Memory Upgrades and New Hard Disks

What do you do if you have sworn off working with computers for a while?

Go up town, buy some memory and a hard disk and spend the day upgrading stuff.

My little MacBook, which has all my music and media on it, has just about filled up its little 120G hard disk. It could do with something a little larger. And my Advent Netbook, although wonderful with Windows 7, does chug a bit when I run more than a couple of programs alongside each other. And so, since this is not technically programming as such, it was off to the shops and out with the debit card.

The Advent 4211 upgrade was simple enough, once I’d got all the screws out and unclipped the back. The memory went straight in and then, after a kind of “reverse tussle” to get the back clipped on again we were in business. Windows 7 noticed the upgrade straight away, and seems a lot happier. The good news about a move like this is that you don’t double the memory from 1G to 2G, you have a much bigger effect than that, since the operating system takes up a good chunk of the original memory. I reckon that I now have around three or four times the original space for running programs.

The Apple upgrade took a bit longer, what with having to copy all the files off the original disk onto the new one, but it was actually a very smooth process. I put the old disk in a USB caddy and then restored the old contents onto my newly installed operating system, which worked a treat.

All in all, a successful day, but not perhaps as far away from computers as I originally planned.

XNA Network and Hair Restoring

If you can’t solve a problem, just go to bed. I should have done that yesterday (although it would have meant I was in bed at 11:30 in the morning I suppose).

Anyhoo, I got up, had breakfast, and then made XNA networking work perfectly.

It turns out that there is something in the WiFi configuration at my house that stops network gameplay from working. I had connected all the devices by wires, but had left the WiFi turned on, which seemed to confuse matters. Replace wireless connections with wires everywhere and everything works.

I now have a working lobby system, proper host and client gameplay, sample programs and a completed Chapter 16. And, since that is the last chapter in the book, I guess that means that I can return to real life and start doing other things that have been piling up a bit. But I think I’ll have some time off the computer for a bit.

XNA Networking and Hair Tearing

Today is the day I’m supposed to write all about how to create networked XNA programs. This is a wonderful feature of the platform, and makes it really easy to make multiplayer games for PC, Xbox or even Zune. Or at least it would be, if I could get the networking to work.

I’ve got the material written but my programs just don’t notice each other. They just sit there, aloof and out of touch. I was a bit cross about this for a while, but then I tried some sample programs from other sources and they don’t work either. I think it must be something about the installation I have here, but at the moment I’m not sure what.

The good news is that the Zune devices which I’ve got, which also support network gameplay via XNA, work just fine.

Yet Another Robot

Briefly snuck away from writing today and bought another robot dog. I felt a bit guilty about not being sat at a keyboard all the time, but not about buying the dog, which was half price and is really good. The best part is the Remote Control, which is absolutely huge. Wrex is not really a proper piece of Artificial Intelligence, in that you mostly have to steer him around by hand. He does have an “off the leash” mode which is quite fun, along with a keypad on the back you can use to re-program him. He has a wide repertoire of remarks and special actions which are pretty amusing.

Going to Live There

I find that when I’m trying to write stuff I have to “Go and Live There” for a while. “There” being what the book is actually about. This doesn’t make me particularly good company, but it seems to be the only way to do it. Today I was mostly in Chapter 15, which is coming along nicely at the moment.

I really like working with XNA, and I’ve been playing with just what you can do with the Zune device, which is actually rather a lot.