Its Xmas and Xmas means  Donald Knuth putting on his flamboyant Xmas top and talking to us about something that most of us know nothing about? Of course not. This year it's all about the Knight's Tour which is more interesting than anything a salesman could get up to.

The annual Santa tech-fest is well under way, with Santa trackers from both Google and NORAD counting down to the big day to see how Santa is doing on sorting out who's been naughty and who's been nice. 

Google has "dropped", in the new sense of the term which means "launched", Gemini 3 Flash, the latest Google model. The Gemini team says Gemini 3 offers frontier intelligence and is built for speed at a fraction of the cost. 

The Apache Pulsar team has announced the release of Apache Pulsar Client C++ version 4.0.0. Improvements include support for getting the encryption context on a message, and for getting the producer name of a message. The supported C++ standard has also been upgraded to version 17. 

Agentic AI and MPC are coming on strong in the database market. After the likes of Postgres and Oracle, now it's MongoDB's turn to incorporate MCP.

Microsoft has deprecated IntelliCode extensions for VS Code in favor of GitHub Copilot Chat. While this also provides advanced suggestions and inline completions, its free tier is limited to 2,000 suggestions per month, and as Copilot provides a suggestion with every input, this doesn't last long.

It is official - Xmas is NP hard. See exactly how and appreciate the value of holiday algorithms.

Our top feature this week is a bonus chapter for the highly regarded "Programmer's Guide To Theory", a book in which Mike James sets out to present the fundamental ideas of computer science in an informal, and yet informative, way. Next up we have Ian Elliot explaining the notion of a "First Class Function". Plus the week's news and additions to Book Watch.

We're fast approaching Panic Weekend, when those of us who've been trying to forget about the upcoming holidays face up to the reality that the present giving season is happening whether we're ready or not. So if you're still in need of some festive ideas, we've come up with a few that might rescue you. 

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Let's find out what happened this year.

Claude Scientific Skills give Claude super powers, not just on coding, but about any science. We try them out to see what's on offer.

The Android developer team has announced that Android Studio Otter 2 Feature Drop is stable. Feature Drop is the term used for updates that are built on top of the IntelliJ platform updates, and follow soon after each new "animal" release - in this case Otter.

For me 2025 was the year of the Espressif ESP32 - well it extended back into 2024. By the end of the year I was convinced that for the sort of IoT projects that I want to do around my own home the ESP32 S3 is the single board microcontroller of choice and I heartily recommend it to any programmer wanting to get into the IoT scene.  

Apple can't seem to catch a break at the moment. It keeps appealing and it keeps losing. Now its appeal against an injunction that called for it to reduce fees for external in app purchases has been rejected.

In cooperation with the Nebius AI cloud platform, JetBrains has launched a set of ten free courses for developers that demonstrate how to incorporate AI in their workflow to become 10X productive.

Docker has announced an upgrade to Docker Desktop with improvements including a new Dynamic MCP feature.