“For us it’s probably a no-lose even with piracy as it is,” shrugged West. “But, as I say, second-hand sales cost us more in the long-run than piracy these days.”

Most of today’s key video game outlets – Game, HMV, Amazon – and even some supermarkets (Tesco) buy and then resell used games from customers. Game publishers have developed a number of initiatives to counter-attack this, the most popular being EA’s Online Pass, which bundles a free code with new games that can be redeemed to enable multiplayer or receive downloadable content. Whoever buys the game second hand won’t get a free code, which means they’ll have to buy a replica online for around $10.

Why do game publishers and developers not like second-hand game sales? Because they don’t get any money for the transaction – the shop reaps all the rewards.

I must be the worst video game customer they have. I remember playing my first video games on an Atari 2600 A LONG time ago. I’ve owned virtually all of the Nintendo, Playstation and X-Box systems that have been created. You could call me an old school gamer. When I am playing multiplayer games online I have to remember that I’ve been playing games longer than some of my opponents have been alive (so why are they so much better than me?). I am passing the tradition to my children with our Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS systems. They play the Nintendo games while I keep the X-Box 360 for myself.

This habit can get to be expensive, considering how long I have been buying video games. When I got out of college, found a job and started paying for these systems and games myself I realized just how expensive it could be. I decided then to stop chasing the latest and greatest video game. I wait now for the prices to drop significantly in the used market before I buy a title (except for Gears of War 2 and 3 – I’ve gotta have those now!).

This keeps me significantly behind the curve for new video games. I don’t mind so much when I’m paying a lot less for the game than others do. I keep all of the games that I buy after I have finished playing them. When the next X-Box or Nintendo system comes out I have plenty of hardware to trade for a system upgrade and a few games. Then the clock starts again on buying new games. When I am fortunate enough to receive a Christmas bonus from work I take advantage of the holiday deals and buy enough games to last me for most of the next year. With a full time job, a loving wife and three kids, a fierce Geocaching habit and a strenuous work out schedule I don’t have the time to keep up with the pace of video game development.

When a hot new title hits the market and comes back used a few days later the used price isn’t that much different from the new price. When there is a five dollar difference I go ahead and buy the new game (if I truly can’t wait for the price to come down). The extra few dollars buys me an unblemished copy with no scratches. Have you ever seen how scratched up a used game can become? Of course, the developers don’t see any of the dollars from a resale but they have already made their money on the initial sale of that product. You can be sure that the person that brings the game back takes a heavy loss on the trade in value. I know I have at times.

I bet I am more typical than you would think. All of the kids that played Atari with me are surely still gamers now, right? To call us worse than software pirates is nothing short of insulting. I almost felt bad for Lionhead (almost) until I read this:

Fortunately, Lionhead has already managed to cover development costs with first-hand Xbox 360 sales, which are “in their millions”.

Wait a minute, you have already covered your development costs and have turned a tidy profit? Why are you complaining about this? When I studied economics in college we called this rent seeking behavior. As such, it should be dismissed out of hand. To the developers I say “meh, I will continue buying your games used.” Create something as good as Gears of War 2 and 3 and I will buy it at the midnight release party. Otherwise, please take  your profits, shelve the atrocious behavior and get busy developing the next profitable title.

Geocaching Swiss Army Knife

Shortly after I started Geocaching I discovered Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (GSAK).  GSAK is an excellent database application that is geared towards tracking all of your caching activities.  I rely on this one program to load thousands of caches into my GPSr, keep track of what I have found (as well hidden) and all of the recent activity in caches I haven’t yet found.  In my experience it is the best program written for this purpose.  There are other applications that can do parts of what GSAK can do but none offer the same complete package.

Sounds great, right?  The only problem I have with this program is that it is written for Windows.  There is no Linux port!  Since I run Ubuntu on all of my mobile computers (and even my work computers), I can only use it on my Windows computer at home.  This (for me) was limiting.  Of course Windows users don’t have a problem with this.  For us Linux users however, we are simply stuck if we need to reload our GPSr units in the field or do any research while we are out of range of the internet.

Wine Is Not A Windows Emulator

Over the years I have tried numerous Linux based tools trying to replace this functionality.  Each time I eventually gave up and went back to doing it in Windows.  One day recently I decided to give the latest development build of Wine (WINe is Not an Emulator) to see if GSAK would work at all.  In past revisions of Wine GSAK would either not load at all or would crash and burn shortly after loading.  After updating my laptop and giving it a shot I found out that it works!  I was able to finally load GSAK and browse around the program without crashing.  What a relief!

So, how did I get it to work?  My Linux distribution of choice as of this writing is Ubuntu 10.10.  The default version of Wine that is in the Ubuntu software repository is version 1.2.  Don’t try to run GSAK in this version as it will not work.  You can find detailed instructions on how to install Wine 1.3 below (summarized):

Run the following commands on the command line:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.3

These commands will install the latest version of Wine automatically.  If you already had Wine installed then the upgrade will remove version 1.2 first.  I had the most success by manually deleting the Wine version 1.2 /home/user/.wine directory.  Opening Wine version 1.3 will create these files again from scratch.

