Recipe for Pain

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  1. Take one Toshiba M400 laptop running Windows XP Service Pack 2.
  2. Carefully image the M400 disk using Paragon Drive Backup 6.0 onto two separate external disks.
  3. Carefully copy all the document files onto further external disks, so that you have plenty of copies of all the important stuff.
  4. Install Windows Vista onto Toshiba M400, wiping hard disk in process.
  5. Remember some crucial files that are not in the document directories you copied onto external drives, but hey, I've got a drive image backup so no problem.
  6. Fail to find the Paragon Drive Image program CD.

New Year at Hornsea

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First, a happy new year to both my readers. At Chateau Miles, we have been know to celebrate the arrival of a new calendar by heading off to the seaside at Hornsea. Today the weather looked reasonable, and so we set out. On the way there it seemed like a bad idea, in that we drove along underneath some very nasty looking clouds and the odd smattering of rain.

But when we got to the coast it was wonderful. It was very blustery, but this really seemed to blow out the cobwebs at the start of the year. It was also pretty busy, and one or two valiant souls had actually gone for a paddle. I'd taken the big camera, and so I took a bunch of snaps.

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New Year seaside

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Arcadia

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Lights

Viva Pinata

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I am weak. Very weak. Show me a sale with two XBOX 360 video games for 60 quid and I'm pretty much bound to buy a couple. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I can resist pretty much anything but temptation. I ended up buying Test Drive Unlimited, a game which lets you tear up and down great chunks of Hawaii in a fast car, and Viva Pinata, a gardening game. Number one wife noted wryly that the only time that I will actually do any gardening is inside a computer, and this seems to be the case.

In the game you create a nice garden in the hope that wandering pinata will come and live there, breed, eat each other, and form a living ecosystem. Pinata are animated versions of those things that kids at posh birthday parties in Mexican restaurants smash open to get out toys and sweets and there seem to be an unlimited number of these which can crawl, burrow, fly, swim and so on.

The game is aimed firmly at children, so I reckoned I would be able to cope. And so it seemed when I started. A friendly girl with a voice able to convey more enthusiasm than a very enthusiastic thing tells you what to do in awed terms, and introduces you to your toolkit noting that "If you hit your pinata with the shovel they may become ill". So let's play nicely out there kids.

Anyhoo, a lot happens in a very short time. Within an hour I had my version of a green and pleasant land running nicely and a few different varieties of pinata living side by side, eating, breeding and throwing fireballs at each other. And it looks very pretty. The clock spins in accelerated real time and the sun and moon wax and wane very effectively.

And I realised one more thing that differentiates me from youngsters (and probably lots of grown ups as well). I think that, once they have picked up the control system, kids would now have the patience and determination to try making different pinata, plant different seeds, build new types of garden, put their own drawings on their own breeds and do all the other things which make the game so much fun. But I couldn't be bothered. I turned the joypad over to number one son, who has more of an appetite for this kind of thing and wandered off to do some proper work. In a trice he had added a whole bunch of trees and species that would have taken me ages to sort out.

I think the snag is that at my age if I'm going to spend any amount of time in a learning curve I like to think that I'm going to get something concrete out of it at the end, and a pretty new pinata just doesn't cut it for me. For me the game is just too much like gardening, in that it requires effort and thought, and I'd rather put those into something else, like messing around with computers (which is probably how I really enjoy myself).

However, if you are looking for a game to play with your kids which is bright, colourful and creates a living environment with genuine causes and effects and unlimited scope for experimentation and cooperation, then you should take a look.

A Dangerous Obsession

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If you think about it, you really shouldn't let people with an obsessive nature anywhere near computers. When I was much younger I knew a chap called John. Actually, now I am older I still know a chap called John, but it is a different John, and not important right now. Anyhoo, John had one of the first microcomputers, a Nascom. It had a 25 lines of 40 characters display. And 8 KBytes of RAM. And he could write Basic programs on it and store them on a cassette tape. What power. I was dead jealous. One Monday he came in to work looking even more haggard and disheveled than ever, which for John was saying something. We asked him if he had enjoyed a pleasant weekend.

 "Not really" he replied "I wanted to see the robots feet and it took ages to get it to work".

Turns out that the Nascom had a display character set which contained graphical images, including little robots. Snag was that these were not displayed completely, because the screen hardware skipped some lines when it drew the raster. The feet were missed off. For John this was a bad thing. So he spent an entire weekend rewiring the hardware so that all the scan lines were drawn. And he could see his robots feet. We thought this was silly, and could hardly see the difference extra pixels made.

I was reminded of this during my attempts to get Vista Aero Glass to work on my Toshiba M200 this weekend. For those that don't know, Glass gives you a funky effect around each window, so you can sort of see through to the one beneath it. This adds very little to the usability of your computer, but it is very cute, particularly if you understand how fiendishly hard it is to draw this kind of thing. And my rather elderly Tosh machine can just about do it. But only if you download a special driver, customise the initialisation file and then throw in a registry hack. And it only sort of works, in that every now and then it runs out of display memory and drops back to boring old opaque window edges.

But getting glass on my desktop became very important to me, and I spent far too much time trying and failing to make it work. Finally I had a glass display running and I showed number one wife the finished result.

"I can't see the difference" she said.

Vistafied

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Some things are guaranteed to put me into a mild sweat. Finding we have no milk in the house, filling in my Tax Return. And changing my computer operating system.

Today I've done all three. The milkman seems to have vanished. We gave him a bottle of wine for christmas, told him we didn't want any milk for a few days and we've not seen him since. I have this awful vision of an upturned milk float half submerged in a ditch with a white clad body spreadeagled alongside, a half empty wine bottle still clutched in its dead hand. Or he might just have forgotten us. Anyhoo, I was nearly condemned to black tea until number one daughter mentioned that there were shops in the village which also sell milk. Phew.

