Bruce van der Kooij » idea

Modern Warfare 2: The party system, matchmaking and finding servers

Bruce van der Kooij — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:59:23 +0000

Since November 2009 I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2 with a bunch of online friends and while the game is not without its problems, I have absolutely fallen in love with its party and matchmaking system. It’s great to be able to just hook up with a bunch of friends and not have to concern yourself with finding a server or worry about getting split up when you finally do find one (think auto team balance).

I’d be very happy if at least the core functionality from the party and matchmaking system from Modern Warfare 2 would be preserved in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Seeing as how Call of Duty: Black Ops has a confirmed release date for 9 November 2010 (less than 6 months away) there may not be a lot of time left to integrate this feature if it has not already been taken into account but one can certainly hope :-)

Thanks!

Drupal, oh how I miss thee

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:46:56 +0000

I wish WordPress had a URL alias system like Drupal does. Now with WordPress it seems you can’t update the post title or change the permalink scheme without breaking all previous links

Why did I actually choose WordPress over Drupal? It may have had something to do with that word that starts with a u and ends with sability (which reminds me of the Drupal 7 User Experience Project, whose site oddly enough doesn’t properly handle that I force a particular font). How would the ideal blogging engine look like front-end and usability wise anyways because WordPress in my experiences so far is still far from ideal?

UPDATE: a quick Google search for “drupal change permalink without breaking” (without the quotes) turns up this blog post which lists 3 plugins that can help with the permalink issues. I’ll take a look at these later.

UPDATE: Tyler searched his logs and gave me this link. Include this in my research when I look at the issue later.

TODO:

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Analyzing text for repeating segments

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:39:35 +0000

While writing one of the previous blog posts it occurred to me that I was using “Even though” quite a few times (now corrected).

“Even though it’s a little bit slower on my system”

“I haven’t yet actually used the Expose plugin, even though I do organize things using virtual desktops. “

“Even though I’m hoping for more innovation in the window manager area”

It would be pretty cool if there was a plugin that would signalize such things automatically and inform the author.

WordPress hybrid edit mode

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:25:10 +0000

I wish WordPress would support some hybrid mode which would allow you to directly use HTML in visual mode. I think Atlassian’s Confluence actually supports this kind of thing.

GNOME Do’s advanced text entry mode

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:10:20 +0000

Dear Lazyweb, is it just me or does GNOME Do’s advanced text entry (<.>) mode still seem severely limited? It doesn’t seem to support text cursor movement, selection and I can use only a single line break at a time. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t just use a stylized multi-line GtkEntry widget (or possibly even something like GtkSourceView or Scintilla). Actual advanced text entry mode would be required for using it to write blog posts.

Improving GNOME Do’s Window Manager plugin

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:38:37 +0000

Something related to the previous post and something that I think would be quite useful is if GNOME Do’s Window Manager plugin by Jason Smith supported textually searching through the window titles and then focusing the application it found. It currently only supports searching for application names. Using libwnck this is actually quite easy. Focus prevention logic in the window manager may prevent proper focusing though. Perhaps ideally it would be able to search through the entire window content, but AFAIK this cannot be easily achieved. This is actually something I’ve been meaning to implement, let’s see if I get around to it.

Making sharing screencasts a snap

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:46:05 +0000

I was interested in somebody usage of Tomboy and this made me think about how recording screencasts has become incredibly easy with recordMyDesktop, but the process afterwards could probably still be improved. I’m mostly thinking about easily sharing the result (with proper compression etc.).

Interestingly enough Tyler also blogged about recordMyDestkop a few days ago (“man this app is slick” ;-).