Archive for October, 2004

 Nobuo Uematsu Leaves Square Enix

While the story isn’t all bad news, I’m really starting to worry about Square/Enix. They seem to have lost many of the folks who made them so magical, and their latest stuff really isn’t living up to their games of the past. I think they know this, and are trying to bank on popular names in the FF series instead of coming up with new an original stuff. A perfect example is all the FF7 stuff that’s coming out. While I loved FF7, and am really looking forward to some of these projects (I think there’s like 4 now, two action rpgs for ps2, the movie and the cell phone game) I can’t help but feel like they are trying to fleece the name for all it’s worth. Then I see things like this story, which lists all the people who’ve left them, and I really get worried. And the new Dragon Quest isn’t even an in house development! I was really surprised to hear that they farmed out one of their biggest franchises.

Thinking of a Final Fantasy game without an Uematsu score makes me want to cry. I mean, listen to the abomination that was Final Fantasy X-2 for an example of the horrors. I’m still trying to pretend that game never happened, at least musically. He’s been doing fewer and fewer tracks in the FF games recently, FF9 being the last FF game he solo composed. I think he did like 2 songs for FF11. I’ve heard he did more for 12, and he’s working on music for one of the FF7 PS2 titles, but who knows after this news.

I really think my beloved Squaresoft is losing their way…

Well, Molly just left for a Halloween party. Being the fun hating recluse that I am, I’m home listening to video game music. Later I’ll probably do some WORK. Woo! Wee! As she was leaving I said something or the other about today being Halloween. Well, as I’m sure everyone else who is reading this knows that’s tomorrow. Duh. Well, back to the music!

I have OODLES of music. I mean oodles and oodles. I have so much assorted gaming, anime and movie music that sometimes I don’t listen to something for a really really long time. Every now and then I go through some of my older stuff and rediscover things I’d forgotten I have. One example is an absolutely hilarious “Mariah Carey” parody version of the Magic Knights Rayearth opening theme. Working Designs put it up on their site many years back as an April fools joke. (they were working on the English version of the MKR Saturn game at the time) Another neat track I have is a “just messing around with a boombox” recording of Soyokaze no Sonachine by a very talented singer. It really sounds fantastic despite the horid sound quality. (EDIT: I should note that I’m pretty sure this track was from one of the folks involved in the wonderful Project Magestic Mix.) I so love music, and I really love to collect random fun things like these.

I work at Raymond James. (you know, the place that bought the naming rights for the football stadium in Tampa) They really really really take Halloween seriously here. I remember my first Halloween here, seven long years ago. Back then, they took it even more seriously. What I remember most is distribution service’s Psycho Circus. They had a Disney quality walk through attraction that must have taken all year to make. It had light effects, creepy music, folks in amazing makeup and tons of other things. The whole walk through was very dark, and they used light to guide you from scare to scare. Honestly, I was floored with the quality. I wish I’d had a chance to look a bit longer, but I went through with a friend of mine who was screaming and pushing me forward the whole time. My department (IT) always seems to win something. This year we (ok they, I didn’t do much) used a Las Vegas theme. When the judges came around, they did Blue Man Crew re-enactment complete with music and a huge slingshot. It was very surreal to see a developer I worked with on several occasions dressed in all blue with blue body paint and acting like a mime. And then one of the database administration gals came down dressed as a umpa lumpa,(spelling?) and another as some kind of medieval maiden, not really sure I “got” her costume. Surreal. Then my boss’s boss’s boss came down with silver hair. She said she was going to come as a circus performer but didn’t complete the costume. Still, it was SURREAL. This year’s biggest attraction was the Haunted House. These guys went all out. They even had a full color ad they sent around. It was basically a horror movie themed walk through with lots of excellent lighting and rooms for many different classic horror films. Throw in narrow hallways and lots of people grabbing you and screaming at you and it is very effective. Lots of fun was had by all, and they raised lots of money for charity too. Halloween at RJ is always fun. Each year it gets a bit less elaborate, but many people still dress up and it is fun to walk around and look at the people and the decorations. Of course it makes working a bit hard, but I’m not gonna complain about that!  

