Take a break and catch up with the latest articles, book reviews and news posted on this site. This week Sue Gee takes a look at how Easter Eggs have become safer but more accessible and financial spreadsheet expert, Janet Swift, continues to explore the way in which interest rates affects cashflow.
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April 14 - 20, 2022
Featured Articles
Coded Easter Eggs Sue Gee
A software Easter Egg is an intentionally hidden novelty or message concealed for personal reasons within a computer program or application. We take a look at its history and original motivation and see how things changed when Googlers expanded the tradition.
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Cashflow Continued - Annuities Janet Swift
We consider annuities in the second of three chapters devoted to exploring the way in which interest rates affects cashflow. This chapter of Financial Functions with a Spreadsheet explores annuities.
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Programming News and Views
Twitter Commits To Jetpack Compose 20 Apr | Mike James
If you are an Android developer Jetpack Compose is likely to be something that worries you. Unless of course you have the freedom to simply adopt the latest exciting tech - and it seems Twitter has done just that.
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Windows 11's Shockingly Low Adoption 20 Apr | Janet Swift
It is over six months since Windows 11 launched. So how is it doing? According to recent figures it is on fewer than 1.5% of Windows desktop machines, which means that is less popular than Windows XP which is still on 1.7% of desktops more than 7 years after its end of life.
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Ngrok Spring Boot Starter - Tunneling The Easy Way 19 Apr | Nikos Vaggalis
Ngrok Spring Boot Starter makes establishing a tunnel towards your developer machine as easy as adding a dependency to your Spring Boot project.
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GitHub Dependabot Now Warns Of Vulnerabilities 19 Apr | Kay Ewbank
GitHub has updated Dependabot so that the alerts it generates help developers understand how they're affected by a vulnerability. The improvement follows GitHub's recent announcement that Dependabot alerts would be easier to understand and remediate.
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The Best Wordle Initial Guess Is... 18 Apr | Mike James
SLATE - probably. It is amazing that a game as simple as Wordle has taken the world by storm. It gives hope that there might be other similar gems waiting to be unearthed. But what about a good strategy for solving the game?
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Pharo 10 Focuses On Stability 18 Apr | Kay Ewbank
The latest version of Pharo, the open-source Smalltalk-inspired language and core library, has been released, with what the developers describe as a massive system cleanup that has gained speed, removed dead code, and removed old or deprecated frameworks including Glamour, GTTools, and Spec1.
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Easter Eggs - The Hunt Made Easy 17 Apr | Lucy Black
What better time to go looking for Easter Eggs. I'm not referring to chocolate ones in the physical environment, rather to games or jokes that have been coded into the virtual world, waiting for an unsuspecting visitor to be delighted by their discovery.
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Pieter Abbeel Wins 2021 ACM Prize In Computing 15 Apr | Sue Gee
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Pieter Abbeel the recipient of the 2021 ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to robot learning, including learning from demonstrations and deep reinforcement learning for robotic control.
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Five Reasons To Use A VPN 15 Apr | Rita Zeller
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) offer privacy and protection to web users, but does everyone really need one? Some people may believe that since their online activity does not involve anything illegal or suspicious, they “have nothing to hide,” therefore don’t need to be using a VPN. In reality, there’s a lot more to what VPNs can do for your online safety and privacy.
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AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program 14 Apr | Sue Gee
AWS, in partnership with Intel and Udacity, has a new scholarship program to prepare students for careers in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Aimed at "under-represented and under-served" high school and college students, there are 2,000 places on Udacity's AI Programming with Python Nanodegree program.
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Apache Daffodil Gets VS Code Extension 14 Apr | Kay Ewbank
Apache Daffodil has a new extension for VS Code. The Daffodil VS Code Extension is a custom extension developed by Apache for allowing users to debug schemas inside VS Code.
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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
Concluding with the final comment that the book needs a English editor, Ian Stirks verdict is:
This is one of only a few exam books available for DP-300, so in some ways has a captive audience. Depending on your tolerance of bad English, you could rate the book either 2 or 4 out of 5. I did find the book useful for the exam.
Irrespective of the exam, the book’s content is very useful for on-premises SQL Server DBAs who want to move into Azure. I think the book assumes perhaps a few years of SQL Server DBA knowledge.
Added to Book Watch
More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive.
From the I Programmer Library
Recently published:
Programmers think differently from non-programmers, they see and solve problems in a way that the rest of the world doesn't. In this book Mike James takes programming concepts and explains what the skill involves and how a programmer goes about it. In each case, Mike looks at how we convert a dynamic process into a static text that can be understood by other programmers and put into action by a computer. If you're a programmer, his intent is to give you a clearer understanding of what you do so you value it even more.
I Programmer has reported news for over 10 years. You can access I Programmer Weekly back to January 2012 for all the headlines plus the book reviews and articles.
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