News

Code In The Classroom   Wednesday 20 August

Continuing its push to give all school students the opportunity to learn to code, Code.org is inviting educators to check out the beta of its K-5 Computer Science Curriculum, which will be launched in September.

Speed Data Is Enough To Track You   Wednesday 20 August

If I tell you how fast I have been driving and for how long, you might think that the best you can do is to compute the radius of the circle I must be in given my starting point. In fact, the data provides much more information than you might expect and it is usually enough to give your exact route. So tell me your speed and I'll tell you where you have been. 

Bing Developer Assistant   Wednesday 20 August

The new plug in from Microsoft that helps developers find code snippets and samples is available for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. It and has been created by combining two existing Visual Studio extensions - Sample Browser and Bing Code Search.

Intel RealSense Webinars   Tuesday 19 August

Intel's second webinar about its latest RealSense Technology takes place tomorrow August 20th. And if you missed the first one it is now available online.

Gordon Bell Lifelogging at 80   Tuesday 19 August

Gordon Bell turns 80 today, August 19th, 2014. Born in 1934 he has lived through an era in which computers occupied entire building through to being able to carry one in your pocket or around your neck.

Amazon Live App Testing   Monday 18 August

Amazon has released a tool that lets you test mobile apps on a group of users before going fully live.

Google's Blink Not Implementing W3C Pointer Events   Monday 18 August

Since it split away from the WebKit render engine to create Blink, Google has been free to pick and choose what gets implemented. Now we have the news that it has decided to ignore the W3C spec for touch events.

Numerical Methods With Python MOOC Starts Today   Sunday 17 August

An interesting sounding MOOC that will help students implement numerical solution methods in well-designed Python programs starts on August 18.

1000 Kilobots Make Patterns   Sunday 17 August

Self organizing swarms are fascinating. If you have grown bored with watching ants or termites do their thing, you can now watch a swarm of 1000 tiny robots making shapes without anyone having overall control. 

Realtime Facial Tracking and Animation   Saturday 16 August

A video from SIGGRAPH 2014 presents a fully automatic approach to realtime facial tracking and animation which doesn't require calibration for different individuals and seems suitable for deployment in consumer-level applications. See the video to appreciate how good it is at getting an avatar to follow your facial expressions.

Keeping Open Source Safe   Friday 15 August

While large open source software projects benefit from having thousands of people contributing, that openness also leaves them open to problems, as a recent spate of patches for the Linux kernel shows.

Facebook Cup 2015 Scheduled For January   Friday 15 August

The dates have been announced for the 2015 Facebook Hacker Cup contest  and registration is now open. All the online rounds will take place in January 2015.

JetBrains Upsource   Thursday 14 August

A browser-based code viewer designed to be a team developer tool has been released in an early access program by JetBrains.

Goodbye Google Maps API for Flash   Thursday 14 August

The, already deprecated, Google Maps API for Flash will be finally switched off on September 2nd. So if you haven't already migrated to the JavaScript version you need to do so pdq (pretty darn quick).

Programming Tribes   Thursday 14 August

Why is it that certain groups exhibit what you might call inessential characteristics. It is as if you suddenly encountered a group of music fans who all had red hair. What has red hair to do with that particular music genre? What then has the use of email lists got to do with open source?

The Core

Android Adventures - A NumberPicker DialogFragment Project   Thursday 14 August

There comes a time when you need to see a complete example and this chapter of Android Adventures is exactly that. It constructs from the beginning a dialog containing a variable number of NumberPickers to demonstrate how to create a UI on the fly and how to make use of DialogFragment.

History

Gordon Bell And DEC - The Mini Computer Era   Tuesday 19 August

Gordon Bell is responsible for many things, but the design of the most successful range of minicomputers, the PDP range, is probably the thing he is best known for. This is a story about when computers were big, but getting smaller...