Take a break and catch up with the latest articles and news posted on this site. This week Mike James discusses Randomness, a topic that is more subtle than you might imagine. And from our History section we have selected Steve Wozniak - Electronics Genius in celebration of Woz's 75th birthday.
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August 14 - 20, 2025
Featured Articles
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Programmer's Guide To Theory - Random? 20 Aug | Mike James
Randomness is more subtle than you might think and it's not easy to define or detect. This is what this extract from Programmer's Guide to Theory is all about.
<ASIN:1871962439>
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Steve Wozniak - Electronics Genius 15 Aug | Harry Fairhead
Co-designer of the Apple computer, Steve Wozniak is one of the computer pioneers who have changed the way we work and play. He is also something much rarer today, an electronics genius. He has just turned 75, so this seems like a good time to look back on his achievements.
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Programming News and Views
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Python Still Growing - 2024 Developer Survey Results 20 Aug | Janet Swift
The results of the 2024 Python Developers Survey, conducted as a collaborative effort between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains have been published. This was the eighth edition of this survey and reveals that Python encompasses almost all areas of computing.
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NIST Finalizes ‘Lightweight Cryptography’ Standard to Protect Small Devices 20 Aug | Harry Fairhead
The problem of security on small devices is a serious one so it is a good job we have the NIST on the case. Its latest effort is to point us in the direction of a new set of cryptographic functions which are "lightweight" enough to be actually used.
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Grafana 12.1 Adds Monitoring Tool 19 Aug | Kay Ewbank
Grafana 12.1 has been released, with automated health checks for your Grafana instance, streamlined views in Grafana Alerting, and visualization updates. The release follows the major upgrade to Grafana 12 in May, which introduced a new suite of observability-as-code tools to assist with automating observability workflows.
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Java Agent Development Kit Goes GA 19 Aug | Nikos Vaggalis
This is the general availability of the Java's interface to Google's Agent Development Kit, the toolkit for building smart AI agents.
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Go 1.35 Adds Experimental Garbage Collector 18 Aug | Alex Denham
Go 1.25 has been released with an experimental garbage collector that the team says improves the performance of marking and scanning small objects through better locality and CPU scalability.
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Google Releases Open Source Data Extraction Python Library 18 Aug | Kay Ewbank
Google has introduced an open-source Python library that can be used to programmatically extract information while ensuring the outputs are structured and reliably tied back to their source.
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A World First For Humanoid Robots 17 Aug | Lucy Black
Held from 15 to 17 August, the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games has taken place in Beijing. Over 500 robots came together to compete in sports like boxing, football and table tennis, perform dance and martial arts and tackle specific challenges such as sorting medicines.
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Robot Mall, A Bejing 4S Store 15 Aug | Lucy Black
A new robot shop has opened in Beijing to coincide with the World Robot Conference there. With over 100 products from 40 Chinese manufacturers, you can buy everything from mechanical butlers to human-like replicas of Albert Einstein.
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Record Level Of Interest In Google Summer of Code 2025 15 Aug | Sue Gee
Google Summer of Code 1025 is well underway with 1280 contributors from 68 countries coding for 185 mentoring Organizations. Figures from Google show a record level of interest in the program.
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With MCP Docs Servers You'll Never Run Out Of Fresh Documentation 14 Aug | Nikos Vaggalis
MCP has changed the way you interact with your tools overnight. Now it targets your documentation. Wouldn't be great to have the latest and updated code samples and documentation of your favorite framework and libraries ready at your fingertips? Plus, be able to talk to it in natural language?
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Google Jules Coding Assistant Now Available 14 Aug | Kay Ewbank
Google Jules is now generally available, and has had a 'critic' mode added to help reality check the suggestions the tool makes.
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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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Effective Shell (No Starch Press)
This is a hands-on guide for developers who want to master the command line; not just to get around, but to build a fast, flexible, and portable development environment. Dave Kerr says this isn’t a tour of shell commands; it’s a blueprint for creating workflows that scale across machines, teams, and projects. The book goes from keystroke-level efficiency to composing powerful pipelines, writing reliable scripts, and automating common development tasks. Later chapters take it further: managing your configuration with Git, customizing your shell setup, and working seamlessly across remote sessions using tools like Vim and tmux.
<ASIN: 1718504144>
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Practical Reliability Engineering, 6th Ed (Wiley)
With a strong focus on practical engineering applications, in this book Patrick D.T. O’Connor and Andre V. Kleyner offer a balanced blend of reliability theory and real-world applications. This edition has been comprehensively updated to reflect the latest advancements in industry practices and state-of-the-art reliability engineering. Every chapter has been refreshed with new material, and two new chapters ― Repairable Systems and Human Reliability ― have been added.
<ASIN:1394199961 >
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Building a Debugger (No Starch Press)
In this book, subtitled "Write a Native x64 Debugger From Scratch", Sy Brand shows how to master the inner workings of your x64 Linux system and expand your OS expertise by writing your very own debugger using C++. The book covers the entire process of building a debugger for x64 Linux systems using C++. As go from an empty filesystem folder to a fully fledged debugger capable of setting breakpoints, stepping through code, and manipulating variables.
<ASIN:171850408X >
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