New Anime Series: Galilei Donna

October 24, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

First Episode(s) Review for: Galilei Donna

Summary:

Three brilliant sisters of various ages born of brilliant but very dysfunctional parents get caught up in a mystery involving pirates and other exciting space things (don’t look at me I don’t know whats going on at the moment but its something to do with Galileo)

Animation:

A mixture of muted cell and computer animation, its nothing to write home about and the computer overlay is not of the best, but they have done a good job of the facial expressions of the characters.

Plot Potential:

Best plot so far of this season, I genuinely don’t know whats going on, hoping it wont turn into the plot of National Treasure

Music:

Nothing that stands out

Reminds me of:

Strangely a mix of Outlaw Star and dragon ball GT

Overall:

Brill plot, cant wait for each episode

Disclaimer: These are mini reviews of anime’s that are fresh out in Japan and are not licensed in the UK, buy them once they have been licensed or at the very least buy the merchandise, remember if the anime makers make a loss, THEY WILL STOP MAKING ANIME!!

Transparent Children

October 23, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Part of the work LDC have been doing for Wellesley Information Services on the Socialbizug.org site has been a upgrade of the home page

One of the upgrades was a overhaul of the Content Spotlight (basically a carousel of stories), but it had a niggly bug that was identified, in which the text showing inside a semi transparent area that was its self semi transparent

Just does not quite right does it? the CSS for this is as follows

div.content {
    background:#000;
    opacity:0.65;
    filter:alpha(opacity=90);
    -ms-filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=90);  
}

Playing with the CSS Opacity property of the child text properties makes no difference and that is totally expected, Opacity works like that (boooo!!), the traditional work around if you want none transparent text inside a transparent element is to NOT have the text/object as a child, but rather a peer and then move it into the correct place via css, for this situation that sucks as the whole Content Spotlight is generated via Java script, thankfully we have a lovely little alternative for modern browsers and that is the [RGBA Colors](http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_colors_legal.asp) setting for the background property, which allows you to set the Red Green Blue and Opacity values for an element and this does not ruffle down to the child elements, like so:

div.content {
    background:#000;
    /* opacity:0.65;
   filter:alpha(opacity=90);
   -ms-filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=90);  IE */
        background: rgba(0, 0 ,0 ,.65);
}

Which suddenly fixes our problem and makes everything look nice again.

New Anime Series: Unbreakable Machine Doll

October 22, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

First Episode(s) Review for: Unbreakable Machine Doll

Summary:

A boy and his “doll” (a full size and life like robotic girl complete with wedding day dreams) arrives at a Hogwarts style school that specialises in the robotic battle arts, he burns with the desire to become the most powerful ‘puppeteer’ so that he can reek revenge on someone (we don’t know who yet)

Animation:

This is a standard very well draw anime, of the type they produce when “England” is in some way involved, smokey and full of filtered light

Plot Potential:

I was surprised to find that the hero is rated as completely naff in the school, no naturally talented, no hidden powers, providing they don’t reveal too much too soon this should be good, also as the advanced dolls are sentient, the possible variety of characters is huge

Music:

not bad, not up to the visual side, but not bad

Reminds me of:

Gosick + Angelic Layer

Overall:

A really watchable series, i really hope its ongoing, its based on a 12 volume series so i hope it goes on for at least 26 episodes

UKICON 2013

October 21, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

OK, better late than never, but here is the report form this years UKICON a awesome fun affair which may be the last of its kind, now that IBM are apparently pulling back on the sponsorship of such (a truly insane plan if you want my option), even knowing that everyone was fired up and I got good audience participation which makes it worthwhile.

Now this was my first conference were IBM Connections was the main order of the day, I was luckily enough to be able to present with Gab see Here for her blog entry (for me it was like being allowed to present with GOD!!)

Mine and gabs slide decks are below

Now this year I got nominated for an IBM champion (the fact that it was accepted just shows that someone at IBM has a very sick sense of humour), but I suspect the naming of my solo presentation is not going to help that cause much (ah well)

everything at the conference was organised perfectly, and for me it was all a swirl of groovy people, cool tech, panicky presentations and vodka, a most excellent time.

As always a great thank you to Warren and Kitty (not to mention the rest of the helpers over the years)

Life and Work update

October 21, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Its been ages since I’ve shared what I’ve been up to in here. My bad, how can I justify such a terrible absence of updates?

Well the major news is that I’ve taken the plunge and I am going properly freelance in line with our plans for LDC. Its been good to see my LDC compadres Matt and Julian make a success of it and its exciting to now be on the same road. The stuff I’m doing is varying hugely, from dealing with the security and standards implications of the storage of details for minors, though application clustering on cloud services for the lowest cost, past IBM connections customisation and freaky Java on domino and finishing with cutting edge mobile on the latest frameworks.

And its been great, I’m enjoying the variety and getting to grips with new projects. Plus I’ve been doing some fascinating development work for start-ups which enable me to work on things that are truly objects of grace and beauty.

So it’s going well, and if you have stuff you want doing please give me a kick (all my contact methods are on the top left of this page). Always glad to talk it over.