Halo 2

I finished Halo 2 last night. Now I can get some sleep. Let me jump on the bandwagon and say that this is the greatest game ever. I'm now going to try in heroic mode and save up my pennies to get Xbox live so that Justin and I can play online.

My only complaint about the game is that I couldn't hear the voices. Even if I turned up the volume to deafening levels. After finishing the game I turned off my dolby pro logic and it seemed to help a little, but then you don't have the surround sound. Its hard to follow the action if you can't hear the directions. Anyone else have this problem?

How Google works

I was checking the site stats for my kid's school website Providence Christian Academy and noticed that three Google hits were from "kevin heifner". I thought that was odd since my name does not appear anywhere on the site (or the source for the site). I then googled for "kevin heifner" and was surprised to find that the number one link for my name was www.pcastl.org.

So how could the number one link for my name be a Christian School in St. Louis that does not contain my name? Its not like my name does appear on other sites. So why would www.pcastl.org be number one on the list?

Well... Recently I posted to Weiqi's Blog and since I didn't have a webpage of my own, I just used the website of Providence. It turns out that Google uses the words used to link to a page to match search phrases. So since "kevin heifner" was used to link to www.pcastl.org, Google setup their index so when someone searches for "kevin heifner" it lists www.pcastl.org as the number one link.

So it should be possible to get Google to list the www.pcastl.org for searches such as: Christian School St. Louis or Christian Education St. Louis or Christian K-12 School by creating links like those of this sentence. All I need to do now is wait for the google-bots to find this page and see what happens.

Syndication feed

James McMurry asks:

I'm glad to see you're going to have a blog, but where's the syndication feed?

I think that it is:

http://heifner.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Real-time design patterns

I'm teaching OOAD/DP (Object Oriented Analysis and Design) and (Object Oriented Design Patterns) this week in Dewitt (East Syracuse), NY. One of my students asked about resourses for real-time design patterns, so I shot a quick email to my fellow developers at OCI.

Chris Cleeland had this to say:

I just stumbled across http://www.eventhelix.com/RealtimeMantra/Patterns/ which looks like an interesting collection of realtime-related patterns--and it's free.

In response to my question about Real-Time Design Patterns by Bruce Powel Douglass, Mike Martinez had this to say:

I am in the process of reading it. So far it appears pretty
thorough. It addresses the major issues of real time software, which
are not normally considered with most pattern treatments.

I would recommend the book on the basis of the application of patterns
to the RT domain.

Anyone else have any comments?

Weiqi found my blog

Weiqi Gao has this blog listed as one of his "Blogs I read". The question is how did he discover that it exists. I've sent an email to him to find out...

Start of Blog

Well, I finally decided to start a blog. Please stay tuned for actual content in the future.