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Featured Articles

The ESP32 RISC family is fast, but there is a way to make GPIO lines work even faster. This is an extract from Harry Fairhead's book on programming the ESP32 RISC using C and the Expressif IDF.

Programming News and Views

Amazon Research has just published an overview of the efforts it is making to make AI safe. It all sounds good, but it ignores the fact that AI can never be made "safe" any more than a human can.

EDSAC entered into computer history by performing its first calculation on May 6, 1949 in Cambridge, England under the supervision of Maurice Wilkes. The ambitious project undertaken by the Computer Conservation Society to build a fully functioning replica, capable of running the programs of the 1940's and 50's, has now entered its final commissioning phase and is currently on public display.

Apache has released OpenNLP 3-M3, with new NLP capabilities including support for Roberta-based models via ONNX. This is the third milestone release of the latest version, which is focused on becoming more modular and upgrading the minimum requirement to JDK 21. The 2.5.9 version was released simultaneously with the current stable maintenance branch.

Companies like PlanetScale and Oracle are providing curated libraries of Skills that allow AI coding assistants, such as Claude Code or Cursor, to interact directly with databases.

The team behind DuckDB has released DuckLake, an open-source data lake and catalog format designed to be a lightweight data lakehouse. While it has been developed by the same team as DuckDB, DuckLake is not based on the relational database.

A new TechBrief from the ACM's Technology Policy Council (TPC) outlines the benefits and risks associated with the rise of “vibe coding”.

In the week that Microsoft opens the original DOS we revisit a possibly more important release . Last year, to celebrate Microsoft's 50th Anniversary, Bill Gates shared the original Altair BASIC Source Code as a 157-page pdf of scanned fan-fold paper! It makes for a fascinating read.

New source code from the early days of MS-DOS has been released as open source. The newly available materials provide a look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00. The listings come from Tim Paterson's archives, and include DOS listings, the source code of 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library.

GNU Nano 9.0 has been released. This release aims to provide smoother navigation, with improvements including horizontal scrolling by moving all lines together. It also reassigns Meta keys < and > for scrolling, and has a new backward search option.

Oracle has launched Trusted Answer Search, describing it as an alternative to searches based on large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The platform aims to offer a more tailored alternative for organizations who want to provide a natural language interface for users, but keep the answers to those derived from known and trusted data sources.

Two new client frameworks have been released for Amazon Smithy. The Java client framework can be used to build type-safe, protocol-agnostic Java clients directly from Smithy models, while the Smithy Kotlin client code generation transforms Smithy service models into strongly typed Kotlin clients.

Book Watch

The purpose of this book, which covers the ESP32 RISC V family of C2, C3, C5, C6 and H2 SMBs, is to reveal what you can do with the ESP32's GPIO lines together with widely used sensors, servos and motors and ADCs. After covering the GPIO, outputs and inputs, events and interrupts, Harry Fairhead gives you hands-on experience of PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), the SPI bus, the I2C bus and the 1-Wire bus, the UARTs and, of course, WiFi.

This book explores how AI is transforming cybersecurity and how to implement AI in your organization's cyber defenses to meet today's evolving threat landscape. Caroline Wong examines AI's impact on both offensive and defensive cybersecurity strategies. Wong explains how artificial intelligence has transformed the way cyberattacks are carried out and how technology professionals prepare for and defend against them.

This book explores the Arduino open-source electronics platform used for building interactive projects like home automation tools or robotics. John Nussey's guide for beginners, updated with the newest features and technologies, shows how to put your creative ideas into action using the latest Arduino tools. The book looks at how to choose the projects, Arduino circuit boards, and coding environments that are right for you. With many examples and step-by-step instructions, Nussey provides both inspiration and know-how, so readers can tap into the huge potential of Arduino.

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