Technically Speaking

I've been playing Jewel Quest on XBox live Arcade recently. The essential point of the game is to match 3 or more gems of the same kind to color the squares they are on gold, removing them from the board, repeating until all the squares are gold. The game board refills with new random gems when you remove some. 

Learn more about the game here

In any event, you start the game with 4 or so lives, and you get a new life after every 50,000 points scored. Also, you are allowed anywhere from 3-5 moves on a board before restarting the board costs you a life.

Of course, if you are going to spend time gaming, might as well spend time finding bugs too :)

Bug number 1: Unlimited lives - Get very close to a free life in your score, like 2-3 moves close. Let time run out on the board, or complete the board if you are that close. You'll start the next board within 3-4 moves of a free life, go ahead and make those moves. Now, restart the board. Here's the bug, your score resets to what it was before you started the board, which is correct, but it doesn't reset your number of lives. You can pretty much earn unlimited lives by making a few moves, getting that free life, restarting the board, and repeating this.

Another aspect of the game is making cascading matches. You match 3 gems which causes the ones above them to fall, in turn making a match, etc

Bug number 2: Points after restart - This is in combination with the first bug. If you make a match that you know will cause cascading matches, press start immediately after you match that initial match, and choose restart. The game resets your score immediately, but then allows the cascading to continue, increasing your score before the board actually resets. This one isn't as useful as the first one, but still interesting to see.

It's that time of year again, so the family went for Santa pictures. We've been going to the same photographer for the last 7 years or so, so all of our Santa photos are essentially the same - Same Santa, same setup, just growing kids and aging parents :). This year though the Santa was different, and not even remotely close to looking like the other Santa's. We were there so we took the picture anyway.

Of course we paid the going rate for a Santa photo, and the 5 minutes of photographer time it took for the session, we even sprung for the extra copy of the photo on disk. Here's what we got:

Yes it is 2008 and yes that is a floppy disk. I no longer own a computer that has a floppy drive, so i don't think i'll be getting that photo anytime soon. But of course what would the point be? What digital camera takes a decent photo that fits on a 1.44MB floppy anyway? The photo on this disk is for the "web", it's really reduced in size. 

Talk about timewarp. 7 years ago, this seemed perfectly logical. Everyone has floppy drives, not alot of folks have advanced digital cameras, and you always reduced the size of a photo to a thumbnail put it on the web because otherwise it would take forever to load.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to be able to attend the Google Test Automation Conference here in Seattle. While the name of the conference implies that it’s all about Test Automation, I found it to actually be a little broader than that, aiming at testing in general. Certainly it was one of the first technical conferences I’ve been to where you didn’t have to explain to other people what a tester is or what we do.

Many of the talks had great impressive titles that it seemed the 2 days would be awesome. In actuality some of them fell a little short of the lofty goals of the title and abstract of the talk, but all in all, a great conference.

As a software tester, some of my takeaways from the conference:

- Move away from large system tests towards smaller, focused, modular tests.

- Stop writing your own tools, the ones you need are likely already out there

- Start thinking outside the box as it relates to Virtualization - It's more than just getting more machines.

I'll probably post on these more in the future.

All of the talks are posted on YouTube.

You should also check out the Google Testing Blog.

Wow, over a year since my last post. Alot has happened. I work for Nokia now, not Microsoft. Instead of working on ASP.NET, i'm working on a real Internet Service built with ASP.NET (http://share.ovi.com)

I am officially rebooting this blog today,I've changed the title for now. I'll be posting about more than just ASP.NET and Testing software, so that title wouldn't fit.

I want to talk more about software problems and how they are getting solved. I want to help folks host large scale ASP.NET  applications the right way. I want to share my hobbies and interests.

(Insert your favorite reboot sound here)