Sneakernet, 2013 Style

Back when I was a kid, the closest thing we had to "the cloud" was walking around, moving files from computer to computer by carrying floppies.

These days, that seems so antiquated - except for the times when you decide to upgrade the OS on your fileserver, causing Postgres to fail, causing YUM to fail, possibly leading to shared libraries being truncated (or is that an independent problem that just happened to fail at the same time?)

So, today, I got a USB external drive, hooked it up to my laptop where I had been doing the development for the past few weeks, walked it over to my desktop development machine, copied the files over, and have managed to verify that all of the files are there and working, as the above screenshot evidences.

I had been hoping to get a lot of work done on the game today. The fact that I've got my development machine capable of doing development, that's progress from where I was on Friday, so that's good. There's a lot of stuff that I have on drives that I haven't yet figured out how to boot, so that's work to be done, sometime. There's a lot of features I need to get in to this game by the end of the month. (1GAM permits a few days of leeway, which I haven't yet allowed myself to take advantage of. Maybe this is the time.)

I find it interesting that the hexes on the right side of the screen here look purple on this monitor, while on the netbook I was developing on, they looked dark blue. Similarly, the darkened hexes that I was using for last month's game look nearly black on my phone. So, the lesson is of course to test out your game early and often and make adjustments as appropriate. Perhaps I should have some sort of brightness feature - an option in a settings menu, perhaps, or just some constants that I play around with and ship as suitable defaults.

Oh, while we're on "lessons learned": back up your stuff. Really. And, when you think it's a good idea to upgrade your system, back up your system first. And it might even make sense not to upgrade the system so much as build a new system from scratch (new hard drive, fresh OS) and bring your data with you.

Even if the game was in a state where I felt like I wanted to share a link to a version, the webserver is one of the machines that fell prey to the upgrades that seemed like a good idea at the time. I expect to be able to sort that out, hopefully by the end of the month. Probably plus a few days.