Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week week includes How to Terminate A Process Gracefully with SIGTERM in Kubernetes and an article from our History section celebrating the inventor and computer pioneer, Clive Sinclair.
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August 11 – 17, 2022
SIGTERM, also known as Exit Code 143, is a signal that allows users to terminate a process gracefully within their Kubernetes environments. This signal has its origins in Linux, with its usefulness being one of the main reasons that it has been incorporated into Kubernetes. Often mistaken for SIGKILL, this signal is actually about shutting down processes gracefully.
Not every computer innovation originated in the United States. Clive Sinclair was a designer who could make one transistor do the work of two or more. He built low cost and futuristic electronics by doing things different.
This year’s SIGGRAPH, the most important graphics conference and show on the planet, took place last week – take a look at the fascinating videos showing off the latest in graphics technology, art and CGI.
The Boston Dynamics AI Institute has been founded with initial funding of over $400 million and Marc Raibert at the helm. It has the goal of “solving the most important and difficult challenges facing the creation of advanced robots.”
Microsoft has announced the public preview of Dev Box, a managed service that can be used to create on-demand project-specific cloud-based “workstations” on Azure. Microsoft describes the development environments as high-performance, secure, and ready-to-code.
IBM’s Deep Search for Scientific Discovery (DS4SD) Toolkit has been made available to the public. It comes from the depths of IBM’s research labs using NLP to analyze mass amounts of data.
Go 1.19 has been released with a revised memory model, and changes to the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries.
Godot has been upgraded with improvements including a new navigation server and physics interpolation in 3D.
Neural networks and reinforcement learning have achieved things that only recently seemed like science fiction, but now we have an example of real machine learning from Pieter Abbeel’s Berkeley Robot Learning Lab. A robot dog goes from waving its legs in the air to walking in just one hour and with no external help.
Discrete Math enables you to recognize mathematical structures in real world contexts. It is therefore a valuable skill for software engineers and data scientists. Put together with the ability to think like a programmer and you have a winning combination.
Microsoft has announced that it has made nearly all its 3D emojis available for customization, though mercifully Clippy isn’t included. Microsoft says the move is “aligned with our own design philosophy of designing in the open.”
Azimutt is a free and open source database schema explorer with many great features. I put it to test when designing a Spring Boot application. Here’s what I discovered.
Apache Arrow has been updated with better support for C++, extensions to Flight SQL, and substantial improvements to the Parquet crate.
If you want to purchase, or to know more about, any of the titles listed below from Amazon, click on the book jackets at the top of the right sidebar. If you do make Amazon purchases after this, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a small source of revenue that helps us to continue posting.
Grokking Machine Learning (Manning)
Rating: 5 out of 5 Reviewer: Mike James
Mike’s Verdict:
If you want a book that tells you what ML was like before neural networks became the main deal then this is a great book. It gives you an overview of a wide range of techniques that come under the heading of machine learning – how important these ideas will be for you depends very much on what sort of work you are planning to do. Missing from the account is anything about clustering, dimensional reduction and, my personal favourite topic, discriminant analysis. What the book covers it does very well and it offers lots of insights into how things work – but you do need some math and you need to want to know about these historically important ideas.
Artificial Intelligence in Games (CRC Press)
Python for Data Science (No Starch Press)
More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive.
Latest publications: 
This month sees the publication of the revised second edition of Programmer’s Python: Everything Is An Object in which Mike James reveals how Python has a unique and unifying approach with regards to class and objects. This is the first of a set of titles at intermediate level for the programmer who wants to understand what makes Python special and sets it apart from other programming languages, hence the strap line “Something Completely Different – which is, of course, a reference to the Monty Python TV and film brand that inspired Guido Van Rossum to name his new language. The subject is roughly speaking everything to do with the way Python implements objects. That is, in order of sophistication, metaclass; class; object; attribute; and all of the other facilities such as functions, methods and the many “magic methods” that Python uses to make it all work. 
This is the second of that Something Completely Different titles and explores the way that data is treated in a distinctly Pythonic way. What we have in Python are data objects that are very usable and very extensible. From the unlimited precision integers, referred to as bignums, through the choice of a list to play the role of the array, to the availability of the dictionary as a built-in data type, Python behaves differently to other languages and this book is what you need to help you make the most of these special features. There are also complete chapters on Boolean logic, dates and times, regular expressions and bit manipulation.
MIke James is now working on the third book in the series, Programmer’s Python: Async which not only covers the latest asyncio in depth, but has all you need to know about the many approaches to async that Python provides – threads, processes,futures,tasks, schedulers. This is the book you need to understand all the options, trade-offs and gotchas.
These books aren’t for the complete beginner and some familiarity with both object-oriented programming and Python is assumed, with the first chapter providing a quick recap. They also share an Appendix on using Visual Studio Code from Python. 
Programmers think differently from non-programmers, they see and solve problems in a way that the rest of the world doesn’t. In this book Mike James takes programming concepts and explains what the skill involves and how a programmer goes about it. In each case, Mike looks at how we convert a dynamic process into a static text that can be understood by other programmers and put into action by a computer. If you’re a programmer, his intent is to give you a clearer understanding of what you do so you value it even more. I Programmer has reported news for over 12 years. You can access I Programmer Weekly back to January 2012 for all the headlines plus the book reviews and articles.
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