You need Wine version 1.3 or higher to make GSAK work.

After you have installed the latest version of Wine and created the new configuration files, download the latest version of GSAK.  Open the command line and browse to the downloads directory.  Enter the following command to install GSAK:

wine GSAK772B56.exe

Latest version of GSAK

Now that the software is installed you can start it up, enter your licensing information and get started!  Once I had finished the installation and tried out a sample database, I was ready to start putting this to use.  I solved the issue of getting the software to work in the first place.  Now I had to solve the problem of portability.  How can I move my GSAK installation around with me wherever I go?  I have desktops at work and at home, a laptop and a netbook.  That’s a lot of devices!  I could be using any of them at any time so what happens when I have my netbook but GSAK is on my laptop?

Dropbox solves this problem nicely.  I am running this service on all of my computers to synchronize my important files everywhere I go.  With so many computers it is virtually impossible to keep up with where my data is.  Dropbox takes care of this completely.  I went to my Windows computer and copied my existing GSAK settings files to my Dropbox folder.  Once you have copied the settings files over you will need to change the Application Data, Database Folder and Backup Folder paths in Tools – Options – General.  As you move from computer to computer GSAK will open up and pull in the latest database information.  It really is seamless!

It is seamless however, until I try to open GSAK on my one Windows computer.  The Application Data and Database Folder settings survive the transition from Linux to Windows.  The Backup Folder path does not change.  It still looks for the last path used.  If you want to back up the database in Windows you have to manually change the options coming and going from Windows.  I posted a note in the GSAK forum asking that the Backup Folder be turned into a variable instead of a hard coded path.  Hopefully that will change in future versions.

So What Doesn’t Work In Windows?

There are two areas of GSAK that still doesn’t work with Wine:

• Split Screen View – This feature doesn’t work at all.  It loads the first cache when the program loads but never loads another one after that.  Sometimes the program crashes when it tries to load.  I only run this view when I am on my Windows computer and I have to turn it off before I go back to Linux.
• Macros – Most of the macros that I am accustomed to using work well in Linux.  Only the macros that require Windows drive letters won’t work in Linux.  That doesn’t affect me very much so I haven’t spent much time on it.

It really works!

So there you have it, GSAK works in Linux!  There are still a few kinks to be worked out but considering that a few months ago it wouldn’t even load properly this is enormous progress.  I hope more of my fellow Linux users will start running it.  Perhaps we can get the last few glitches worked out at some point and have the same functionality as our Windows brethren.  Happy Caching!

When I first started this job we were running a mixture of Windows 95, 98, ME and 2000 workstations.  The Microsoft Office versions ran along the same time frame and were anywhere from Office 95 to 2000.  Needless to say this was a support nightmare.  I was able to convince everyone that we needed to standardize on the latest available software and move forward from there.  Unfortunately, not everyone had the money to do this in a timely fashion.

The compromise was to slowly standardize on the same packages as we phased out older equipment. Fast forward several years and we have been happily running Windows XP and Office 2003.  We avoided Windows Vista and Office 2007 (almost) completely.  Once Microsoft announced that they were ending support in 2014 I realized that it was time to start planning for a migration.

This time we are going to do it differently.  This time we are updating the entire office at once.  Since we have never had a reason to do a mass installation of the same software packages, and our equipment comes from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) with a Windows image preinstalled, we rarely have to build a brand new installation.  Throw in our use of Clonezilla to image the hard drive and it is rather unusual for us to have to build anything from disc.  Now we have to deploy 35-40 workstations altogether in one project.

There is no upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7 so we have decided to take advantage of the built in deployment tools. All good implementations start with research, and this one is no different.  Here are a few websites that helped me wrap my mind around the process and get the ball rolling:

• Post from David Szpunar’s blog detailing his migration.
• Deploying Windows 7 – Part 5: MDT 2010 Enhancements.
• Another very helpful website discussing XP to Windows 7 Migration with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010.
• Tips for integrating the User State Migration Tool.

The third link provided the most direct help.  The first two helped me figure out the main concepts.  Once I read through the information on these sites I downloaded the following tools:

• Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
• Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) For Windows 7
• User State Migration Tool

Install the first two tools on your deployment server.  The third tool should be installed on each workstation before and after the migration.  We’ll talk more about this later.

Deployment Server

Create a new deployment share (MDT Deployment Share) by right clicking on the Deployment Shares folder and selecting New Deployment Share.  Walk through the New Deployment Share Wizard to set up your preferences for the Windows 7 installation.  You can enter a license key, suppress the license agreement message and pre-determine all of the installation variables.  Answering these questions in advance will greatly simplify the deployment process.  Once you have finished you should see something like this:

New Deployment Share

The next step is to import your operating system(s) installation media.  In your Deployment Share, right click on Operating Systems and select Import Operating System.  Walk through the wizard.  There are a few different options through which you can deploy Windows 7 to your workstations.  You can import the installation files directly from the Windows 7 DVD, use a sysprep image (WIM) or connect to your Windows Deployment Services server.

