Canvas animation is simple - or is it? Just keep drawing the pictures. In this extract from JavaScript Bitmap Graphics With Canvas we look at how it works.

Logic isn't the most exciting of subjects and you might think that it had its day with the Greeks, but you would be wrong. Logic isn't just part of programming, it can be all of  it!  

Researchers have identified another speculative execution vulnerability and this one isn't fixed by the current OS patches. It seems very likely that the era of making processors faster by being clever might  well be over.

The Linux Foundation has expanded its portfolio of free-to-audit training courses on the edX platform. The latest one explores running compute in edge locations with Kubernetes and the open source tool K3s.

The Rust Foundation, the recently formed non-profit organization that has stewardship of the Rust programming language is welcoming Facebook as a new Platinum member, its top-level tier. Four Silver Tier members have also been announced.

Pyodide is now an independent community project rather than being developed in-house at Mozilla. Pyodide provides a way to run Python in web browsers by using a WebAssembly compilation of the CPython interpreter and scientific stack.

The ACM has announced that Michael Franz of the University of California, Irvine is the recipient of the 2020 Chuck Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award in recognition of his development of just-in-time compilation techniques that enable fast and feature-rich web services on the internet.

Microsoft has increased its existing support for the Python, becoming a Visionary Sponsor by making a $150K donation. The funds will be focused on the Packaging Working Group to help with development costs for further improvements to PyPI and the packaging ecosystem. 

After more than a decade of competing in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, Dr. Fill, a computer program devised by Matt Ginsberg came at the top of the rankings. It convincingly beating over 1300 human opponents in another triumph for AI. Its success this time around can be attributed to the contribution of a neural network.

Microsoft has announced that from August 1st it will reduce the amount of revenue it takes on PC games in the Microsoft Store from 30 percent to 12 percent. There are also new tools and greater discoverability to encourage devs to the platform.

Amazon AWS has released an IDE for data scientists and analysts who want to develop apps in R, Python, Scala and PySpark. EMR Studio was previewed at AWS re:Invent 2020 and is now generally available.

TeamCity Cloud, the SaaS version of JetBrains well-established CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) product, allows teams to streamline their software development life cycle in the cloud. 

Mongita, a lightweight embedded document database that implements a commonly-used subset of the MongoDB/PyMongo interface, has been announced. The open source Python library is intended to be useful to Python developers who want to use JSON files but don't want the overhead of a MongoDB server.