Featured Articles

Fundamental C - typedef
Harry Fairhead

This extract, from my book on programming C in an IoT context explains the C typedef. You can write good C without knowing anything about it, but you will find it hard to read other people's programs without it and you will be forever mystified about how structs are defined.

If you think regular expressions are trivial and boring, you've not seen the whole picture. Here we reveal that in .NET they are amazingly powerful and not to be missed.

News and Comment

The Halt And Catch Fire Hack
22 Jul | Harry Fairhead

You may know the mythical machine instruction "halt and catch fire" - well the machine might have halted, but it certainly didn't catch fire. In fact, finding software that can damage hardware is difficult - until now. Modern power supplies are quite easy to hack and program so that they burst into flames.

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary OpenCV has announced its OpenCV AI Kit, affordable hardware and software for AI-powered Computer Vision, and initiated a Kickstarter Campaign.The funding goal of $20,000 was reached in just 20 minutes. Deadline is August 13th.

Apple, Facebook and Google have all shown off new emojis to mark World Emoji day. The full list was announced back at the beginning of the year, but the companies have now shown off the way they'll look on the various platforms. 

Mozilla has finally brought to market its Virtual Private Network Service, formerly branded as the Firefox Private Network. The change of name to Mozilla VPN is to attract a larger audience than just Firefox users. Will it succeed as a revenue stream for Mozilla?

While most Rubyists are probably familiar with the Fukuoka Ruby Award, there may be multi-linguists who could be tempted to join in a competition that asks you to use Ruby, possibly in conjunction with other languages, and have your code judged by Ruby's creator, "Matz".

Google has extended BigQuery for use with multiple clouds. BigQuery Omni works with Google Cloud and AWS, and will soon support Azure. 

GitHub has announced that it has completed its mission to preserve open source software for future generations by storing its code in an archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain, built to last a thousand years.

Google has launched a new free online course for people without programming experience to learn how to build Android apps using the Kotlin programming language. There's an emphasis on having fun and lots of badges to earn along the way.

Microsoft's Java Engineering Group is porting OpenJDK to Windows 10 on ARM64-based devices, and has reported that the first phase of the work is now complete.

What Is Virtual Reality? How Can I Use It? These questions can be answered by following a series of five courses offered on Coursera by Goldsmiths, part of the University of London. You can dip into them for free or enroll in the Specialization and gain a valuable credential. 

The latest release of RavenDB adds the ability to query and index time series data, along with other improvements including the ability to schedule periodic document refreshes, customize database compression, and a host of bug fixes.