News

Google To Charge For Its Android Apps In The EU   Wednesday 17 October

The European Commission's strong approach to controlling all things computing might be a good thing, but it is certainly creating a two-tier environment. Google is now going to charge for its Android Apps and services but only in the European Economic Area. 

GitHub Launches Actions   Wednesday 17 October

GitHub has launched a new tool called GitHub Actions that you can use to build, share and execute code directly on the site. It is designed to cut down on the steps necessary to execute code. 

Sourcegraph Powers Up Your Code Repository  
Wednesday 17 October

Sourcegraph is a code navigation engine that non-destructively rearranges your repository's structure to organize it, as well as powering it up with code intelligence and advanced search capabilities.

GitHub Extends Learning Lab   Tuesday 16 October

At its annual GitHub Universe conference, GitHub is releasing three new Learning Lab courses, covering secure development workflows with GitHub, reviewing a pull request, and getting started with GitHub. 

Mapbox Visual for Microsoft Power BI Upgrades Visualizations   Tuesday 16 October

The Mapbox plugin for Power BI has been upgraded with support for 3D extrusions on fill maps and better handling for shape filters. 

Paul Allen, Co-Founder of Microsoft, Dies  
Tuesday 16 October

Paul Allen, who with Bill Gates brought BASIC to the world and founded Microsoft, has died at the age of 65. 

PostgreSQL 11 RC Available   Monday 15 October

PostgreSQL 11 is here - well, it will be within days, and the release candidate is available for download now. 

Hacktoberfest 2018 - Celebrate Open Source!  
Monday 15 October

Hacktoberfest is an annual event sponsored by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio and while "Hacktoberfest" might sound or give the impression of something doable only by very experienced hacker programmers, in essence, it's just a wrapper around having to submit 5 Pull Requests to any Github hosted repository and earn some swag in return.  

AI Makes Deep Fake News   Sunday 14 October

Lots of people worry about AI and the effect it is going to have on the economy and wider issues of society.  Blaise Agüera y Arcas of Google AI has made a short film explaining how AI might just cause a transition from a fact-based world to something much less certain. You can no longer believe your eyes. 

Parkour Atlas   Saturday 13 October

I admit that this is about the video. To see Boston Dynamic's Atlas robot jumping around like it means it, is fascinating. How far have we come so quickly - but have we? Is this the robot you are looking for? 

CodeLobster Now Multi-Platform   Friday 12 October

The updated CodeLobster 1.3 has been released with multi-platform support. CodeLobster is a portable IDE that is free to use and offers highlighting and autocomplete for PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. 

Microsoft Joins Open Invention Network   Friday 12 October

In a move that consolidates its new relationship with open source and with Linux, Microsoft has announced that it is joining OIN - the Open Invention Network - a community dedicated to protecting Linux and other open source software programs from patent risk. 

RStudio Reticulated Python   Thursday 11 October

The latest version of RStudio has improved support with a number of programming languages and platforms, including SQL, D3, Python, Stan, and C++. The Python support comes via a reticulate package that provides an interface to Python. 

Infer.NET Machine Learning Framework Now Open Source   Thursday 11 OctoberMicrosoft has made another of its products open source; this time its the Infer.NET machine learning network. Infer.NET is a framework for running Bayesian inference in graphical models that can also be used for probabilistic programming. 

The Core

Programmer's Python - Multiple Inheritance  
Monday 15 October

Python supports multiple inheritance which can be scary, but the trick is to make it as much like single inheritance as possible and this is what Python does. This extract is from my new book with the subtitle "Something Completely Different". 

Babbage's Bag

What's In A DOS   Thursday 11 October

Now that Microsoft has open sourced MS-DOS it's a good time to look at filing systems, blocks and the FAT and how they are used. Let's explore the basics of a DOS - Disk Operating System.