Our web server crashed… HARD.

Perhaps you have noticed that this blog, along with my main web site, SophSoft.com, has been down and non-functional for a couple of days. The web server hardware that was running these sites (and several others) got completely fried on Sunday.

When I say “fried”, I mean truly fried. The AMD processor in the box overheated and filled the area with a nauseating burning electronics smell. If anybody asks, the amount of time it takes for an improperly cooled CPU to self-destruct is about 5 seconds, and when that happens, it stinks (in more ways than one).

We were already contemplating a system upgrade anyway, and since finding a replacement for this aged processor would be considerably more hassle and cost than replacing the entire box (with one three times the speed), we acted upon the latter option. This also gave us the opportunity to dump Windows 2000 Server in favor of Ubuntu Server (Linux).

So, after building a new server box and installing a new (to me) operating system, the hardware and software now seem to be working properly. Note that “properly” is not quite “as desired“, and there is still much configuration to do in the coming days (including recovery of our secondary sites), but at least our two main sites are back together.

[Insert image of Phoenix rising from the ashes.]

I hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving day (even outside the US).

Following tradition, here are the things for which I am thankful this year:

On the business side, I am thankful that we have been productive and successful this year, that business is definitely on an upward trend, and that we have a clear roadmap for the next several projects and updates. We managed to finish Vista-friendly versions of all of our products, including Pretty Good MahJongg, Action Solitaire, and Most Popular Solitaire, before the consumer release date, Pretty Good MahJongg won a Shareware Industry Award, and we released Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, expanding onto a new platform.

On the personal side, I am very thankful that my immediate family is happy and healthy. My wife is actively volunteering in our community, my older son is enjoying his first year at Michigan State University, and my younger son started his high school career by being cast in their production(s) of Working that will travel to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Thanksgiving 2005
Thanksgiving 2006

An update to our Mac solitaire game is now available.

Goodsol Development has released a product update, Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 1.01. One can download or purchase the update, or find out more about the game, at the Pretty Goodsol Solitare Mac Edition web page.

Due to customer requests, this update adds two new variants to the solitaire game, Gaps, which can be found on the ‘Preferences->Rules’ menu. Some people really wanted the option of unlimited redeals, so that is now available. Since this makes the game impossible to lose (without quitting, that is), and hence no real challenge, we also added an option of only four (4) redeals, which is easier than the default two (2) redeals. This easier (but not unlosable) option provides some challenge but makes most (if not all) deals of Gaps winnable, with some effort.

Fortunately, the release version of the title contained no showstopper bugs, but we did fix a couple of aesthetic issues, along with one annoying problem that made the random deal selection when starting a ‘New’ game considerably less than random. Ironically, it had similar symptoms to a bug reported and fixed during beta testing, but the cause was completely unrelated. More on that in the future…

Start playing games as a family tradition this week.

The week of Thanksgiving, in the United States, has been declared National Games Week. This year, that means November 18-24, 2007. Although the original promoter, Games Quarterly magazine, has ceased publication, there is a MySpace page for National Games Week dedicated to its continuance.

Here, it is a short work week, leading up to our biggest holiday for traditional family gatherings, followed immediately by a day dedicated to just staying home. What better time could there be to enjoy the simple pleasures of playing games with friends and family. I encourage you to break out the board games, or maybe a deck of cards, and enjoy a timeless activity experienced around the world for centuries. Better still, use this opportunity to start a game night tradition in your household or neighborhood.

By the way, the crocodile at my door tells me that Nashanull Keel-a-Zeeba Day is this week, too.

ELHS Theater is performing Working through November 18.

This weekend, the East Lansing High School Theater program began a two-week run of the musical, Working, based on the book of the same name by Studs Terkel. The play opened last Friday and runs through next Sunday [November 18] afternoon. The next performance will be Wednesday at 7:00pm, with Friday and Saturday shows at 7:30pm, and then “closing night” (for this incarnation) at 2:00pm, all at the East Lansing High School Center for Performing Arts.

