New Anime Series: Strike the Blood

October 29, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

First Episode(s) Review for: Strike the Blood

Summary:

A super vampire comes about every so often capable of shaking the stability of the world, this time its a young lad who really does not want the job and realises fully what damage he could cause, adding to his problems is the young female demon hunter (who is world inexperienced but very violent) that is sent to watch after him.

Animation:

A “by the numbers” competent production , nothing I would be ashamed to show a none Anime fan but then again nothing that rocks the world.

Plot Potential:

It’s a good background Anime (meaning you can glance away from the screen and not miss anything vital to the plot), but with it being very very close to A Certain Scientific Railgun or Stay fate night its going to have some proving to do, thought the male hero not being an Idiot is a good start (I have not face palmed even once)

Music:

American Hard rock (good head banging stuff)

Reminds me of:

A Certain Scientific Railgun ….Hell it’s damn near a copy

Overall:

Good fun and one that I fully expect to be franchised in English for those that need a dubbed version.

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!!

Using Pending and Learning, week 1

October 28, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Just a weekly snapshot of the tech I have used for a client, prepared to use for a client or am learning for the future.

Using

The IBM Collaboration stack ( Atom db2 Websphere Connections Domino etc etc )

Pending

Jboss Rest Easy

Bootstrap

Ext-JS

Learning

Swagger link1 link2

Enunciate

Sales force

fuse ESB

Zen Coding link1 link2

This is over an above the usual suspects of Java , Jquery , github, SVN, Mavin, Jenkins et al, that you need to have a grip on.

Is It Important?

October 25, 2013 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Sometimes with both large clients and multiple small clients, you are though no fault of your own faced with tons of simultaneous jobs at once, all of which are somehow the most important thing since the big bang, containing clients and managers both trying to see who can scream the loudest with you in the middle having to decide which one of the multiple tasks that all have to be done simultaneously you are actually going to do first.

If you tell anyone that someone else’s item is more important than theirs they tend to have a melt down, so the way I have personally found to deal with at least some of it, is a simple important/not important decision,

Important Problems

Ones that cost or make money for a client.
Ones that affect a client’s reputation with the wider world.
Ones that would mean a state of compliance or none compliance with a legal or government office.

Unimportant Problems

Everything else.

Amazingly I have not found manager at a large client that has ever taken me to task for taking a decision on this basis of this logic, so I can recommend it if you are in a pinch and don’t know which way to turn 🙂

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

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.