News

Learning To Walk   Wednesday 12 July

Deep Mind has been applying its deep reinforcement learning to the problem of walking - but not just any walking, this is difficult terrain. The neural network gets it wrong some of the time, but it is still impressive and its fails are fun to watch. 

.NET Core 2.0 Preview Improves Platform Support   Wednesday 12 July

The latest version of .NET Core is available in preview with improvements to the platform support and the ability to reference .NET Framework libraries from .NET Standard libraries. 

Alice Under Threat   Wednesday 12 July

In June 2014 the United States Supreme Court ruled that implementing an abstract idea on a computer was insufficient grounds for making it eligible to be patented. 

Ballerina Adds New Log API   Tuesday 11 July

There's an updated version of the open source programming language Ballerina with new APIs. 

Windows Phone 8.1 End Of Support   Tuesday 11 July

Today marks the  end of support for Windows Phone 8.1, the last of the original line of Windows mobile devices. What of the future and what cost the past? 

GitHub Introduces Code Owners   Monday 10 July

GitHub has added a new feature that you can use to identify the people who 'own' code in a repository, so they can review any changes. 

Happy Programmers Produce Better Apps   Monday 10 July

There is a saying that "happy hens lay better eggs" and so it seems to be with programmers. We are not the logical automatons that we pretend to be and that management would like us to be. It really does matter that we are allowed to be free range ... 

Amazon Alexa Extending Its Influence   Sunday 09 July

Amazon's Alexa appears to be establishing a significant lead in the smart speaker market and the latest ability, being able to use Echo devices as an intercom, looks set to increase the gap. Is it sustainable in the long term? 

Arthrobots - Soft and Flexible   Saturday 08 July

No not arthropods, which are icky insects and scary spiders - but arthrobots which are sort of robot arthropod. They move like insects and they are a new class of soft robots. 

Program Arduino in Visual Studio Code   Friday 07 July

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code extension for Arduino, which provides an easy way not only to code, build and deploy Arduino sketches but also to debug them, is now open source under the MIT Licence. This is just part of the Microsoft's ongoing commitment to IoT developers. 

Apache Fluo Improves Spark Integration   Friday 07 July

There's a new version of Apache Fluo. Fluo is an implementation of Google's Percolator for Apache Accumulo. Version 1.1.0 of Apache Fluo (incubating)  improves scalability and Spark integration. It also has a new Observers API. 

Deep Mind's NoisyNet Suggests Random Is Good   Thursday 06 July

We are still at a very early stage in our understanding of Deep Reinforcement Learning and one of the important questions is how to explore the possible range of actions. Some new results from Deep Mind suggest it might be easier than we thought.  

Mozilla's Things Gateway For Rapsberry Pi   Thursday 06 July

A small team at Mozilla has released a Things Gateway for connecting "things" to the web which uses the Raspberry Pi. This is currently experimental and part of a larger vision for on an open and decentralized Internet of Things. 

Windows App Studio Closing   Thursday 06 July

Microsoft is closing down Windows App Studio in favor of Windows Template Studio, a Visual Studio extension.

The Core

The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - Arrays & Strings   Monday 10 July

Arrays and strings are the most basic of the more advanced data types. They are so familiar that you might think you don't need to look at them, but Kotlin has its own way of doing most things.

jQuery 3 - Consuming Promises   Thursday 06 July

Promises are a way of organizing asynchronous calls that is better than using callbacks. The callbacks are still there but they are come with a degree of organization. Previously jQuery was criticized for implementing a promise mechanism that was non-standard. Promises in jQuery 3 are compatible with the standard.