Featured Articles

The Swing components have provided an easy approach to the idea of objects, but there comes a time when you have to find out how to create your own. In this part of Modern Java, we look at the standard ideas of object-oriented programming.

So you know how to create an Android app, but do you really know how it works? Here's a basic guide in Kotlin, an extract from my published book Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App.

News

Siri Is Disingenuous, Alexa Caring and Google Professional
08 Jan | Sue Gee

Researchers have looked into the types of personality ascribed to the three leading voice assistants from Apple, Amazon and Google and discovered that Siri’s is predominantly described as disingenuous and cunning, while Alexa is perceived as genuine and caring and Google is associated with higher professionalism than the other two.

There are some news items from the past year that deserve a second chance. Here we have one such - you will have heard of pair programming when two programmers team up to work on the same problem. Now there is mob programming which is pair programming raised to the power of however many people you can throw at it. But does it work?

The 1.0 release of Debezium is now available, with support for more databases, and container images upgraded to OpenJDK 11.  Debezium is also now built against the latest version of Apache Kafka (2.4.0).

IBM has stopped work on server-side Swift. The news was announced to the Swift forum, with members being told IBM team leader Ian Partridge and technical architect Chris Bailey will leave the Swift server workgroup.

The newly established Dijkstra Fellowship aims to recognize the impact of groundbreaking work in mathematics and computer science. It comes from the Amsterdam-based Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and is named in honor of Edsger Dijkstra who developed his eponymous shortest path algorithm while a researcher at CWI.

The latest release of V8, Google's open source JavaScript engine, will reduce heap size by 40 percent by using pointer compression when it is released alongside Chrome 80 stable in a few weeks.

What still amazes me about physical computing is how simple things can be transformed by some computational power. Consider the humble clock. It has just two hands, but put 24 of them together and you have something new - a meta clock.

There are some news items from the past year that deserve a second chance. Here we have one such - sorting algorithms are fundamental to computer science and writing one of your own will teach you a lot. There are many different approaches to sorting - but one thing they share in common is that they are better understood when visualized.

Research has confirmed that the neuron is more than just a single active unit. Its connections do a computation that makes it a two-layer network in its own right. Perhaps the brain is far more capable a machine than we ever imagined.

Kylin 3.0 has been released by Apache with improvements including support for real-time OLAP, integration with Apache Livy, and a curator-based job scheduler.

Given the worries and controversy around the (2020) New Year firework displays perhaps this deserves to be better known: Visitors to the 2019 Big Data Expo held in Guiyang City, Guizhou Province, southwest China were treated to a nightly light show staged using 526 drones.

A report analyzing RSA certificates has identified a weakness that means they can be easily cracked, exposing network and IoT devices that rely on digital certificates based on RSA certificates.

Books of the Week

Full Review

Computer Graphics Programming in OpenGL with C++(Mercury Learning)

Reviewer: Mike James,  Rating (out of 5): 5

Added to Book Watch

Programming C# 8.0 (O'Reilly)

Righting Software (Addison-Wesley)

ROS Robotics Projects, 2nd Edition (Packt)