Programming News and Views
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What's New With Spot 22 May | Harry Fairhead From nuclear environments to construction sites to manufacturing facilities, Boston Robotic's Spot quadruped robot is proving that agile mobile robots can have a useful role in a wide range of applications across many industries. Spot has recently had hardware upgrades, including a new tablet, and two new additions to its range of payloads. |
May Week 3 21 May | Editor ![]() Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week includes an extract from Raspberry Pi IoT in C on using the DS18B20 temperature sensor and a chapter from Financial Functions with a Spreadsheet that explores what makes a good investment. |
Google Releases ARCore Geospatial API 20 May | Kay Ewbank ![]() Google has launched the ARCore Geospatial API in ARCore SDKs for Android and iOS across all compatible ARCore-enabled devices. ARCore is Google's AR developer platform that provides developer tools for creating augmented reality applications that blend the digital and physical worlds. |
Grace Hopper Award Recognizes Contribution To Secure Computation 20 May | Sue Gee Raluca Ada Popa, an associate professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for the design of secure distributed systems. These systems protect confidentiality against attackers with full access to servers while maintaining full functionality. |
Kafka Adds KRaft-Based Authorizer 19 May | Kay Ewbank ![]() Apache Kafka, the distributed streaming platform that can be used for building real-time streaming data pipelines between systems or applications, has been updated with improvements including a KRaft-based authorizer and a proposal for marking KRaft mode as production ready in Apache Kafka 3.3. |
Striim Launched On Google Cloud 19 May | Kay Ewbank ![]() A new service that offers Google Cloud customers real-time streaming data integration and analytics has been launched by Striim. Striim Cloud on Google Cloud is claimed to be the fastest way for customers to deliver real-time data and insights to power business intelligence and decision-making. |
Gato And Artificial General Intelligence 18 May | Mike James ![]() DeepMind has set the cat among the pigeons - again. Gato is a transformer model trained on a range of different subject areas that claims to be a "multi-modal" solution, i.e. it's an AI that can do more than one thing well. This isn't in dispute, but the idea that this is the solution to Artificial General Intelligence is... |
Scratch At 15 - Worth Knowing About 18 May | Sue Gee This week is Scratch Week, a global, virtual celebration of the block programming language for kids from MIT that this year celebrates its 15th anniversary. |
Kalix-NoOps High-performance Microservices and APIs 17 May | Nikos Vaggalis ![]() What Kalix Platform-as-a-Service promises is massive - a way to write cloud applications based on Kubernetes under a unified API abstracting the lower layers away. |
Meta Donates Jest To OpenJS Foundation 17 May | Kay Ewbank ![]() Meta Open Source is transferring Jest, its open source JavaScript testing framework, to the OpenJS Foundation. Jest is the most used testing framework measured by weekly downloads (17 million a week) and by GitHub stars - over 38,000. |
Dash Dash - Making Linux Documentation More Approachable 16 May | Nikos Vaggalis Dash Dash is a new website that aims to prettify the ugly that is the Man Pages. What once felt like a maze of weird symbols and hyper intense colors, now are visually subdued and easier to understand. |
Docker Adds Extensions 16 May | Kay Ewbank ![]() The Docker team has announced two major improvements at DockerCon; Docker Extensions and Docker Desktop for Linux. |
Deep Blue Became World Chess Champion 25 Years Ago 15 May | Alex Armstrong Today is the 25th Anniversary of IBM's chess playing supercomputer Deep Blue beating the reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov at his own game, marking a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence. Or was it just a bug? |
May Week 2 14 May | Editor ![]() If you've not visited I Programmer before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to the latest feature articles and to our wide ranging news with its mix of analysis and comment. It also lists the week's addition to Book Watch Archive and our Book Review of the Week. |
Lights, Camera, Sound - AI Improvements to Google Meet 13 May | Sue Gee Updates and new features in Google Meet which will bring welcome improvements to virtual meetings were announced this week at Google I/O. |
Flutter 3 Is Stable For MacOS And Linux 13 May | Kay Ewbank ![]() Flutter 3 has been released and is now stable for macOS and Linux, in addition to Windows. The developers say the new release also offers significant performance improvements as well as mobile and web updates. |
Google Announces AlloyDB To Free Users From Legacy Databases 12 May | Kay Ewbank ![]() Google has announced a preview of AlloyDB for PostgreSQL at Google I/O. The announcement describes the fully-managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database service as providing a powerful option for modernizing the most demanding enterprise database workloads. |
Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ 12 May | Nikos Vaggalis ![]() The Azure Toolkit is a plugin for IntelliJ that provides templates and functionality with which you easily create, develop, test, and deploy Azure applications. The newest version 3.64.0 was recently released. |
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Book Review
Learn Quantum Computing with Python and Q# Wednesday 18 May Author: Dr. Sarah Kaiser and Dr. Chris Granade |
Featured Articles
The Fundamentals of Pointers Mike James ![]() Despite the fact that pointers have been long regarded as "dangerous" they are still deeply embedded in the way we do things. Much of the difficulty in using them stems from not understanding where they originate from. Pointers are a sophisticated abstraction that wraps some fundamentals of assembly language. |
Raspberry Pi IoT In C - The DS18B20 Temperature Sensor Harry Fairhead ![]() The DS18B20 is the most used of the 1-wire devices. Find out how to use it. This is an extract from the newly-published Raspberry Pi IoT in C, Second Edition. |
Investment Analysis Janet Swift ![]() How is it possible to evaluate investments that generate irregular cashflows? We explore how NPV can be used to make investment decisions. This chapter of Financial Functions with a Spreadsheet explores what makes a good investment. |
The Trick Of The Mind - On Being Variable Mike James ![]() This chapter of my new book on the nature of programming is aimed at both programmers and non-programmers. In this extract we look at the idea of a variable something that confuses the beginner and expert alike. |
Just jQuery The Core UI - The DOM Ian Elliot ![]() From the point of view of a JavaScript programmer, the User Interface (UI) is created by HTML tags in the web page. When HTML was first invented there was no intention for it to be the UI for a programming language and so a connection between the elements that make up a page and the code had to be engineered. The result was the Document Object Model, DOM. |
Unhandled Exception!Turing CompleteThis is an over reaction! Just about everything is Turing complete - mostly by accident - and in any case my dishwasher already plays Mario and it took a lot longer than six months... More cartoon fun at xkcd a webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language |
Book Watch
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Book Watch is I Programmer's listing of new books and is compiled using publishers' publicity material. It is not to be read as a review where we provide an independent assessment. Some but by no means all of the books in Book Watch are eventually reviewed.
Machines Like Us (MIT Press) Friday 20 May Subtitled "Toward AI with Common Sense", this book asks how we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise. Ronald J. Brachman and Hector J. Levesque offer an accessible account of how common sense might be built into a machine. They analyze common sense in humans, explain how AI over the years has focused mainly on expertise, and suggest ways to endow an AI system with both common sense and effective reasoning <ASIN: 0262046792> |
PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook (Packt) Wednesday 18 May This is a collection of 175 recipes for database administrators to manage enterprise databases effectively. Simon Riggs and Gianni Ciolli show how to get up and running with all the latest features of PostgreSQL 14. The recipes cover how to tackle a variety of problems and pain points for a database administrator such as creating tables, managing views, improving performance, and securing your database. <ASIN:1803248971> |
Discovering Modern C++, 2nd Ed (Addison-Wesley) Monday 16 May Updated for C++17 and C++ 20, this book teaches C++ using realistic examples. Drawing on experience teaching C++ to physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and students, Peter Gottschling guides readers to sophisticated approaches based on advanced features. <ASIN:0136677649> |
Coding with Scratch (In Easy Steps) Friday 13 May This book, subtitled "Create Awesome Platform Games" is part of the QuestKids set of books aimed at younger children which benefit from the full-color experience of other In Easy Steps titles. This one take readers from Scratch basics through to creating their own driving games in easy steps. Max Wainewright shows how to create each game with challenges to take you to the next level of coding. The book even includes mods to make games more exciting. <ASIN:1840789565> |
Programmer’s Python: Everything is Data (I/O Press) Wednesday 11 May This book is part of a set of Something Completely Different books that look at what makes Python special and sets it apart from other programming languages. Mike James looks at how Python treats data in a distinctly Pythonic way, providing data objects that are very usable and very extensible. From the unlimited precision integers, referred to as bignums, through the choice of a list to play the role of the array, to the availability of the dictionary as a built-in data type, Python never fails to please and this book is what you need to help you make the most of these special features. <ASIN: 1871962595> |
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