August Week 2
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 14 August 2021

Get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer with our weekly digest. It summarizes the week's news together with links to the week's book review and the titles selected for Book Watch Archive. This week Ian Elliot discusses how to test and modify bit patterns with JavaScript's Canvas graphics and, from our History Section, a look back to the phenomenal success of Lotus 1-2-3.

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IP2

August 5 - 11, 2021

Featured Articles     

JavaScript Canvas Bit Manipulation
Ian Elliot
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If you are going to work with bitmaps at the most basic level you have to know how to test and modify bit patterns. The reason is that each pixel is stored using a set of bits to record each of the color channels. 


Mitch Kapor and Lotus 1-2-3
Historian
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The spreadsheet was a remarkable  invention and yet the people who pioneered it didn't reap all the rewards they should have. Today we take spreadsheets for granted, but there is fascinating story lurking behind the scenes.

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Programming News and Views   


Programmers Start Young
11 Aug | Sue Gee
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Over half of the respondents to this year's Stack Overflow Developer Survey wrote their first line of code between the ages of 11 and 17. Somewhat surprisingly, school doesn't figure as much for where younger developers learned to code as for the older ones.


Codex - English To Code
11 Aug | Mike James
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Open AI has a new release of its GP3-based code generation tool, Codex. Basically you talk to the program and it creates the code you would have written if you hadn't spent the time talking to it. It is also the basis for the better known GitHub Copilot, but it isn't clear whether the update will propagate. So are all our futures in jeopardy?


JetBrains Space Adds Notification Support
10 Aug | Kay Ewbank
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JetBrains has added notification support to Space, its integrated team environment and collaboration software. The notification support adds a way to configure notifications about events in a team's work environment.


HackerSploit Docker Security Essentials
10 Aug | Nikos Vaggalis
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Docker has certainly become one of the most important parts of business infrastructure. Equally important is the question on how to secure it.This HackerSploit course, made in cooperation with Linode, has the answer.


Microsoft's New Support For Eclipse Foundation
09 Aug | Sue Gee
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Microsoft has become a Strategic Member of the Eclipse Foundation with Stephen Walli, Principal Program Manager in the Azure Office of the CTO, joining the foundation's board of directors.



Mozilla Common Voice Adds New Languages
09 Aug | Kay Ewbank
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The Mozilla Common Voice initiative has released a new, expanded data set featuring 16 new languages including Basaa and Kazakh, along with 4,622 new hours of speech.


Android Alter 3 Sings Its Way Into Our Consciousness
08 Aug | David Conrad
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How can robots help us understand the meaning of human life? This theme has been explored in works of fiction ever since Karel Čapek coined the term. This month sees the world premiere in Japan of a new opera "Super Angels" starring the android Alter 3.


New Hutter Prize Milestone For Lossless Compression
06 Aug | Mike James
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A new milestone has been achieved in the endeavour to develop a lossless compression algorithm. Artemiy Margaritov, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh has been awarded a prize of 9000 Euros ($10,632) for beating the previous Hutter Prize benchmark by 1.13%.


Facebook Hacker Cup 2021 Registration Round
06 Aug | Kay Ewbank
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The annual Facebook Hacker Cup registration is open now, and registration round takes place between August 27 and 30.


What Programmers Want, Love Or Dread
05 Aug | Janet Swift
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The 2021 Stack Overflow Survey Report has been published with a plethora of detail about who developers are, their experience and their preferences. As previously JavaScript is the prevalent language and  Visual Studio Code is the most used IDE.


IntelliJ IDEA Adds Project-Wide Analysis
05 Aug | Kay Ewbank
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IntelliJ IDEA has been updated with improvements including a new project-wide analysis feature that can track errors all the way through projects before compiling them. Maven and Gradle support has also been improved.

 
 

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Books of the Week

If you want to purchase, or to know more about, any of the titles listed below from Amazon, click on the book jackets at the top of the right sidebar. If you do make Amazon purchases after this, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a small source of revenue that enables us to continue posting.

Full Review 

  • The Big Book of Small Python Projects (No Starch Press)
    Reviewer: Lucy Black  Rating: 4  out of 5  

    Verdict: If you aren't happy learning by doing then you probably won't get much from this book. Even so, it's worth buying if any of the projects spark your imagination - or if you are looking for projects to hand out to a class.

Added to Book Watch  

More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive.

From the I Programmer Library

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Last Updated ( Saturday, 14 August 2021 )