   Saturday 11 July

Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a legend among computer science books. For those who are looking forward to the next installment of this multi-part work, the 2nd revision of pre-fascicle 6a is now available for download.

Android M - Still No Name But An SDK Update And NDK Support   Friday 10 July

Google still hasn't given us a name for Android M but it has provided an update to the Android M SDK for use with Android Studio. The first preview wasn't particularly stable - does this make things more workable?

PhpStorm 9 Released   Friday 10 July

The latest version of PhpStorm, the IDE for PHP and web development from JetBrains, has been released.  It has improved support for PHP, a new inline debugger, and more options for remote development.  

Microsoft Scales Down Windows Phone   Thursday 09 July

You can look at this as giving up or accepting reality, but as with most things it is more complicated. Has Microsoft finally given up on Windows Phone? If so what does it matter?

Python 3.5 In Preview   Thursday 09 July

The third beta of Python 3.5 is now available for early adopters. Since entering its beta phase Python 3.5 is in ‘feature freeze’, so no new features will be added.

The Core

Exploring Edison - Mraa GPIO   Monday 13 July

The mraa C library is the simplest and most direct way to get in touch with the Intel Edison's GPIO lines. In this chapter we take a look at the basic operations of input and output including interrupt handling.  

Test Your C++ Static Analysis Skills   Thursday 09 July

How good are you at spotting bugs in code? The team behind the PVS-Studio static analyzer has created a C++ quiz that challenges you to find the flaws in code fragments, taken from real open source programs.