News

It's Pi Day And Google Gets In On It With A Doodle   Wednesday 14 March

Pi Day - that's 3/14/18 to you - has been slowly growing in its impact and now Google has validated it, for the second time, with a doodle. What's it all about and is there a uniquely programmer angle on the whole Pi thing?

A New Raspberry Pi For Pi Day   Wednesday 14 March

Pi day is supposed to be celebrated by eating pie but why not have a piece of a different pie? A Raspberry P? The new model B+ to be precise.

Google Summer Of Code 2018 Student Applications Now Open   Wednesday 14 March

Google Summer of Code, which gives students an opportunity to make a substantive contribution to Open Source projects with the motto "Flip  bits not burgers", has recruited more mentoring organizations than ever  for its 13th year making it bigger than ever before.

UPDATE: Student Application period opens today.

JavaFX Will Be Removed From JDK   Wednesday 14 March

Oracle is going to split JavaFX out of the core distribution of JDK from version 11 onwards. JavaFX is Oracle’s rich client development technology for Java.

iNaturalist Kaggle Contest   Tuesday 13 March

Google has announced the 2018 iNaturalist Challenge being run for the 5th International Workshop on Fine Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC5)  and now underway on Kaggle . It is a "long tail" species classification competition, which poses particular challenges for machine learning.

Kylin 2.3.0 Adds SQL Server Support   Tuesday 13 March

Apache Kylin has been updated with a new version that supports SparkSQL in building intermediate flat Hive tables. There's also a new Dropwizard-based metrics framework and a cube planner that can select the most cost-effective cuboids to build.

From Scratch To Python With Future Learn   Monday 12 March

A new course from the Raspberry Pi Foundation opens today on the Future Learn Platform. While primarily aimed at educators working with K-5 (primary school-aged) learners, it will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know how programming concepts translate from block-based to text-based languages.

Top 3 Languages For Big Data Programming   Monday 12 March

R, Python, and Scala are the three major languages for data science and data mining. Here you’ll find out about their respective popularity, ease of use, and some pros and cons. Before all that, however, an important link between data warehousing and Big Data needs discussing.

Nim Improves Async   Monday 12 March

There's a new release of Nim, the systems programming language that focuses on performance, portability and expressiveness. Nim, which was formerly called Nimrod, is statically typed and compiled.

Your Own HAL With A Little Help From Alexa   Sunday 11 March

One of the best jokes in ages has been to say "Alexa, open the pod bay doors" and listen to the response. Each of our favourite voice assistants knows about HAL-9000, but now you can take it a stage further with a replica.

Machine Learning Identifies MOMA Artworks   Saturday 10 March

Google's Arts & Culture Lab in Paris has been experimenting with how AI can be used for the benefit of culture. One of its latest achievements is to turn a repository of 30,000 images into a searchable archive.

Ubisoft Applies AI To Code   Friday 09 March

Games developer Ubisoft has announced Commit Assistant, an AI system to spot errors almost before you make them. Is this the future of code?

New Platform For Code Jam 2018   Friday 09 March

Code Jam, Google's annual coding competition that challenges programmers to solve algorithmic puzzles, is back for its 15th year with a new interface. In addition more contestants will proceed to Rounds 2  and 3 than previously. This year's World Finals will be held in Toronto, Canada.

Win 10 To Get AI Dev Platform   Thursday 08 March

Microsoft is adding a new AI platform to the next major Windows 10 upgrade. Windows ML will let developers use pre-trained machine learning models in their Apps on Windows devices.

Android P Developer's View   Thursday 08 March

It's not long till May and the preview of Android P is available. We could spend hours speculating on what the P stands for, but let's assume for the moment that is stands for Programmer or Programmer's.

Women In Tech - Towards Gender Parity   Thursday 08 March

Today is International Women's Day, a key date in the ongoing campaign for gender parity, and this year's theme is #PressforProgress. HackerRank has published findings relating to gender inequality in software development which indicates some signs of progress.

The Core

Android Programming In Kotlin: Animation   Monday 12 March

You can animate Android graphics using nothing but a timer. It's not the best way to do the job for anything complex , but it's good to know it can be done. This extract is taken from Beginning Bitmap Graphics in a new book aimed at Android programmers wanting to use Kotlin.

Babbage's Bag

How Error Correcting Codes Work   Thursday 08 March

Error correcting codes are essential to computing and all sorts of communications. At first they seem a bit like magic. How can you possibly not only detect an error but correct it as well? How do they work? In fact it turns out to be very easy to understand the deeper principles.