Then I had to do my tax return, seeing as it is due tomorrow. I don't earn much money (most things I do for love - obviously) but I did get paid for some stuff I wrote some time back, so I have to declare it and pay the man. So there was a quick scrabble for forms, typing of numbers and pressing of submit buttons.

Then we came to my new operating system. I'm going to move to Vista. Part of me wants to, the other part has a great affinity for the status quo. However, some software I want to use only works with Vista, so I'm kind of forced into this. I'm not actually moving completely just yet. I thought I'd install the system on another computer first so that I have an escape clause. So far things have gone quite well. I've got Vista running on my old Toshiba M200 and it seems to work OK so far.

Live to Shop

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We went up town this morning shopping. So did everyone else. We didn't have a huge amount to buy, which was just as well, it is just that I'm addicted to the almond croissants that they serve in Costa Coffee and number one wife likes the tiramisu coffee (we are becoming terribly cultured).

Anyhoo, it was hell. We went to Marks and Spencer's to get some food and joined "The Longest and Slowest Moving Queue in the World"(tm). At one point I said out loud "This isn't just queuing, this is Marks and Spencer queuing" in what I thought was a clever parody of the current advertisement campaign they are running in the UK. I don't think this went down too well. 

Eventually we made it back home via a few present drop-offs and I'm just about to begin the wrapping up process. And yes, I have bought some sticky tape. But somebody has made off with my scissors.....

Christmas Do

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Getting into the spirit of the day....

Today we had our staff christmas lunch. For a change we had the meal at a nearby golf club. Very posh. The car park was full of expensive cars and a good time was had by all.

Then in the evening we repaired to the Hive Virtual Environment suite and found out what you get if you plug a Wii into a huge video projector and play tennis and bowling. The answer? Big fun.

Easy Lies

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There should be a special place in hell reserved for people who tell you lies on customer support just to get rid of you. I've just got a new portable media player, the Archos 504 (long story, but it is very nice). One of the reasons I bought it was because I want to load it up with music from my Napster account. It has the "Plays for sure logo" on it and everything so there should be no problem.

Of course it doesn't work. As soon it is connected it to the Napster program the device resets itself. I've emailed Archos customer support ("response in two business days"). At least they haven't told me any lies. In fact, after nearly a week, they've told me nothing.

So today I ring Napster support. Expensive, infuriating and ultimately pointless. I tell them my Napster doesn't work. They suggest a few things and press some buttons to no avail. The supervisor is fetched. He tells me that Napster doesn't work with Archos. I tell him I have another device made by Archos which works fine. He tells me it might not work now. It still does. After a while it occurs to me that I'm probably being told this information because it has the best chance of getting me off the line. In the end it does, because I ring off in disgust.

Then, after some internet digging I try Media Player 11 rather than the Napster program. It works fine.

XNA Launch Event

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We got up nice and early and headed for the university. Unfortunately, thanks to traffic, we were a bit later arriving on campus than I wanted, but still in time to do a bunch of interviews for the press.

The morning talks were all about how the XNA technology works and how it fits into to the games industry. The answers, by the way, are very well and very well. It is really easy to use and, whilst not yet applicable to "top of the range" games is going to find increasing favour in the games industry as they come to terms with just how much easier it makes things.

Then it was lunch, another interview, and then time for my bit. The talk seemed to go OK, the audience were polite enough to laugh at most (but not all of) my jokes. You can find the presentation, complete with clip art, here.

Then Peter Molyneux gave his session. Which was excellent. The most important thing that came out of his talk was the emphasis that he places on communication skills. You should be good at your part of the game production process. You should be brave enough to take your ideas and champion them passionately. But you also need people skills. If you can't persuade, argue, admit when you are wrong and keep as many people happy as possible during the rollercoaster ride that is game development then you are going to have a hard time. That was very good to hear. At Hull we push those aspects of professional development very hard indeed, and it was good to hear one of the best game creators in the business echo them for me.

We even made the BBC News.

And then we got in the magic bus for the trip home.

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One of these students has won an XBOX 360 at the XNA launch event. Can you use your powers of observation to discover which one?

Mini-buses and temporal anomalies

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Today is the day we all pile into the mini-bus that I've arranged and then rumble down the motorway to the Microsoft XNA Launch event at Warwick. I'm going to give a talk, the students are going to learn things and get free stuff.

Last night I discovered that my powers of organisation had temporarily failed me, and that I booked the bus for the wrong day, but fortunately the nice man at the hire company took that in his stride and so that 17:00 we hurtled out of the university into the darkness.

The nice lady in my Gizmondo directed us straight to our luxurious Travelodge for the night. The journey was mostly painless, although the traffic was quite busy on the motorway. I have a new respect for Ford Transit vans now, this one had a seriously powerful engine and was quite happy to reach 80, even with 14 souls on board. Didn't try a handbrake turn though, not sure that everyone would have appreciated that.

Pitch me a Snake

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I've spent a very happy day in the labs marking student work. Normally I hate marking. Exam scripts send me into a cold sweat. But this was much more fun. Rather than dead trees I was looking at live code. Each of our students in the first year was given 15 minutes to pitch their Snake game. And there have been some super ones. We are going to open up the "wherewouldyouthink hall of fame" and put some of these programs up there for download. Great stuff.

Next semester we are going to take the snake game and move it onto an XBOX. And I reckon we will be the first people in the world to do this in an undergraduate course at first year level.