News

Lucida For Personal Artificial Intelligence   Wednesday 07 September

The Clarity Labs team of researchers at Michigan University made headlines last year with the release of its own IPA (Intelligent Personal Assistant), called Sirius. Sirius was mistakenly regarded by many as the open source version of Apple's Siri, but that wasn't the case since the two projects are totally unrelated. Maybe that's one reason for rebranding Sirius as Lucida.

Fundamentals of Digital Circuits From MITx   Wednesday 07 September

Are you interested in how  a computer works on the inside. If so a free course from MIT on the edX platform that started yesterday could be just what you are looking for.

Closure Moves To JavaScript   Tuesday 06 September

Google's Closure compiler is now available in pure JavaScript, and no longer needs Java to run. The new experimental release runs under NodeJS with support for some popular build tools.

Columbia Creates Data Set Cleaner   Tuesday 06 September

 A tool that cleans big data sets of dirty data has been developed at ColumbIa University and University of California at Berkeley.

Angular 2 Fundamentals - The Coolest Course In Existence   Monday 05 September

This has to be one of the most interesting online courses I've ever come across, mainly down to the instructor's hip and fast talking sprinkled with the right amount of "yo's" and "hey's" that make it distinct.

Is OpenOffice Heading to the Apache Attic?   Monday 05 September

After a long and chequered history spanning over 30 years if you count its proprietary forebears, OpenOffice, the free open source suite of productivity software, is on the brink of closure due a lack of volunteer developers with the requisite skills to keep it up to date. 

A Pi And A Kinect Autofocus A DSLR   Sunday 04 September

It has been a while since we had a wow Kinect project and this one isn't so much wow as just interesting. The idea is simple enough - use a Kinect to create an auto-focus for a DSLR used as a video camera. It is not until you step back for a moment and consider how insane this approach is do you realise how far we have come in so short a time. 

Tabs Or Spaces - One Billion Files Later An Answer   Saturday 03 September

This issue splits the programming world like no other topic. It's a cross-platform, cross-language divide that pits fellow programmer against the barbarians who simply format their code in the wrong way. For indents should it be spaces or tabs?

Facebook Open Sources Two Technologies   Friday 02 September

Facebook has released two technologies as open source at its @Scale conference in San Jose. The Zstandard compression algorithm and the MyRocks storage engine are both being made available for open source use. 

The Weekly Top 10: Professional Development   Friday 02 September

This week's catch of blog posts that might otherwise have escaped you notice starts with stats on in-demand programming languages. It then looks at the website development process and introduces new techniques.

OpenStreetView Launches   Thursday 01 September

A street image application and map that is free to use and crowd sourced has been launched by OpenStreetMap.

C# SDK For Language Understanding Intelligent Service   Thursday 01 September

A C# SDK for the LUIS, Microsoft's Language Understanding Intelligent Service API is now available on GitHub, taking us another step forward towards being able to build bots that respond to natural, spoken language.

The Core

jQuery 3 - DOM Traversal Filters   Thursday 01 September

When you first encounter filters they seem easy enough - just extract the results you want from the results you have. The trouble is that filters are fun and jQuery pushes the idea beyond the obvious. In this chapter we look at traversal filters and more.

History

Margaret Hamilton Apollo and Beyond   Monday 05 September

Margaret Hamilton was lead developer for the team that wrote the programs that landed men on the moon and has devoted a career to error detection and recovery. She coined the term "software engineer" to gain recognition for the work done by programmers and is a role model as a woman in a male dominated environment.