News

$500,000 Inaugural Alexa Prize Awarded   Wednesday 29 November

A team of students from the University of Washington has won the inaugural Alexa Prize and presented a cheque for $500,000 at AWS re:Invent. The $1 million prize for being able to sustain a conversation for 20 minutes wasn't won on this occasion. 

Google Build Out   Wednesday 29 November

Google has launched a YouTube series where engineers demonstrate how to combine mobile, cloud, and web technologies - so long as they're from Google.  

Headless Chrome and the Puppeteer Library for Scraping and Testing the Web   Wednesday 29 November

With the advent of Single Page Applications, scraping pages for information as well as running automated user interaction tests has become much harder due to its highly dynamic nature. The solution? Headless Chrome and the Puppeteer library. 

Imagine Cup 2018 Highlights Microsoft's Latest Technologies   Tuesday 28 November

The new slogan for the Imagine Cup is "Code With Purpose" and it is now underway. For 2018 there are new awards for Big Data, AI and Virtual/Augmented reality apps. Teams are encouraged to make an early start on their projects by pitching their ideas the Big Idea Challenge before January 31st. 

Top 10 From Around the Web: More About Python   Tuesday 28 November

This round up of Python-related items gathered from bog posts and external websites indicates the versatility of this popular language and has tips both for beginners and for more experienced Python programmers. 

Microsoft SQL Operations Studio With Smart GUI   Monday 27 November

Microsoft has released a preview of a free tool for managing SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. SQL Operations Studio provides wider options than the Windows-only SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and runs on Linux and macOS as well as Windows. 

Amazon Sumerian For Building Virtual Environments   Monday 27 November

AWS (Amazon Web Service) introduced a Midnight Madness event to get it's annual re:Invent conference off to an early start. The first announcement was Amazon Sumerian providing assets for building VR/AR apps as a service. 

Google Opens Doors To Its Colaboratory   Monday 27 November

Last month Google made another of its in-house data science tools freely available for anyone to use. Colaboratory is a document collaboration tool that has the ability to run code and show its output within the document. It is another step towards making AI and data accessible to all. 

Winners Of Android Things Hackster Contest   Sunday 26 November

The three prize winners of a contest to build connected devices powered by Android Things are impressively innovative, diverse, and relevant. They are a great showcase for what can be achieved with low cost hardware together with Android Things. 

What Is The Computational Power Of The Universe?   Saturday 25 November

The universe can be viewed as a huge physical computer that has been running for 13.7 billion . The outcome of its program is the way it is. Does the universe actually have the power it needs, or does it need to use clever algorithms? 

Claim A Free Windows 10 Virtual Machine - Time Limited Offer   Friday 24 November

Microsoft is hoping to tempt developers to create Universal Windows Platform apps with a free virtual machine that comes preloaded with Windows 10 Enterprise and Visual Studio 2017. Unfortunately, the VM expires on January 15. 

Hadoop 2.9 Adds Resource Estimator   Friday 24 November

Apache has released Hadoop 2.9 with new features including YARN federation, HDFS router based federation, and a resource estimator. 

AWS Amplify Opens Cloud Services For JavaScript   Thursday 23 November

Amazon has released an open source library for interacting with cloud services that use JavaScript applications. The AWS Amplify library is organized into a number of categories, with more planned for the future. 

GitHub Adds Security Alerts   Thursday 23 November

Using its new dependency graph feature, GitHub is now able to warn you of potential security vulnerabilities in code that a project relies on and to suggest known fixes.

The Core

JavaScript Async - Microtasks   Sunday 26 November

The workings of the JavaScript dispatch queue are more subtle and interesting than you might think. Far from just being a queue of events, there are tasks and then there are sub-tasks. This is an extract from Ian Elliot's latest book in the I Programmer Library JavaScript Async.

Babbage's Bag

What is a Turing Machine?   Thursday 23 November

The Turing machine can compute anything that can be computed. It is the very definition of computation and the fundamental tool for reasoning about computers. You really need to know what it is all about. Here is an illustrated guide.