This extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday lists the week's news items, Book Review and additions to Book Watch and the week's two feature articles. This week Mike James explains how to use masks to work with bit patterns in Python and we look at the fascinating story behind the spreadsheet and how Mitch Kapor founded Lotus Development Corporation.
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July 3 - 9, 2025
Featured Articles
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Programmer's Python Data - Bit Masks 07 Jul | Mike James
To work with bit patterns you have to master the mask. Find out what lies behind in this extract from Programmer's Python: Everything is Data.
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Mitch Kapor and Lotus 1-2-3 04 Jul | Historian
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
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Gemini On-Device - Generative AI For Robots 09 Jul | Sue Gee
In that same way Gemini can produce text, write poetry, summarize an article, write code, and generate images, it can also generate robot actions with Gemini Robotics. Now, the new Gemini Robotics On-Device model eliminates the need for a network connection, and its full SDK allows roboticists to train robots with new tasks.
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Perl 5.42 Released - Still Going Strong 09 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis
Just hot out of the oven, there's a new minor version release of the venerable programming language that is Perl.
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Google Introduces Gemini CLI Open-Source Agent 08 Jul | Kay Ewbank
Google is introducing Gemini CLI, an open-source AI agent that offers lightweight access to Gemini, Google's conversational chatbot that is based on Google's multimodal large language model (LLM), also called Gemini, from terminals.
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Windows 11 Overtakes Windows 10 - But Not In Europe 08 Jul | Sue Gee
With the end of support of Windows 10 just three months away, Windows 11 has finally edged ahead of Windows 10 in terms of Desktop Windows Version Market Share on a Worldwide Basis. In Europe, however, Windows 10 still stays firmly ahead.
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Apache Arrow 21 Released 07 Jul | Kay Ewbank
Version 21 of Apache Arrow has been released, including the first official Swift implementation of the platform. Improvements to Arrow 21 include exposing gRPC in the Flight client builder and improvements to Avro read consumers. The Swift implementation has been under development for a couple of years now.
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PNG Gets First Update In Over Twenty Years 07 Jul | Kay Ewbank
PNG, the Portable Network Graphics specification, has been updated to add support for HDR (High Dynamic Range) images and for animated PNGs.
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Chinese Robots Play Three-a-Side Soccer 06 Jul | Lucy Black
Four teams of humanoid robots faced off in fully autonomous 3-on-3 soccer matches in the latest event organized to showcase China’s advances in humanoid robot technology. It was the first such competition in China and a preview for the upcoming World Humanoid Robot Games, set to take place in Beijing.
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Why Drone Shows Are Booming 04 Jul | Lucy Black
What do you need to make a celebration noteworthy? You may automatically think fireworks, especially for Independence Day, but an increasing number of celebrations are turning to drone shows instead.
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Mitch Kapor Gains MSc 45 Years After Dropping Out of MIT 04 Jul | Janet Swift
Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s has completed his MSc from MIT's Sloan School of Management, started in 1979.
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Two Tools To Elevate Your MongoDB Experience 03 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis
The tools contradict each other; the first one allows you to write SQL instead of using Mongo's special syntax, while the other allows you to manipulate the database without having to write SQL and by just employing natural language.
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Mozilla Discontinues DeepSpeech 03 Jul | Kay Ewbank
The DeepSpeech project started by Mozilla has updated its GitHub page with the message "This project is now discontinued", and a change in the project status to archived.
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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 helps us to continue posting.
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Full Review
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JavaScript Crash Course (No Starch Press)
Author: Nick Morgan Publisher: No Starch Date: March 2024 Pages: 376 ISBN: 978-1718502260 Audience: Developers wanting to learn JavaScript Rating: 4 Reviewer: Ian Elliot JavaScript is still a very important language, so why not a crash course?
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Book Watch
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Practical Deep Learning, 2nd Ed (No Starch Press)
Subtitled "A Python Introduction", this book shows how to build working models for tasks from image analysis to creative writing using Python. Ronald T. Kneusel emphasizes practical skill development and experimentation, building to a case study that incorporates everything covered so far to classify audio recordings. Examples of working code you can easily run and modify are provided, and all code is freely available on GitHub.
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Grokking Relational Database Design (Manning)
This book teaches the art of database design through real-world projects, insightful illustrations, and action-oriented learning. Unlike many beginning database books that focus on the technical details of SQL and formal database theory, in this book Qiang Hao and Michail Tsikerdekis teach how to think about relational database design from the ground up. The authors also explore how generative AI tools such as ChatGPT radically simplify the mundane tasks of database design.
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Coding with AI For Dummies (Wiley)
This book introduces the ways that artificial intelligence can make life as a coder easier. Chris Minnick explains the tools that can produce, examine, and fix code for you and looks at how to automate processes like code documentation, debugging, updating, and optimization.
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