John vs Mercurial, Round 2

I mentioned in a previous post that I would be giving Mercurial another chance, because the first time didn’t go so well. The only real driving factors for me are the massive number of ads on SourceForge, and at some point down the road, I want to close Asteroid Outpost’s source. Having a quick look around, I found Bitbucket. They offer free, open and closed source repositories for small project teams. So far, round 2 is proving to be much smoother than my first attempt, maybe TortoiseHg is better than it was? Or maybe I’ve grown? Whatever the case may be, Merc and I are getting along now.

There is one nice feature that I will certainly be using: Guess Renames. Renaming in SVN was a pain in the ass. First you’d rename or move the file(s) in Visual Studio, then go to windows explorer, undo the rename manually, then re-rename the files one by one using SVN. With Merc, I can simply rename the files in Visual Studio then get Merc to guess the renames for me. Problem solved.

All of my Asteroid Outpost related projects that used to be on SourceForge have been moved to Bitbucket already, and I’m sure I’ll be moving more projects over when I get the chance. I have already added a few new projects to Bitbucket, here’s my profile link.

Work has begun on a Battlefield 3 Extra Stats page (powered by bf3stats.com). BF3 already has some amazing statistics on your playing, but I feel it lacks the ability to compare multiple soldiers. There are a couple things I would like to get out of this page:

  1. Which weapons are my friends using that I am not?
  2. Which weapons are my friends using more/less effectively than I am?

To help me visualize exactly what I wanted before I wrote too much code, I made up a Google Docs Spreadsheet with me and some of my playing buddies to visualize the stats. The highlighted cells on the first sheet indicate weapons that I deemed underused by the player, and in the “Accuracy Slim” sheet the highlighted rows try to indicate which weapons may be more accurate than others, based on empirical evidence. The PHP for this page is open-source on Bitbucket, surprise!

I seem to be in an open-source mood today, so maybe I’ll upload some more of my older projects, like my Winamp G15 plugin. Speaking of my G15 keyboard, it is no more, it ceases to be, it no longer functions. What a sad day that was. On the plus side, I got a new, mechanical keyboard! On the down side, the new keyboard was a little annoying because it didn’t have dedicated media keys AND it was defective. The period key would double-bounce, making it really annoying to program with. On the plus side, they let me return it for a different new mechanical keyboard! And it’s awesome. I only have one problem with my new keyboard: Not all of the keys are mechanical, and I have to use the non-mechanical keys all the time while I’m programming. They can feel rather stiff and they don’t travel quite as far as the mechanical ones do. I would have paid more for 100% mechanical, but I suppose I can’t get everything. I’m still happy.