News

Clang Now Compiles Chrome For Windows   Wednesday 07 March

This is simple story until you start looking just below the surface. The simple part is that Google has manged to use the Clang compiler to compile Chrome targeting Windows. The real question is why?

Avalonia Cross Platform .NET UI Framework   Wednesday 07 March

The first beta of Avalonia, a cross platform .NET UI framework with XAML, data binding, and lookless controls, has been released. Avalonia can be used to develop XAML-based applications for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Google Provides Free Machine Learning For All   Wednesday 07 March

Google's Machine Learning Crash Course has already been delivered to more than 18,000 Googlers and now it it have been made available for free and to all as part of Learn with Google AI, a new educational resource aimed at every developer.

Twitter Heron Donated To Apache   Tuesday 06 March

Twitter Heron, Twitter's real-time streaming and analytics platform, has been donated to the Apache Incubator program. Heron was open sourced in 2016, and is used to process the billions of events generated at Twitter every day.

Autonomous Driving Resource Open Sourced by Microsoft Garage   Tuesday 06 March

Self-driving cars are arriving much faster than we ever expected. So rather than requiring the Haynes Manual for your next vehicle will you be referring to the Autonomous Driving Cookbook?

Google's New Contributions to Landmark Recognition   Monday 05 March

Google Research is releasing Google-Landmarks, a dataset for the recognition of human-made and natural landmarks. It is also open-sourcing  Deep Local Features (DELF ), an attentive local feature descriptor, suited to the task of landmark recognition.

Webpack 4 Adds WebAssembly Support   Monday 05 March

Webpack 4.0 has been released with improvements including a rewritten plugin system and WebAssembly support. The new release of the JavaScript module bundler is also reported to be up to 98 percent faster.

UPDATE - Data Science Predicts Oscar Winner Correctly   Monday 05 March

This weekend sees the 90th Academy Awards, causing anticipation and tension - there's a lot riding on the Best Picture Award, not only in Hollywood but also across America and around the globe. Thinkful decided to use the power of data science to pick the winner .... and now we know its prediction of The Shape of Water turned out to be the right one.

Google Supporting Grace Hopper Biopic   Sunday 04 March

A big screen biopic on the life, times and achievements of Grace Hopper has been announced by Middleton Media, the company responsible for the Lego Movie (2014) and the television series Bates Motel. Google is backing the project.

Top 5 Tutorials for the Ajax Enthusiast   Friday 02 March

Here are five tutorials for getting to grips with Ajax, a technology that allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging data with a web server behind the scenes. With Ajax, it's possible to update parts of a web page, without a need to reload the whole page.

Java EE Is Renamed Jakarta EE   Friday 02 March

The results are in for the vote on the new name for Java Enterprise Edition, and unsurprisingly the voters have chosen Jakarta EE. The renaming has to happen because Oracle refused to let the name Java be used.

Bill Gates Is A Tabby   Thursday 01 March

Bill Gates prefers tabs to spaces. This admission was made during a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session, his sixth, held on February 27th. As well as reopening a perennial debate, this answer earned him two months of Reddit Gold, although it also caused others pain and distress. 

Visual Spark Studio IDE For Spark Apps   Thursday 01 March

A new free IDE has been released that lets you build, test and run Apache Spark apps on your desktop. Visual Spark Studio is a free cut-down version of the Impetus StreamAnalytix platform. It provides a lightweight development tool for data processing and analytics on Spark data.

The Core

Just JavaScript - Parameters, and Destructuring   Monday 05 March

There are many ways in which JavaScript's approach is different from standard, run of the mill, class-based languages, but some of them go unnoticed. Take the whole subject of parameter passing - JavaScript does it different. An extract from soon-to-be published book by Ian Elliot.

Getting Started with Python   Thursday 01 March

So you want to get up to speed with Python. Here's a lightening tour for the beginning to intermediate programmer who is already familiar with some fundamental programming ideas.