The PWM hardware available on the ESP32 is a little more complicated than you might expect and some things might be better achieved using the RMT. This extract is from Programming the ESP32 in MicroPython, part of the I Programmer Library and it shows you how to use the PWM hardware.

Spark is the go-to tool for processing large datasets and performing complex analytics tasks. Running on it Kubernetes offers benefits in resource efficiency, reducing conflicts between jobs competing for resources and fault tolerance.

Microsoft and Anaconda have teamed up to put the power of Python and popular libraries such as numpy, pandas, Matplotlib and seaborn inside Excel allowing a "best of both worlds" scenario for data analysts that promises to be better than either on its own.

Google has announced that it plans to make HTTPS the default on Chrome. Over 90 percent of traffic on Chrome is already to HTTPS sites, but between 5 and 10 percent of traffic remains 'stubbornly' on HTTP, according to the Chromium blog. It this a good move?

The talks presented at the 5th annual Python Web Conference are now available on YouTube. Topics ranged from AI/ML and Big Data to CI/CD, Serverless and more.

IBM has announced IBM Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, an AI-assisted solution designed to make it faster and less risky to modernize COBOL applications.

John Warnock, co-creator of the PostScript Language and co-founder of Adobe Systems, died on August 19th, 2023 at the age of 82.

SQLPage is a fun and innovative open source project that lets you do the presentation layer in plain SQL.

The Vesuvius Challenge was launched in March 2023 with a Grand Prize of $700,000 for the first team to read at least four passages from a Herculaneum Papyri scroll with a deadline of December 31st, 2023. There was quick uptake by the machine learning and computer vision communities. Here's a progress report with details of the latest prize - for finding letters in a scroll.

President Biden has announced a two-year competition to develop better cybersecurity products using AI. The AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) has almost $20 million in prizes, and will see teams compete to develop AI-driven systems to automatically secure critical code.

2022 was GitHub's biggest bug bounty year in its 9-year history. It paid out more than $1.5M in bounties for 364 vulnerabilities, bringing the total rewards via HackerOne since 2016 to $3.8M.

Google has released an early preview of Project IDX, a browser-based development experience built on Google Cloud and powered by Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2. Project IDX is also built on Code OSS, Code-Open Source Software, the core layer of VS Code.

Java and JDK 21 are now feature complete, and are in Rampdown Phase Two. Java 21 is the new Long Term Support (LTS) version, meaning it will be supported for at 5 years by Oracle, and both Java 21 and JDK 21 come with 15 JEPs (Java Enhancement Proposals).

Author: Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols
Publisher: No Starch Press
Date: June 2023
Pages: 560
ISBN: 978-1718503106
Audience: Systems programmers
Rating: 4.8
Reviewer: Mike James

There's a new edition of what has become the standard text on Rust. Has it matured along with Rust?

Subtitled "How the pros use Python and Flask2, This friendly guide shows how the Python ecosystem fits together, and grounds the reader in the skills they need to continue their journey to being a software developer. Doug Farrell builds on Python skills you’ve learned in isolation and shows you how to unify them into a meaningful whole.

This practical guide, subtitled "A Practical Guide to Analyzing Performance in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database" shows how to analyze and troubleshoot SQL Server performance using wait statistics. Thomas LaRock and Enrico van de Laar look at how to identify precisely why queries are running slowly, and how to measure the amount of time consumed by each bottleneck so you can focus attention on making the largest improvements first.

With the strap line "101 true crime stories of people abusing and misusing data", this book starts from the premise that just because there’s data doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right data or people are using it properly. Merrill Albert uses a series of anecdotes to loook at how data problems (data crimes) are caused by people treating data improperly, and what the impact of this is.