[GRLUG] GRLUG Social Tonight

[Mike Williams]

On 11/02/2011 03:43 PM, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Mike Williams<knightperson at zuzax.com>  wrote:
>> While we've made lots of progress, the casino project is far from finished.
>> You might be at the tail end of the music server one, but then at least you
>> can listen to it over the big speakers.
>>
>> I have some concerns about the casino project. Besides some abysmal security
>> practices, I'm concerned about what exactly we are doing here. I'm all for
>> mental exercise and building systems to do cool things, but we're working
>> for a for-profit enterprise (and an industry that is not one of my
>> favorites, although I can probably look the other way for that). We're doing
>> quite a bit of software development work, and as near as I can tell we're
>> doing it for free. Pro Bono work is fine if a noble cause is benefiting from
>> it, but this is a for-profit business. Should they be paying us in some way?
> We've been getting free beer, wireless, snacks, cool toys to play
> with, and a roomy area to socialize in.
Well, true.
> They've also already got a fully-working setup with Windows. They
> don't *have* to switch to Linux; the Casino Kiosk project has been
> largely about showing them, "hey, you can go this route, too!" It's an
> evangelist project.
>
> Besides, if these touchscreens can be made to work properly on Linux,
> especially by default, a number of possibilities are opened up.
>
> As for the cash receptor and printer, getting that thing working
> properly under Linux opens up opportunities for others.
>
I guess, but we're looking at a whole system swap. With the lack of 
drivers for the bill acceptor we're looking at essentially writing a 
driver from scratch, and that could be a very messy hack job. To make 
the printer work is becoming fairly complicated also. The current 
version, if I'm deciphering the emails right, renders barcode in the 
software driver. The printer is capable of generating them with built-in 
templates, but the system that reads them and cashes out might not 
understand them if they're different from what the Windows software builds.

True, we could replace the cash acceptor with something less weird, but 
it seems like the further in we dig the more complicated the project gets.

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