News

Open Source Font Designed For Code   Wednesday 26 September

Source Code is part of Adobe's recently released Source Sans Pro family and is a monospaced font that is integrated into Adobe Edge Code, part of the Adobe Edge suite for web developers.

Azure SQL Updates   Wednesday 26 September

New features have been added to the Windows Azure SQL database through service updates.

ACE Editor Reaches 1.0   Wednesday 26 September

The open source embeddable code editor ACE is now available as version 1.0, along with a new website.

Yahoo YUI JavaScript Framework Updated   Tuesday 25 September

The Yahoo User Interface (YUI) framework has been updated to be faster with extra features.

NAG Updates C Library   Tuesday 25 September

The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) has announced a major update to its library of numerical routines for C and C++ programmers, including new optimizers.

SQL Server 2012 SP1 CTP   Tuesday 25 September

A preview build of SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 is now available for download.

Project Austin - A Case Study In Modern C++   Monday 24 September

Project Austin is recreating the abandoned Microsoft Courier tablet's note taking software. What is really interesting, however, is that this is a show case for modern C++ as envisaged by Microsoft.

Looking Forward to JavaOne   Monday 24 September

This year's JavaOne Conference takes place in San Francisco from September 30 to October 4 - and you can  register in advance online until Friday September 28.

Oracle Login Weakness   Monday 24 September

A flaw in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases could leave systems open to remote attack.

App Users Dislike Data Requests   Sunday 23 September

If your mobile apps share or collect personal information, you risk losing customers, a new report has found.

Responsive Web Design - A Paradigm Shift   Sunday 23 September

A web page or app has a big problem to solve-  how to look good on the range of different screen sizes that are going to be used to view it. The new way of doing things is not to code up a version for each viewing format, but to use responsive web design.

Cirque du Soleil Breaks New Ground With Chrome Experiment   Sunday 23 September

A new Chrome Experiment proves you don't need a Kinect to create a Natural User Interface and you don't need WebGL to create stunning 3D scenes.

Free Face SDK For Windows Phone   Saturday 22 September

With the recent takeover of Face.com by Facebook, programmers have had to rethink how to do face detection tasks. If you don't want to trust a web-based API, what about running one on a phone? Microsoft has the SDK you are looking for.

Record Breaking QR Code   Saturday 22 September

A vast corn maze is the world's largest Quick Response code - and if you happen to  overfly it you can discover that it works.  Have QR codes finally found the field they were invented for?

W3C Announce HTML5 To Be Ready Nearly A Decade Early   Friday 21 September

One of the complaints about the W3C is that it didn't push the HTML standard forward fast enough. Now in a sudden announcement it plans to make HTML5 complete by the end of 2014 - but only by shrinking down what we mean by HTML5.

Craigslist - SQL or NoSQL?   Friday 21 September

Craigslist’s Jeremy Zawodny’s presentation on data storage technologies at Craigslist is available as a video, and gives some fascinating insights into why Craigslist has made various choices of technology.

See Python Run - Free Visualization Tool   Friday 21 September

Making the connection between the text of a program and what it does is the key to learning to program. A new Python based tool makes this much easier as it actually shows you what the program's inner workings are doing as it runs.

Raspberry Pi Web IDE   Thursday 20 September

The Raspberry Pi is a very cheap and reasonably powerful computing device but to get to work with it you have to master Linux. An easier way might be to use a Web IDE.

Azure plugin for Eclipse with Java   Thursday 20 September

Microsoft has released an updated preview of the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java.

IBM Hot Data In A Flash   Thursday 20 September

IBM researchers have developed faster data retrieval using distributed flash caching.

The Core

jQuery Promises, Deferred & WebWorkers   Friday 21 September

It is fairly easy to consume promises returned by asynchronous functions that other programmers have put together for you. It is only a little more difficult to use promises and within your own asynchronous functions. Let's see how it works.

eBooks

Java Class Inheritance   Monday 24 September

Working with classes and objects is a very sophisticated approach to programming. You can't expect to absorb all of its implications in one go. We have already looked at the basics of class and objects. Now we need to look at encapsulation, constructors, overloading and inheritance.

Babbage's Bag

Finite State Machines   Wednesday 26 September

Finite state machines may sound like a very dry and boring topic but they reveal a lot about the power of different types of computing machine.  Every Turing machine includes a finite state machine so there is a sense in which they come first. They also turn out to be very useful in practice.