"Online Python Tutor is a free educational tool that helps students overcome a fundamental barrier to learning programming: understanding what happens as the computer executes each line of a program's source code. Using this tool, a teacher or student can write a Python program directly in the web browser and visualize what the computer is doing step-by-step as it executes the program."

"The major new feature of the company's new iOS 6 mobile operating system is a new mapping module developed by Apple itself - a replacement for the Google-supplied maps that have been standard on the iPhone since it debuted in 2007. It is a change borne not of user demand, but of corporate politics: Google's Android platform is the biggest competitive threat to the iPhone, so Apple is cutting ties with Google. iPhone owners might have loved Google Maps, but Apple has no love for Google. Unfortunately, Apple's new maps are simply not as good as Google's." That's putting it mildly - my own town barely even exists on Apple's maps. It's basically a trainwreck, and according to The Verge, Apple has been working on this for the past five years. This is what happens when a company cares more about stupid grudges than its customers. Considering how much effort it has taken Google to get where it is now with maps, don't expect Apple's maps to even get near Google Maps any times soon. This isn't going to take months - this is going to take several years, if at all.

"The International Trade Commission voted yesterday to investigate Apple for patent infringement allegations launched by the Google-owned Motorola Mobility. As expected, Motorola is asking for import bans on just about every iOS device, including iPhones, iPods, and iPads. What might be surprising is that Motorola is also asking for a ban on every type of Mac OS X computer, claiming Apple's iMessage technology infringes a Motorola patent." Let's hope all those products get banned. And that all Motorola phones get banned. Let's hope everything gets banned from the US. And yes, I changed Motorola into Google for the headline.

Apple has released both iOS 6 and OS X 10.8.2 today. We already covered iOS 6 when it was announced (as has the rest of the web). The OS X update adds a number of small features and addresses a load of bugs. Have fun!

"Stephen Elop only has a few months to show he can turn Nokia around if he is to survive but the new smartphone is unlikely to woo customers back from Apple and Samsung. Investors and analysts say the chief executive has until early 2013 to prove he made the right choice by partnering with Microsoft Windows or his future at the loss-making company will be called into question." Well, I'll be doing my part. I'm buying a 920.

From the BioWare blog: "Today, BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have announced they are retiring from BioWare." Dragon Age II may have been an abomination of a game, and Mass Effect 2 had some considerable issues as well, but that doesn't negate the fact that BioWare has created some of the best games in history. Thanks, guys, for hundreds and hundreds of hours of great gaming, and good luck with any future projects.

"Asus has a trio of Windows 8 tablets on deck for the holidays, but the pricing is so high - $599 to $1299 for a hybrid - that it's going to be nearly impossible to compete in the marketplace. We were leaked Asus' holiday roadmap and the slide below tells the tale." If this is for real, Windows 8 is screwed in the tablet space. Nobody is going to buy a Windows tablet at prices higher than the iPad.

Microsoft Office 2013 has received its pricetags. Home and Student - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote - is $140, while Home and Business, which adds Outlook into the mix, is $220. Professional jumps to a whopping $400, but adds Access and Publisher. For $100 per year, you can get the subscription version, which can be installed on up to 5 PCs (both Windows and OS X PCs). In related news, Microsoft still thinks it's 2001.

"Visopsys (VISual OPerating SYStem) is an alternative operating system for PC-compatible computers, developed almost exclusively by one person, Andy McLaughlin, since its inception in 1997. Andy is a 30-something programmer from Canada, who, via Boston and San Jose ended up in London, UK, where he spends much of his spare time developing Visopsys. We had the great fortune to catch up with Andy via email and ask him questions about Visopsys, why he started the project in the first place, and where is it going in the future."

There's a bit of a story going on between Google, Acer, and Alibaba, a Chinese mobile operating system vendor. Acer wanted to ship a device with Alibaba's operating system, but Google asked them not to, and Acer complied. The reason is that Acer is a member of the Open Handset Alliance, which prohibits the promotion of non-standard Android implementations - exactly what Alibaba is shipping. On top of that, Alibaba's application store hosts pirated Android applications, including ones from Google.

"'We are working on this,' Ms. Whitman told Fox Business Network in an interview. 'We have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that would be your first computing device... We are a computing company.'" On the same day the Pre 2 a reader is loaning me arrives in the mail. This is just cruel. Update: "HP Bender Android smartphone appears in benchmark details". Eh.

"As a typical Java developer I never monitored the memory usage of my application apart from following typical best practices like closing the connections, streams etc. Recently we were struck with few issues in our JBoss servers that I had to dig in to the memory management."

"We are proud to announce the open source release of J2ObjC, a Google-authored translator that converts Java source code into Objective-C source for iPhone/iPad applications. J2ObjC enables Java code to be part of an iOS application's build, as no editing of the generated files is necessary. The goal is to write an application's non-UI code (such as data access, or application logic) in Java, which can then be shared by Android apps, web apps (using GWT), and iOS." Huh.

"For the past several years we've been working towards migrating from GCC to Clang/LLVM as our default compiler. We intend to ship FreeBSD 10.0 with Clang as the default compiler on i386 and amd64 platforms. To this end, we will make WITH_CLANG_IS_CC the default on i386 and amd64 platforms on November 4th."