News

Can You Build A Self-Driving Car In Six Months?   Wednesday 07 November

Building a self-driving car is difficult. It has to be or they would be all around us driving us to places at our command. So can you build one in just six months? It seems you can.

Register For Google's First Ever DevFest OnAir  
Wednesday 07 November

Google Developer Groups has announced an online conference featuring sessions from DevFest events around the globe taking place on December 11th and 12th. Simply register with your Google account to be reminded of the event and be able to watch at the time.  

Learning to Sound like a Fender   Tuesday 06 November

Bassman 56F vacuum tube amplifier, that is. Yes, neural networks go where no network has gone before. It is now officially amazing what you can think up for a neural network to do. 

Java 8 Still Dominates   Tuesday 06 November

Most Java developers are sticking with Java 8 or older versions despite Java 11 now being available, according to a new survey of Java developers. More than 10,000 developers completed the survey, making it the largest JVM survey ever undertaken. 

Node.js Updated   Monday 05 November

Node.js 10.x has become the latest long term support (LTS) release, and Node.js 11 has moved into its place as the current release line for the next six months. 

Microsoft GitHub - What's Different   Monday 05 November

Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion was finalized in October and now Nat Friedman has completed his first week as its CEO. What impact will his leadership have on the world's biggest open source community. 

Neuromorphic Supercomputer Up and Running  
Sunday 04 November

The University of Manchester's Faculty of Science and Engineering's SpiNNaker machine, made up of one million processors and designed to mimic the human brain was switched on for the first time on November 2nd. 

DeOldify - Auto Colorization   Saturday 03 November

Yes it's a neural network and it colors old black-and-white shots to make them look good - to deoldify them. What is amazing about this particular effort is not just that it seems to work well, but it's an amateur (in the best sense of the word) effort. 

The 2018 Hour of Code Season Revs Up  
Friday 02 November

A brand new Minecraft activity from Code.org and Microsoft heads the bill for the sixth iteration of the Hour of Code - which  runs from December 3-9, 2018. There are already over 40 thousand registered events and there are incentives for classrooms in the US to sign up to be awarded a set of robots or physical computing kits. 

Don't Neglect Mobile App Security   Friday 02 November

As people become increasingly reliant on their smartphones and other mobile devices, it’s clear that mobile app development brings some fantastic opportunities to developers. It’s also crucial to develop your mobile apps with the importance of security at the forefront of your mind at all times. 

PipelineDB Released As PostgreSQL Extension  
Thursday 01 November

PipelineDB 1.0 has been released as a PostgreSQL extension. It is intended to be used for high-performance time-series aggregation based on continuous SQL queries. 

Go Specialization On Coursera   Thursday 01 November

Coursera has added the Go Programming language to its portfolio of computer language courses. It is designed for those who have had some experience programming in another language but now wish to learn about the features and capabilities of Go. 

The Core

JavaScript Async - Custom Async   Monday 05 November

If you want to write JavaScript apps that are responsive, you have little choice but to master the art of creating your own non-blocking asynchronous functions. In this chapter extract from Ian Elliot's book that is part of the I Programmer Library series from I/O Press we look at ways of working with the event queue to keep the UI working. 

The Paradox of Artificial Intelligence  
Thursday 01 November

What do we mean by "intelligence" in practical terms. And oncewe adopt an operational definition does it defeat the whole idea of "artificial intelligence"? The solution might be to realize that intelligence isn't a property, but a relationship.