Tony is a Geek

As much as I've been in denial....yes, I can now admit I have a problem... ..and that problem is that I've un-expectedly been moving into senior-management. I don't know how it happened, one-day I was happily skipping along, enjoying myself, gorging on all the new technology, new projects, new clients, new colleagues, life was awesome, it was great...and then slowly but surely as the projects started to change, the people started to change, the tasks I was 'expected' to do changed, there was more emphasis on planning, resourcing, organising, 'getting the right people' and it became less about myself being hands-on, physically making solutions to the problems....and then one day last week I was sitting at a meal with the latest project team and a work colleague turned and said to me, "So, how do I become a senior manager like you?". That stumped me.  I'm not a senior manager, am I?  I'm still (mentally at least) young and driven t...

oh no, not another buzzword / Javascript framework for me to be aware of?!? nope.  well, maybe, possibly, actually no.  It's the "new tool" on the block. Okay, so you managed to get through your IT career (from 2000->) by using SOAP, you all recall the lovely XML that was being passed around, hugely complex, nightmare to navigate and get right, schemas always changing, people doing custom stuff and then having the immensely lovely job of parsing all that bloated XML, even if all you wanted was 1 field value. Then REST APIs came along and we all rejoiced, JSON will destroy XML and life will be good.  REST allowed us to use GET, POST, DELETE and we could make endpoints that made sense.  Life was good. As with all things new, the old ways soon caught up. Then we started to pass back via REST lots and lots of data and the UI layer would then have to extract out the actual data it needed.  There was no harm in sending back 10 fields that we currently didn...

Fancy running some Quantum stuff on a Raspberry Pi? Well, now you can....sort of, well, you can run a simulation, it's not going to be a proper Quantum computer is it?, it's a Raspberry Pi. Check out this original article here to find out more . Check out this video to see how you can use QRasp: https://github.com/ordmoj/qrasp

“There are an estimated 3 billion smartphones in the world, and 7 billion connected devices," Googlers Alex Ingerman and Krzys Ostrowski  waxed lyrically . "These phones and devices are constantly generating new data ... Wouldn’t it be better if we could run the data analysis and machine learning right on the devices where that data is generated, and still be able to aggregate together what’s been learned?” https://www.tensorflow.org/federated/ TensorFlow Federated (TFF) is an open-source framework for machine learning and other computations on decentralized data. TFF has been developed to facilitate open research and experimentation with  Federated Learning (FL) , an approach to machine learning where a shared global model is trained across many participating clients that keep their training data locally. For example, FL has been used to train  prediction models for mobile keyboards  without uploading sensitive typing data to servers. TFF enables developers ...

Hey, hang on....what?..... Unity is a games engine, isn't it?.... Well, yes.  Yes, it is.  It helps you to create 3D and 2D games... that deploy to Android phones, iOS phones and Tablets, Web (some limitations) and if you really want to (and have the licenses) to XBox and PS4.... as well as adding in some Augmented Reality (AR) if you want....and some Virtual Reality (VR) output to Samsung Gear / Oculus if you really want to also..... Whoa....sit back and think about that for a second or two.  We have an IDE that allows you to build a UI, really simply, that can be deployed out to multiple devices, can be "smart" in being responsive with the UI and have a single language scripting engine where you can basically write all manner of code in C# that can interface to any backend server based API (written in whatever flavour you want OR someone else's APIs), now we're starting to look promising. How long to setup and make a reasonable app?  Really? a couple of...

( No meerkats in sight ....)  If you want to know what one service from one Cloud provider is in another, check out this guys lovely comparison website, it's very useful if you do Hybrid Cloud solutions (like I do) http://comparecloud.in/ http://comparecloud.in/

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm a little late to the game with this one...but....now most of the bugs have been ironed out, it's a good time to check it out! https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/05/10/launching-3d-game-kit-explore-and-learn-unity-in-3d/ I was using an "old" version of Unity, I think it was 2018.2.xxx and when I added the 3D-Game-Kit asset, I received lots of errors about namespaces missing etc... after a bit of searching, I saw a load of workarounds and a variety of posts and I was about to give up and switch to using Unreal Engine, then I thought...I'll give it one last go.... That's when I decided to upgrade to Unity 2018.3.3f1 and then added the 3D-Game-Kit as an asset - and voila! it just worked.  I worked very well in fact and I'm using a 2013 Macbook Pro. Check it out and walk through the tutorial, I was very surprised at just how simple they've made this: https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/s/3d-game-kit admittedly it is hid...

You hear reports that a tiny bit of debris the size of a coin can punch a hole straight through metal and then you wonder just how does the International Space Station avoid the daily barrage of debris without major incident.  That raises an eyebrow of curiosity itself, then you start wondering, just how much "stuff" is floating around outside this little planet of ours... A quick duck-duck-go search later and I found this great little website:   http://stuffin.space/ http://stuffin.space/?intldes=1958-002B&search= well, if I was looking for a parking space from space, I think I'd try a different planet, this one looks like it's going to be far too difficult to approach successfully........ might explain the decline in UFO sightings ;-)

All about Robots...in one single place.... All about Robots. Did I mention, this is the GO TO place for Robots. Go now.  Do as your robotic overlords tell you.  Go..... https://robots.ieee.org/ https://robots.ieee.org/

updated website: http://www.kustomvanguard.co.uk/ updated website:  http://www.kustomvanguard.co.uk/ updated website:  http://www.kustomvanguard.co.uk/