Here’s a quick and dirty way to record some visitor stats. (this is based on the howto here) (I moved the looong text to a lj-cut on the suggestion of )

Before you start, you should decide how you are going to track the stats. Many free stat sites exist which will work fine with this method, and I won’t go into finding one of them. I’m using a quick custom php script I wrote. (requires mysql) I’ll provide the source to this, but it is quick and dirty and incomplete particularly in that it doesn’t have a method to report statistics yet. I’ll have something up soon to do that though. I’m going to continue this howto assuming you’re using my method. I’m also assuming you are using S2. Doing this in S1 should be much much easier, as you can just include the tag in the header override. I’ve only tried this with the Component style, but I think it will work with any S2 style. First, get lj_hit.php.src, rename it to lj_hit.php, and edit it to put the in username, password and database name. (look for the comment “CHANGE THESE THREE VARIABLES” near the top of the file) Then upload it to your webserver. Next, grab gss_sql.sql and execute it to create the mysql table. You can do this via phpmysqladmin by navagating to your database, clicking the SQL tab, and pasting in the SQL from gss_sql.sql.  At this point you should be able to hit lj_hit.php?pagename=testing and get a little tiny white image. If you get an error message check that you’ve followed my steps. If you can’t figure out what’s up you can post a comment and I’ll try to help. Next, you need to create a custom s2 layer and enable it. In this example I’m going to override print_free_text. First you need to be sure the free text component is enabled. Go to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/ and click edit or create customizations just under themes. On the layout pane, check Override default under Enable Free Text. Then change the dropdown box below to yes. You might need to scroll the page slightly for the dropdown box to show up in some browsers. Once that’s enabled, you can create your custom layer. To do this, go to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/ and click Your Layers. Under Create layout-specific layer, select Theme as the Type, and your layout as the Layout. (NOTE: If you are already applying a custom theme layer then you’ll want to edit instead) Next, click edit next to the layer you created. (or your current theme layer) Paste the contents of free-text.s2 into the box. (if you are editing your existing layer, be sure to leave off the first two lines of free-text.s2) Change the text USERNAME near the bottom right to your lj username. Click compile. Finally, you need to enable the layer. Go back to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/ and select your new theme from the themes dropdown. It will be called stats if you used the sample file. Click change. That’s it! You should see a wee little white box wherever the free text normally shows in your layout. Your normal free text will show up above it. You can make sure it is working by checking out the database. You should see a new row for each hit. If you have any questions feel free to contact me via AIM or leave a comment. I hope you found this useful!

Okay, since I didn’t get any guess for either musical quiz, I suppose it is time to reveal the answers. 1. Intro Theme, Return to Zork Composed by Nathan Wang 2. Funeral March, Wild Arms (PSX) Composed by Michiko Naruke, Arranged by Kazuhiko Toyama Good tunes, both of them. I like the second of the two better, however. 

Does anyone know if there are user stats available for Livejournal? The closest thing I could find was a global stats page that lists a bunch of site wide aggrigates. I’m looking for something more specific to my journal. If I can’t find anything I guess I’ll have to write something.

If you are curious, you can have a look at the stats for Zidane and the box’s current load and uptime at the page I finally took the time to update and get working again. Heh.  http://greglincoln.com/server/uptime.php Uptime is pretty embarrasing recently. I think Rocket was over 100 days when he finally went to the big rack in the sky, but his all time record was over 200 days. Until the end, Rocket was rock solid. Zidane averages about 25-30 days between hard-locks. Sigh.

Perhaps I should give up on the musical guessing thing. Perhaps I’m the only one who finds something like that fun. Heh. I suppose I’ll give a hint or three for the second track though, just for fun. 1. It’s a PS1 game. 2. Soon there will be a PS2 remake, but this song isn’t orchestrated in that version. (bleh) 3. I stopped playing it about 3/4 though. (Molly tells me this was just before it got really interesting, which seems to be when I stop playing most games) Guess correctly for musical gifts and cookies!

I’m posting this via email, just to see if I can. This is a neat feature, if I can get it to work!