Hallo, Salaam, Hello, Bonjour, Hola!

I'm Phil, a Berlin-based software startup founder building MetaLeap, a platform and a tool suite for the New Enterprise. I occasionally blog here about what I mean by that, the progress I'm making (or not), software startup entrepreneurship and web-based software development.

To bootstrap my startup, I am also a freelance software developer, consultant, architect and coach, specialising on the full Microsoft stack (.NET / F# / C# / SharePoint / SQL) as well as agile, functional web-based software development based on cross-platform, open source technology (Python / Lisp / Ruby, all with or without frameworks such as Mako+Werkzeug / Django / Rails / Merb).


And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good...
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

What's new:

jQuery Color Animations: Adding RGBA alpha channel support

// Published 7 October 2008 //

I like using CSS rgba colors — it's freaking awesome to be able to use alpha channels directly with a given color, without having to mess with the CSS opacity settings. I also make heave use of jQuery's pretty sufficient out-of-the-box support for CSS-based animations and transitions. Using John Resig's jQuery plugin for Color Animations, the same good old $.animate() calls can be made to work seamlessly with CSS color properties such as backgroundColor, borderColor, outlineColor, color etc. The catch: RGBA colors are ignored. I tried using the colorBlend fading plugin but found two drawbacks: it had its own $.colorBlend() method rather than working seamlessly with $.animate() — which I didn't particularly mind — but it also caused sustained flickerings in my test cases (yes, even though the change log reported that many flickering bugs had been eliminated) and it doesn't technically work with an RGBA alpha channel but uses CSS opacity properties behind the scenes, which was not what I wanted.

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Pictures on the Road

// Published 7 October 2008 //

I love being on the move. For those of you who don't follow me on Facebook, here are pictures of my recent trips and tours through Germany, Poland, Turkey and Bulgaria for your entertainment:

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