News

Grace Hopper - Building On Her Legacy   Wednesday 28 January

It won't come as news to hear about gender imbalance in our industry. There are however a range of initiatives to address the low proportion of women in tech jobs, including this "Amazing Grace" cartoon comic.

Twitter Can Identify Heart Disease   Wednesday 28 January

 Researchers have shown that Twitter can serve as a dashboard indicator of a community’s psychological well-being and can predict rates of heart disease.

WebRTC Leaks Local IP Addresses   Wednesday 28 January

The law of unintended consequences seems to have been applied to WebRTC because one small useful feature can be turned into the perfect user tracker. 

Microsoft Puts Orleans Code On GitHub   Tuesday 27 January

Microsoft has open-sourced Project Orleans a framework for writing highly scalable services that aims to simplify development of scalable cloud services.

Pluralsight Acquires Code School   Tuesday 27 January

Code School is the latest training provider to join Pluralsight. To celebrate the acquisition Pluralsight it offering 72-hour free access to its own and Code School's courses if you sign up by noon EST on Friday January 30.

GitHub Enterprise 2.1 Released   Monday 26 January

GitHub has released an updated version of GitHub Enterprise, with new features including LDAP synchronization and support for OpenStack KVM.

Elevator Saga - An Addictive Programming Challenge   Monday 26 January

Elevators are simple - right? They just go up and down and move people. But if you are a programmer, waiting for one can prompt the thought.could this be done better? The Elevator Saga is a game where you get to schedule their movements. It isn't easy and it is addictive. 

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 Released   Monday 26 January

The VS team has released CTP 5 of Visual Studio 2015, with new features in debugging, diagnostics, and ASP.NET 5. 

Alan Turing Notebook To Be Auctioned   Sunday 25 January

A notebook containing handwritten notes made by Alan Turing while he was working at Bletchley Park in 1942 is expected to sell for at least seven figures.

R Is For Robot - A Coloring Book From AdaFruit   Saturday 24 January

If you have a small person who loves robots, then this might be an excellent present. In fact you don't have to be that small to be enthusiastic about it. 

Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded Dahl-Nygaard Prize   Friday 23 January

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, is the 2015 recipient of the Senior Dahl-Nygaard Prize, considered the most prestigious prize in object-oriented computer science.

Microsoft's HoloLens - Not Holographic But Interesting   Friday 23 January

At its PR event for Windows 10, Microsoft announced an interesting new interface device - the HoloLens. It brings 3D virtual reality to Windows and is a great, if slightly over-hyped, idea.

TypeScript 1.4   Friday 23 January

Microsoft has announced TypeScript 1.4, with union types, type guards, and more.

Windows 10 Cannot Fail - It's Free   Thursday 22 January

Microsoft has just released new information about Windows 10 and some other stuff - but let's concentrate on the important news for the near future. The world is going to be running Windows 10.

Facebook Shares Deep Learning Tools   Thursday 22 January

Facebook AI Research has announced that is open sourcing the deep-learning modules that enable it to train larger neural nets in less time than those already available.

Computing Teachers Concerned That Pupils Know More Than Them - Updated   Thursday 22 January

A survey of UK schools carried out by Microsoft and Computing at School reveals some worrying statistics that are probably more widely applicable. Update: see the new video.

The Core

Fuzzy Logic And Uncertainty In AI   Tuesday 26 October

Things get very messy when you move away from mathematically founded theories like probability. What does it mean to say that you are 70% sure of something? Can you create a theory of the credible verses the unlikely that lets programs reason like we do? Perhaps. 

Exploring Edison - Meet Edison   Saturday 24 January

The Intel Edison is a very attractive single board computer for IoT projects. It has WiFi and Bluetooth as standard and it's cheap. The only minor downside is the it doesn't seem quite as easy to use as an Arduino, but when you understand it a little better you'll find it is both flexible and powerful.