Big thanks this week to Evoke Marketing Group and Sony Playstation 3 for inviting us to an “exclusive ticketed event at Motion, Bristol”, where they were showcasing some currently un-released Playstation3 titles.

We wheeled up on last Thursday evening and entered into a real gamers electronic wet dream (dangerous, that). The club was kitted out with comfy sofas, a free bar, a DJ and MAHUSSIVE HD screens attached to shiny games consoles, free for anyone to mooch on over and play!

So in we trot, eyes glinting and super ready to be bamboozled by mind-bending challenges mixed with fancy graphics and some of the best games the goliath of Sony could throw at us.

But… while the staff at the event were great ambassadors for gaming, geeing you on with silly chat and mini-competitions, I’m afraid I felt these “unreleased games” would stay better being unreleased for a while.

Playing on the console they were unresponsive, unnatural and failed to make me care about the character. It’s odd; that companies with so much gaming heritage can miss out on a few simple pillars of game design.

While I don’t presume to understand the complexity of design of a PS3 game, it just felt there were a few playful basics missing:

RESPONSIVE CONTROLS

Players don’t want to feel cheated by their character when controls repeatedly don’t react naturally. Play Booty Juggler!

NARRATIVE

Games need to have a reason, we like ones with playful learning. To be honest though. we’ve all played enough First Person Shooters and puzzle games, they now need something better than ‘just shoot baddies’ to keep me playing. Play Artist Rooms!

GAMEPLAY FIRST

..fancy graphics later. Play Fire Kills!

The games we were playing were: FIFA12, GoldenEye, Uncharted 3 and Resistance 3.

So thanks Playstation, but I think I’ll be sticking to lots of other games for the time being.

Views expressed are entirely Dan’s, so there.

Here at TDHQ, we’ve been keenly following the progress of a new database with designs on knocking the grand-daddies from the likes of Oracle off the top spot…

It’s called MongoDB (short for “huMONGOus”).

Did you know that the databases which most companies rely on today were designed to be stored and accessed on computers with only dinky sized memories? At around 4Kbits, these beasts had less power than your watch and were about the size of your mate’s car (or the other way round for you automotive-sans-chronometer types).

With MongoDB, they addressed what was wrong with the current system of database design and improved it, utilising a modern company’s access to computing power. Eg, HUGE Memory and multiple servers in MANY physical locations

Here’s the benefits,

Easy scalability
“Automatic sharding”, makes it easy to add another server your system. Just install and type this…

> db.runCommand( { addshard : “<serverhostname>[:<port>]” } );
{“ok” : 1 , “added” : …}

Rich query language
See how easy it is to write.

to write

db.scores.save({a: 99});

to query

db.scores.find();

High performance
No joins and embedding makes reads and writes fast

High availability
Replicated servers with automatic master failover. So if the main server blows up, pow, another one is “elected” to take over and the service continues

Training Day

We were lucky enough to get tickets to a specialist one-day training conference in shiny London to learn more about its progress. While learning, we heard from The Guardian (a national newspaper), the National Archives (the UK Government archive) and mngr.it (a tech start-up), all who are currently using mongoDb in their applications for both sideline and critical systems. Interestingly, two of them moved to mongoDb because their normal supplier, Oracle, was adding too many 0′s onto the end of their quotes!

Sounds cool, right? A new piece of software that should be able to handle Facebook sized databases, but available to everybody from SMEs through to multinationals corporations. That’s a lot of power!

Thought Den’s official line

So, will Thought Den be using MongoDB in their apps? Well, in time we’ll be trialling it on our own internal apps before moving it into production, but it looks very promising:

PROS
- Faster
- Easy to replicate/manage data across different global cloud data warehouses
- Auto-recovery from other cloud servers if main database fails
- Compatible with Amazon EC2 computing power
- Open Source
- Received lots of investment $$$ to secure its future
CONS
- Global Write lock, causes issues
- New technology
- Other new tech is available, like Google’s BigTable.

Monga-liciuos!

Source: besttechInfo.com

A rumour that spread like wildfire across the web a month ago has now metamorphosed into a big, exciting News butterfly. Facebook is on a journey to take on the might of Apple and Google in the mobile market, much like Leonidas and his 299 fellow under-dressed men.

Project Spartan, as it is known, is Facebook’s plan to develop their own new App Store; think iTunes but through Facebook. While not too much has been said yet (Spartans are men of action, not words) it is not too difficult to imagine what the project could lead to.

This will allow for e.g. making better use of some features like Facebook Credits for sales, in-app purchases and thus making more profit.  It is a clever battle-plan which the Financial Times and Playboy have already kicked off.

Apparently about 80 outside developers and companies (including Farmville and The Huffington Post) are contributing to the project, and we also know now that Apple is giving a certain level of support.

This effort from Facebook to bring a whole new experience to the iOS devices is something to celebrate. It would be nice to see this new platform being spread through other mobile devices, let’s say… Android OS for instance!
It may very well push developers and the rest of the industry to have more interest in HTML5 and CSS3 features, pushing forward new web standards.

source: Slashgear.com

The exciting news for our clients however is that it is a new contender in the app market with Facebook’s 750-million users behind the top brand.

Thought Den’s experience with the technology, HTML5 and Javascript will allow our clients pretty much instant entry to the service.

Now less talk about the naked men fighting please!

WordPress just keeps on getting better and better. The open source project has been with us for 10 years and now this new release just shows how much effort is still going into its development.

Check out our top list of improvements.

Improved Management Dashboard

It looks much more tablet-like

Security Improvements

This is Dan’s best part of the list, old technologies which can leave HUGE security holes are dropped to favour the new tech.

Dropping IE6 support!

Dropping PHP support!

Dropping MySQL 4!

Top Admin Bar

You’re able to get to what you want really quickly

Performance upgrades

Common pages have been tweaked to load faster

Default Theme has HTML5 support!

Times are a moving on, it’s time we allowed the <video> <audio> tag to make easy embedding of media. Plus more useful markup for Search engines

Not a bad list, better get on and start updating our blog then!

Some people may be aware of the ongoing struggle Sony have have recently with the hacking of their Gamer Network and millions of their user details being stolen. To be honest, security is always a matter of time and money. So breaking into their network was clearly worth the money and I assume it wasn’t quick or simple to do!

However, what’s interesting about this story is how the company were thought to be storing their detail in clear text like below.

Passwords in plain text

Storing details in plain text means that anyone who’s able to view the database has easy and plain access to the password. People like the staff, developers, marketing managers, database administrators and even hackers. Imagine how many times you use the same password for lots of different online accounts. That’s a pretty important piece of data for a company to not cover up.

So I felt compelled to write about the Thought Den method we use to store our users’ passwords in any bespoke modules of our online software.

Hashing of passwords
None of your passwords are ever kept in plain text. We immediately use a “one-way hashing algorithm” and a hidden keyword to hide your passwords when they’re saved. Or in English, we put it through a sausage masher and then save the result. Then anyone who views the data will never see your passwords in plain simple text, just a mashed view.

Passwords hashed

Nice right! And the beauty is, it can only go one way, so there’s no de-cyphering it backwards.

Next post. SQL injection attack… or in plain English, keeping your borders well checked against trojan horses.