Professional Programmer

Python Books For Enthusiasts   Monday 25 February

Python continues to grow in popularity and in importance, particularly in the areas of scientific applications and data mining. Python 3 has largely been adopted as the version of choice, so the books in this Programmer's Bookshelf selection are those aimed at developers using Python 3.

History

Ivan Sutherland - Father of Computer Graphics   Thursday 21 February

Computer graphics wasn't invented by one man, but Ivan Sutherland had a lot to do with it and his is the name you generally think of first in connection with its development.

News

AI Takes Control Of A Wind Farm   Wednesday 27 February

No not a post-apocalypse scenario - Google's DeepMind helps make a wind farm 20% more valuable by predicting when the wind will blow.

Survey Results From More Python Developers   Wednesday 27 February

More than twice as many Python programmer's participated in the 2018 Python Developers Survey conducted jointly by the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains. The results are now available. 

Mozilla Argues Australia's Encryption Busting Legislation Needs To be Repealed   Tuesday 26 February

Mozilla has added its voice to criticism of Australia's recently enacted anti-encryption laws, warning that they could effectively force companies to treat Australian employees as potential saboteurs.

Eclipse MicroProfile Improves OpenTracing API   Tuesday 26 February

The Eclipse Foundation has released an updated version of MicroProfile. Release 2.2 of the project has updated its Fault Tolerance, Open Tracing, and REST APIs. The aim of MicroProfile is to make use of and improve Enterprise Java technologies such as Java EE for use with distributed microservices.

Kinect Lives - But Isn't Cheap   Monday 25 February

The new Kinect is aimed at developers rather than consumers and it has a high end spec and price to match.

Microsoft SEAL Cryptography .NET Wrapper Released   Monday 25 February

Microsoft has released a .NET wrapper for SEAL, its homomorphic encryption library. The Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library was made open source in December, and according to Microsoft has already become one of the world’s most popular homomorphic encryption libraries.

Predicting The Oscar Winner With Data Science   Sunday 24 February

After its success with predicting last year's Best Picture Award at the 90th Academy Awards, the data science bootcamp Thinkful has repeated the exercise for this year Oscars and predicts that Roma will win. UPDATE: And the winner wasn't Roma . Instead it went to the second place prediction,  Green Book.   What went wrong for data science? 

The Role Of ASCII Art In Code   Saturday 23 February

A picture is worth a thousand words - and this is why ASCII art turns up in code more often than you might expect.

Trump Demands 6G But We Don't Even Know What It Is   Friday 22 February

We rely on fast networking and with 5G not actually available as yet, President Trump has called for 6G. What is 6G?

Debezium 0.9 Final Released   Friday 22 February

The developers of Debezium have released version 0.9 of a set of distributed services that capture row-level changes in databases so that applications can see them and respond.

Google Says Spectre And Meltdown Are Too Difficult To Fix   Thursday 21 February

You probably think, like I do, that anything can be fixed in software, But it appears that the latest class of attacks need more than software to fix. Google's researchers are convinced that only hardware changes can do the job.

Ivan Sutherland Wins Frontiers of Knowledge Award   Thursday 21 February

This year's BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone to Ivan Sutherland for "pioneering the move from text-based to graphical computer displays."