News

Firefox Phones Go On Sale   Wednesday 24 April

The first batch of the eagerly awaited Firefox OS developer phones went on sale yesterday and were quickly sold out. If you want to catch the second batch act quickly because Geeksphone has already restocked.

MS Donates 400 pages to Web Documentation Project   Wednesday 24 April

Microsoft has donated more than 400 pages of JavaScript reference materials to the Web Platform Docs project to fill a need for reference documentation on this topic.

New XAML and HTML Controls in NetAdvantage Ultimate 2013   Wednesday 24 April

The latest release of Infragistic's subscription-based user interface and user experience toolsets introduces  NetAdvantage for Windows UI and includes Indigo Studio.

Kenneth Appel Remembered For Four Color Theorem Proof   Tuesday 23 April

Kenneth Appel (1932-2013) together with Wolfgang Haken, proved the four color theorem and broke new ground in using a computer to complete the proof. For the first time a computer played a major role in proving a major mathematical theorem.

Mozilla WebRTC Goes Mainstream   Tuesday 23 April

Mozilla's first implementation of WebRTC will be released soon. What will this mean for developers?

ArduinoDroid - An Arduino IDE for Android   Tuesday 23 April

Do you want to develop for Arduino directly from Android? ArduinoDroid is a free app that will let you edit, compile and upload sketches to your Arduino board directly from an Android phone or tablet.

Is Excel To Blame For Our Economic Pain?   Monday 22 April

Two economists whose work has been used to argue against government spending to revive the US economy have acknowledged some fundamental spreadsheet blunders. This has led to other Excel errors being exposed and blame for the mistakes being heaped on spreadsheet use rather than the users.

Android - An Illustrated History   Monday 22 April

Since its debut in 2008, Android has released 39 version updates with feature additions, improvements and fixes. The major milestones have been recorded in this visual timeline.

Virtual Machine Learning Summit   Monday 22 April

Microsoft Research is holding its Machine Learning Summit at Microsoft's "Le Campus" in Paris. But if you are not attending in person. Keynotes and the interviews from the event will be streamed live, complete with online Q&A sessions.

JavaScript Physics Playground   Sunday 21 April

Physics Playground lets you interactively build simple shapes and torture them mercilessly - all in the interests of physics of course. The best bit it that the code is all in JavaScript and ready for you to look at and edit.

Role Playing Game Programmed as Excel Spreadsheet   Sunday 21 April

Professional accountant Cary Walkin has used Microsoft Excel to create a full length turn-based role-playing strategy game. Arena.xlsm features over 2,000  enemies, 1,000 weapon variants, 31 spells and four different endings depending on how players tackle the adventure. 

Evolving Soft Robots   Saturday 20 April

The genetic algorithm can be used to evolve solutions to all types of problem. The latest work demonstrates how it can evolve "soft robots" with body parts built from a range of materials. 

QBASIC Game On Steam Greenlight   Saturday 20 April

Black Annex, a game written in 12,000 lines of QBASIC is gaining lots of support on Steam Greenlight -  partly because of the affection the community has for QBASIC itself.

HTML5 - Intel Inside!   Friday 19 April

What is Intel up to? It has just released a set of really good HLML5 tools, potentially the best yet, that allows you to create  apps that are platform independent. This raises more questions that it answers. Why is an "Intel Inside" sticker on HTML5 so important?

Java 8 Delayed   Friday 19 April

Java Development Kit 8, planned for September 2013, is being delayed until next year because of ‘a renewed focus on security’.

jQuery 2.0 Leaves Behind Older IE Browsers   Friday 19 April

JQuery 2.0 has been released. It is smaller and faster due to not supporting Internet Explorer prior to IE9, a move that pleases most developers.

Oracle Releases Java Critical Patch Updates   Thursday 18 April

Two new major security updates have been issued by Oracle for Java for Mac OS and the Windows browser plug-in, each fixing a large number of severe vulnerabilities.

Microsoft Wins Award for Infer.NET Bayesian Modeler   Thursday 18 April

Microsoft has won one of the ten Patents for Humanity awards bestowed for the first time by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for providing machine learning tools that allow health researchers to better analyze large data sets.

Google - We Have Ways Of Making You Smile   Thursday 18 April

It might even be that Google Research has found a way to stop you from looking silly in group photos. We all know that taking a group photo is hard. Just try to keep everyone's attention while you compose the shot! And you can be sure that in any group photo at least one person has their eyes shut at the moment you hit the button.

Professional Programmer

Perlito - An Interview With Flávio Glock   Friday 19 April

In this interview, which completes a trilogy on implementations of Perl 6, we talk to Flávio Glock about Perlito, the compiler collection that implements a subset of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It is a very interesting discussion that revolves around topics like parsing, bootstraping, VM's, optimizations and much more.

The Core

Advanced Python Arrays - Introducing NumPy   Sunday 21 April

Python arrays are powerful, but they can confuse programmers familiar with other languages. In this follow-on to our first look at Python arrays we examine some of the problems of working with lists as arrays and discover the power of the NumPy array.

Babbage's Bag

Data Structures Part II - Stacks And Trees   Wednesday 24 April

Part II of our look at data takes us into more sophisticated structures that are fundamental to computing  - stacks, queues, deques and trees. If you don't know about these four then you are going to find programming tough and you will have to reinvent the wheel to solve otherwise simple problems.