I attended the show last night, primarily to see my son, William, who was cast in the named role of Anthony Coelho, a stone mason. Although I had not heard about this musical previously, I certainly enjoyed myself. It is unusual in the fact that there is not a plot, per se, but rather individual vignettes examining different personal working situations, taken from interviews. There were some portions that were surprisingly moving, especially considering that the whole cast are teenagers. “Fathers and Sons” was particularly emotional.

What makes the ELHS version of Working special is that the cast has been invited to perform the show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland next August. This is reputed to be the largest art festival in the world, and only about 60 schools from the US are invited each year; East Lansing has the only program in the State of Michigan that was invited for 2008. It is a Big Deal (and I am proud that my son gets to participate).

The trick, of course, is fund raising in order to allow the (slightly different) Scotland cast to make the overseas journey for a week or so. We are looking for sponsors and/or a major benefactor to help provide the approximately $150K it will take to get the cast and crew to Edinburgh. The theme of the show is such that character/job sponsorships and product placement are possible. (We have already “donated” $750 ourselves.)

Anybody interested in helping out can view the promotional video (on YouTube) entitled, Working Our Way to Scotland. (For fun, see if you can spot William rehearsing in his Pretty Good Solitaire t-shirt in the video.)

Tickets are still available for the remaining (Fall) performances for $10, of which $2 is a contribution toward the Edinburgh trip. I already have my ticket for next Sunday, so maybe I will see you there.

Our first ever product for Apple Macintosh was released today.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition is now available from Goodsol Development.

After many months of development, the first product we have developed for Mac OS X has been shipped, and I must say that I am quite happy with the end result. The title received a significant amount of polish even since my New platform: Max OS X post a couple of weeks ago, so I think that the slight release delay was beneficial. You can also read what Thomas Warfield wrote about Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition in his blog.

The title itself is a game containing 30 different types of solitaire (as a start), which is a universal binary for both Intel and PowerPC Macs, and it runs on Panther (OS X 10.3), Tiger (10.4), and Leopard (10.5), the latest “big cat” that was released a little more than a week ago and reportedly sold 2 million copies in its first weekend.

To try our new game, download a 30-day evaluation version, or just buy a copy here.

Now that the program is finished (the initial version, anyway), the project source code is properly archived, and the wishlist for version 1.1 is filed, my hard work is over and I get a chance to catch up on a serious backlog of non-programming work. At the same time, the marketing work is really just getting started, and then we will have a decent idea of how the Macintosh game market stacks up to that on Windows.

Stay tuned…

There are a couple of important happenings in the next few days.

This evening will be the monthly chapter meeting of the Southern Michigan IGDA (International Game Developers Association). This October meeting is an Education Roundtable which will feature several area game/multimedia professors, including Dr. Bruce Maxim of UofM – Dearborn, Brian Winn of Michigan State University, Kim Callery of IADT Detroit, and Jacob Pollak of Schoolcraft College.

For those who are close enough to attend, the meeting will take place on the University of Michigan – Dearborn campus (4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, MI). It will start at 6:00pm, running until perhaps 9:00pm, in auditorium room 1011 of the IAVS (Borg Warner) building. (No, I am not exactly sure where that is, either, but here is a campus map.)

Starting tomorrow will be the Bloomington Schmooze 2007, the latest installment of the Fall Shareware Schmooze, this time hosted by Eric Isaacson of Eric Isaacson Software, makers of ZIPKEY. This schmooze will run Thursday through Sunday, with home base at the Abe Martin Lodge within Indiana’s Brown County State Park, near Nashville (Indiana, not Tennessee).

A shareware schmooze is a unique networking (and socializing) event in which people who, for the most part, work online gather in one location to meet in person. There is no fixed agenda, so the activities can vary from simply sitting in comfortable chairs drinking and snacking all weekend, to opening laptops and working on technical software issues, to visiting local points of interest, to discussing business, politics, sports, the weather, or nothing at all. For more information, visit the official shareware schmooze page.

