Last month, I wrote about overriding shared library functions. I spent time today working on that project and it's to the point where I want to put it out for consumption. It's not perfect, but I've used it to easily override both libc and libX11 functions with great results.

Download: liboverride-20070903.tar.gz

Hop on over to the keynav project page and download the new version.

The changelist from the previous announced release is as follows:

20070903:
  - Drag is now working. Problem was KeyEvent.state contains masks such as
    | Button1Mask which is set when mouse button 1 is held, so keybindings stopped
    | working. Ignoring Button[1-5]Mask in this value fixes the problem.
  - Drag takes two optional arguments: a button followed by a keysequence to fire.
    | 'drag 1 alt' will do an alt+leftclick drag.
    | 'drag 2' will do a middleclick drag.
  - sync to xdotool@20070903
  - Fix a bug in parse_mods and parse_keysym where it was destructively changing the string.
  - Fix a bug where I was using the loop iterator 'i' inside another for loop. Oops.
  - Add to defaults my nethack-vi-style diagonal keybindings

Hop on over to the xdotool project page and download the new version.

The changelist from the previous announced release is as follows:

20070903:
  * Add xdo_mousemove_relative for relative mouse movements
  * Add xdolib.sh. This is a script library to help with features xdo does not
    explicitly implement, such as querying window attributes, or fetching the
    root window id. An example which uses this is: examples/move_window_away.sh

Let me first open by saying I think it's neat that gamers from both Vista and Xbox360 worlds can play with each other online. Cross-platform anything is cool. However, "neat" isn't always something you push to production without considering the drawbacks.

My complaint is regarding this feature and the first person shooter (FPS) genre. This complaint is about the effect that this feature has on gaming. Allow me to clear that I'm not upset that I suck at Shadowrun and die a lot. Heck, it's fun to play even when I die constantly. Except against users who are clearly average or better gamers on Vista.

As anyone who grew up playing FPSs on the computer, my first distaste for the console FPS was the aiming system. The mouse allows you to more quickly and accurately input directional data to the game than does an analog thumbstick. A mouse lets you turn around instantly and accurately with the trained flick of a wrist. Thumbsticks are a far cry from this. Everyone knows this.

So why, then, do we bridge the gaming worlds of PCs and Consoles? Why, when the aiming device (mouse, trackball, whatever) has several distinct advantages over the thumbstick? Who knows.

All I know is, I'm tired of teleporting 3 times across someone's view and his shots follow me exactly, assumedly because he's using a mouse. Maybe he's really good, and I know I'm really bad, but my gut tells me that most of the time these players are on PCs.

For other games, sure, let's join the worlds, where the tools on both sides don't grant significant advantage.

All I want is a checkbox that says: "Only play with gamers on my platform."

If I played on a PC, I'd ask for this same feature, because it would be an absolute slaughter: me against console players.

Pretty please? A checkbox isn't so hard, is it?

Love,
Me, an Xbox Live and Shadowrun fan.