Featured Articles

Android Programming In Kotlin: More Controls
Mike James

Kotlin has established itself as the language in which to write Android apps and the book by Mike James in the I Programmer library, Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App. will be useful to the beginning Android programmer and those who have used Java. This extract looks at the CheckBox and switches and toggle buttons that are just CheckBoxes in another format.

JavaScript has typed arrays that let you work easily with arrays of data stored an ArrayBuffer. What do you do if the data isn't in the form of an array but a patchwork of data types, i.e. a structure? The answer is the DataView, but what about endianism? For the complete answer, read on.  

News

Arduino IDE 1.8.11 - The State Of The Arduinosphere
29 Jan | Harry Fairhead

The standalone Arduino IDE has just been released in a new version. You don't hear so much about it these days and it is a good time to examine the state of the Arduinosphere in general.

Microsoft has open sourced Application Inspector, a tool that you can use to check open source components before you use them to see what they really do and whether there are any unusual or worrying features in the code.

uni is an open source tool with just four commands that lets you query the Unicode database from the command line. It will make you wonder how you went through life dealing with character encodings without it. 

Pandas, the data analysis library for Python, is now available as a version 1.0 release candidate. It features the addition of a new value to represent scalar missing values and a dedicated string data type.

OpenCV has announced a hackathon aimed at eliminating bugs and generally stabilizing the library functionality. Taking place  February 2 - 9 the open source project is looking for help in resolving a selected list of issues.

There's a new version of Ontotext GraphDB that's open source and comes with a range of new plugins. GraphDB Workbench, which give developers a way to quickly develop knowledge graph prototypes, was also open-sourced as a separate project.

We are now very familiar with robots - machines that posses artificial intelligence and perform tasks that humans find arduous or simply unattractive. What you might not know is that word robot comes from the Czech for "forced labour". 

OK, if we are going to be 100% accurate it's only half a brain, but the question still stands. In a remarkable team effort, the wiring diagram, the connectome, for the largest chunk of neural tissue yet, has been mapped out - but this is a long way from understanding it.

It is now a tradition that Google reveals the date of its annual developer conference via a game or puzzle. Yesterday, which is a bit earlier than usual, the company, initiated the challenge to discover the date of the 2020 event.

The latest version of Pharo, the open-source language and core library following in the tradition of Smalltalk, has been released. It brings several new tools in preview, updated git clients and system browsers, and a move to the 64-bit version as the recommended version for Windows.

There will no longer be a fee for Komodo, the multi-language IDE for Python, PHP, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, Node.js, Golang, Ruby, Perl, and a variety of other languages and frameworks. 

Splice Machine, a database that combines Hadoop and traditional relational abilities, has been updated. The new version offers improved SQL coverage, better workload

management, and Kubernetes support.

Books of the Week

Full Review

The Digital Big Bang (Wiley)

Reviewer: Kay Ewbank,  Rating: 4 (out of 5) who begins her review with:

an interesting book that consists of lots of short chapters from cybersecurity experts at a range of companies, but it stops short of giving practical advice on how to manage cybersecurity threats.

Added to Book Watch

Murach's ASP.NET Core MVC (Murach Books)

Large-Scale C++ Volume I (Addison-Wesley)