Retro games are still up there amongst the best titles in the world.
There has been a mini debate amongst the kids in the office about the top 5 retro games.

We came up with the following:

1st: Mario
2nd: Streets of Rage
3rd: Street Fighter
4th: Donkey Kong
5th: Pac Man

We all can't help picking up an old gameboy / nes / snes / n64 / dreamcast / c64 / amiga / atari / megadrive / master system (yea theres many!) and playing it till our thumbs turn raw red!

I still think the old PC games are up there!! Doom, Wolfenstein, Half-Life etc!!
Feeling brave and fancy challenging us? ;)

Man, this LINQ stuff is amazing

I was dubious at first, to be honest.  I'm confortable with SqlCommand and the logic required to build relational data with Foreign Keys and Cascade delete ; "Who needs another data access language??", I said

The more I use LINQ, the more I'm glad it's here.  I did some old school SqlCommand stuff yesterday afternoon, normalising a flat data structure into something a bit more updatable.  Sqlcomands for every different insert, multiple parameters and data types, cycling through DataSets and filling the data as I went.  The debug was a total nightmare with all the hardcoded parameter names and insert statements

The fruit really materialised when I re-did the data access for the site in question.  Strongly-types objects which would only accept normal data, automagically created List<> of related data, so easy to update and even transaction to boot. 

LINQ does enforce a strict data layout and naming convention, but its well worth it

/never looks back!!

Came across this nice little site whilst doing some research for one of my clients the other day.

http://www.wordle.net/create

Lets you create Wordclouds from your own content. Check out the one I created for Creative Jar.

Those of you constantly craving all things arty, get yourselves down to Brick Lane.

From 12th December through to January 5th, Brick Lane Gallery will be exhibiting the work of Italian street artist's El Gato Chimney, Orticanoodles, Ozmo, and Sten/Lex.

A couple of El Gato Chimney's wall pieces.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elgatochimney

Up next; Jon Hammer - self taught graffiti artist, who kicked off his career in the London Underground during London's graffiti "golden age", shows his canvases for the very first time.

http://www.jonhammer.com/

We came across the following Cross Browser JavaScript problem whilst writing a bespoke show/hide function for some client FAQs.

The problem was that we were referencing the 'nextSibling' of an element in our JS using the onClick event. In IE this worked great, however in Firefox the 'nextSibling' could be a line break.

Example:

 <div id=”el1”><img src="imageName.gif" onClick="getNextSibling();" /></div>
 <div id=”el2”>Some text</div>

If the function getNextSibling equates to:  var element2 = document.getElementById(“el1”).nextSibling;
 
In the above, clicking on the image would return the nextSibling as "el2" in IE but "\n" in Firefox.

Breaking down the second line of HTML above as JavaScript would see it, it would look something like this:

"\n " (line break)
with element2.nodeName = “#text”;
element2.nodeType = 3; (that’s TEXT_NODE)
and element2.nodeValue = “\n”; (that’s a line break)

So after a bit of research we found that, if we test for 'nodeType' , and ensure that the nodeType is not equal to 1, then the nextSibling is the element we are after.

var element2 = document.getElementById(“el1”).nextSibling;
while (element2.nodeType !=1)
{
          element2 = element2.nextSibling;
}

And just to make sure...

alert(element2.nodeType);

Job done!

I was going through my rss feeds from Smashing Magazine, being one of the creatives I thought that "Strategic Design: 6 steps for building successful websites" would be a good read. While reading through the post I came across something familiar! Carbonica! Nicely slotted in under "3. Determine your brand image", amazing!

It's really great to see something we've all worked so hard on popup on great sites like Smashing Magazine!

Thanks to everyone who has worked hard on this project and a big thanks to Smashing Magazine for using Carbonica.

I was having trouble with my intranet this week.  Ever since I uninstalled Silverlight Beta 2 and replace it with RTW I've been getting this weird error "Error loading DLL"

It wasn't affecting functionality as far as I could tell, but it sure was annoying!!

Anyway, it turns out I needed to repair my Office installation to get rid of the message.  45 minutes later and all is well

Fingers crossed it doesn't return

Using web analytic data is becoming an essential part of a media agencies role. Although aesthetic considerations have to be a large priorty the project team should also remain focused on their data. Data that is used to its full advantage can often leade to vast improvements in the end users overall experience.

Imedia connection have recently published an interesting article on this very subject: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/20964.asp

The four key questions you can answer using your data are:

1. How do your visitors arrive?
2. What are visitors looking for?
3. Where are visitors landing, bouncing and viewing?
4. What are your website's trends over time?

Get these right and you're onto a winner.

All tests have been created with one aim, to improve the quality of program code, to make applications and systems more reliable and stable. Recently I've been looking for short and clear explanation of what is Unit Testing.

Unit testing is a software development process in which the smallest testable parts of an application, called units, are individually and independently scrutinized for proper operation. Unit testing is often automated but it can also be done manually. This testing mode is a component of Extreme Programming (XP), a pragmatic method of software development that takes a meticulous approach to building a product by means of continual testing and revision.

In our applications with n-tier architecture - the smallest parts could be Business Logic Layer components which obviously can be tested automatically.

Unit testing involves only those characteristics that are vital to the performance of the unit under test. This encourages developers to modify the source code without immediate concerns about how such changes might affect the functioning of other units or the program as a whole. Once all of the units in a program have been found to be working in the most efficient and error-free manner possible, larger components of the program can be evaluated by means of integration testing.

Notice that not everything should be tested under the Unit Tests first of all because of time restrictions. It may take a lot of hours to discover all possible scenarios and develop unit tests for them. Extreme Programming and Agile methodologies require quick reaction from the team members on the new changes of the developing project. However don't forget to keep testing documented as it can save a lot of time after amending some parts later.

Unit testing can be time-consuming and tedious. It demands patience and thoroughness on the part of the development team. Rigorous documentation must be maintained. Unit testing must be done with an awareness that it may not be possible to test a unit for every input scenario that will occur when the program is run in a real-world environment.

As in the real-world anything done by a human hand can contain a small mistake. So if you find something important that wasn't covered by Unit Tests just add it. As you can see, Unit Tests can't cover all components of the system, so there are other methodologies which help testers complete their work better.

Original text was taken from http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid92_gci1243425,00.html