Import Operating System Wizard

We chose to go with the first option.  This allowed us to run a complete Windows 7 installation for each workstation.  We have a wide range of available hardware so the more custom installation worked better for us.  We did lose a bit of time for each upgrade as compared to the custom image but it was not a large amount of time.

Once you have imported the operating system files you should set up any additional applications that you would like to have silently deployed during the installation.  Right click on Applications and choose New Application.  Walk through the wizard to set up any applications with network installation and silent install commands.

Wizard For Installation Network Applications With Silent Install

The next step is to update the deployment share.  Right click on your deployment share folder and select Update Deployment Share.  Be prepared for this to run for a few minutes.  This step prepares the deployment image boot media.  You can find the iso image for the boot cd in the $DEPLOY_FOLDER\Boot directory.  There should be 32 bit and 64 bit files available.  Burn the applicable boot image and you are ready to go!

Silent Install Commands

These are the commands that I used to silently install various applications after the operating system upgrade completed.

Mandriva -> Mageia

Mandriva is becoming Mageia.  My first successful foray into the world of open source software (way back in 2002!) was made using Mandriva (called Mandrake way back then) as the operating system.  At that time I was running the current version (Mandrake 9.2).  I started building linux servers using MandrakeLinux 10.0.  There were some rough spots in the road for those of us hosting servers with this product.  Things had a nasty way of changing on us during upgrades that would bring down mission critical systems until I could figure out where the configuration files had moved to without warning.  Once they changed the name to Mandriva and created a subscription based Club membership I knew that my days were numbered.  I hated the thought of having to pay for the club repository so that I could install the software that I wanted.  I switched to Ubuntu about three years ago and never looked back.

After following Mandriva’s various staffing decisions and financial woes it would appear that a large part of the development team has decided to fork the project.  Many of the management decisions that Mandriva (the company) made over the last several years have been disastrous for the end users of Mandriva (the linux distribution).  I for one am glad to see the community taking back control of this project.  I am watching this project very closely, having signed up for the mailing lists and spending a good bit of time in the IRC chatroom.  If this project gets off the ground I will strongly consider switching back!  You can start following the project at http://mageia.org.

OpenOffice -> LibreOffice

I must admit this announcement caught me a bit by surprise:

On the morning of September 28th, a community of developers and other volunteers announced that they were forming The Document Foundation to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original OpenOffice charter. According to the group, “The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as ‘The Document Foundation.’”

After OpenOffice.org was organized by Sun the project got off to a good start but then stagnated.  Now there is not much development and the product is falling further and further behind.  After Sun was purchased by Oracle, it would appear to be falling behind even faster.  All of that changes with this announcement.  I hope that Oracle steps up and does the right thing by donating the name (OpenOffice.org) to the community (The Document Foundation).  This would put the project in a similar arrangement to the one between The Mozilla Foundation and Firefox.  I will be paying close attention to the developments of this project as well.  You can follow along as well at http://www.documentfoundation.org/.

It’s a great day for freedom!

Gmail interface - Work e-mail address!

Who could say no to an offer like that?  We are looking at the collaborative possibilities of having over 2,000 active accounts in one Google Apps system.  Our current e-mail infrastructure is a mixture of Microsoft and open source products.  We started off with a small Windows e-mail server and have grown over the years to support over 2,000 mailboxes.  We decided to go with a few different solutions for different segments of this user base over time as needed.  In the end we have five servers all working together to run and manage our communications infrastructure.  It’s a mess.  It’s also rather burdensome to administer.  Enter Google Apps with its unified management system, familiar end user facing interface, compelling and easy to use overall setup and the choice to switch is fairly easy.  We started off with about 10 beta users and then migrated the entire Communications and Information Technology offices.  Once we were convinced that the system was working well we began the roll out process to internal staff.  We are up to about 150 active accounts now but we have a long way to go.

What are some of the major benefits of switching to this system?

• We reduce our support surface from five different servers, operating systems and mailbox formats down to one integrated interface.
• We will have access to an whole host of collaborative tools that was not previously possible.
• Our end users will have reduced confusion.  Many times they call us and have forgotten which server they are hosted on (so do we!).
• We don’t have to write documentation anymore.  We just link from Google’s support website!
• We no longer have to constantly maintain our e-mail gateway anti-virus and anti-spam scanners.
• Microsoft Outlook integrates into the Google Apps system.  We have a good number of users that wish to continue using Microsoft Outlook instead of the web interface.

Google Apps allows a custom logo for each organization.

What kind of things can we do with this new system?  Here’s a few ideas:

• Easily share user calendars so that co-workers may know when they are available for meetings.
• Set up shared documents, spreadsheets and presentations for collaborative work within offices.  These documents can also be shared with the entire Conference or with all visitors to our website.
• Set up Google Sites for project based collaboration (rather than just individual documents).
• Easily manage e-mail and make use of the labeling system for filing away old messages for later retrieval.
• Easily set up a system group that I can use to communicate with all of my end users simultaneously.

What other ways can we use this?  We are concentrating on the migration from our existing systems now and will move on to feature implementation later.  I’m curious to hear other ideas as to what we can actually do with this system once we have everything in place.  I’ll post updates as we move along in the implementation process.  We are very excited about all that we can do with this new system!