If you are in the area and have an interest in either building the game industry in Michigan or in the education of our next generation of game developers, stop by the IGDA chapter meeting. If you are involved in development of games and/or independent software of any kind, I urge you to come to the Shareware Schmooze, if even for just part of a day, to meet others who are making a living in the industry.

Sorry for the late notice.

We are getting prepared to release a Macintosh game next week.

As mentioned in several previous posts, including New development platform, most of my recent development has been on “another” platform (read: not Windows), and I can now confirm here that we are almost ready to release a solitaire game for Mac OS X.

The title was developed using Xcode, the development environment that ships (“free“) with every Apple computer, written entirely in C++ (Gnu) and using Carbon. Our decision to use Carbon, as opposed to Cocoa, was made when Apple still openly spoke of both frameworks being “first class citizens” on OS X and even recommended Carbon for cross-platform code. We were almost into beta when Apple revealed, in classic bombshell fashion, that Carbon had been demoted and would not be fully supported in 64-bit versions of the operating system, starting with the next release.

That next release (a.k.a, the next big cat) is Leopard, OS X 10.5, which is going to be released this coming Friday. Ironically, that is just a single day after our originally planned release date, so we will be releasing a little bit later to properly test on this latest Apple operating system. (That is my story and I am sticking to it; the slight schedule slippage on this product was only coincidental.)

Although much of the underlying source code is derived from, or (in some cases) identical to, code used under Windows, the game is not a simple port, as nearly the entire user interface was rewritten to conform with the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and to be “Mac native“. Everything we have heard and read suggests that straight ports that do not look like Mac products (especially those which look like Windows applications) are rejected by Apple users. This should definitely not be an issue with our new title.

This long development process has been quite a learning experience, and there are lots of areas in which OS X excels over Windows, and vice versa. I will detail some of these once the game finally goes gold. In the meantime, it should not take too much investigation and deduction for the interested to figure out the name of this latest project.

This week’s episode of Cash Cab: After Dark had a solitaire question.

For the unfamiliar, the Discovery Channel airs a unique trivia show, Cash Cab, along with its new variant, Cash Cab: After Dark, in which people climb into a New York City taxicab and unexpectedly become contestants on a game show, winning money for each correct answer en route to their destination. The catch is that wrong answers earn a strike and “three strikes and you’re out”, literally: kicked out of the cab on the spot with no (extra) money.

The most recent episode of Cash Cab: After Dark, aired originally on Wednesday night, featured a question about solitaire on Windows, an area in which I have some degree of expertise.

Question: A blessing for bored PC users, what specific variety of solitaire has come with Microsoft Windows since 1995?

The correct answer, of course, is FreeCell, which shipped with Windows 95. (As an aside, I was in attendance at the Win95 release event on the Microsoft Campus. Big doin’s.) However, FreeCell was actually available with Win32s (for 16-bit Windows) and as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack products prior to this.

The FreeCell implementations in both Most Popular Solitaire and Pretty Good Solitaire are deal compatible with the Windows version. Additionally, our upcoming title, on another platform, also contains a version that produces the same deals (up to deal #1000000). More details to follow…

One possible incorrect answer would be Klondike, which is the proper name for the type of solitaire (or patience) that is simply called Solitaire in Windows. The word “specific” could lead one to that response, but that game started shipping with Windows 3.0 in 1990. (The aforementioned games all include Klondike.)

Another possible incorrect answer could be Spider [Solitaire], which started shipping with Windows me (but don’t tell Wikipedia that), but was previously available with Microsoft 98 Plus! Having beta tested the latter product, I can say that the shipping version was a vast improvement on the first version I saw. (Spider is also included in all of the aforementioned Goodsol Development titles as well, including the Spider One Suit and Spider Two Suits variants.)

Too much solitaire information? I have lots more.