Still Going (Complete: 73%)
09/10/15 at 19:45 EST

Been doing a little bit of work lately, and a lot these past couple hours.

For the past few days I've been developing a little photo gallery for a friend of mine; while it's more or less complete I don't feel content linking to it yet, as the images for the gallery haven't been completely compiled/formatted/uploaded. That has had me occupied since Monday.

But more recently, I decided to attempt an RSS feed. It was a hell of a lot easier to figure out than I had expected; once I found the "hello world" of XML pages for RSS use, it was at best ten minutes before I had it all finished. It has since been added to the Navigation Bar.

Speaking of which, that ol' navbar's been growing and growing to the point where it just no longer fits on many screens, including my PSP - in fact, it hasn't fit on my PSP since I added a visual element to it. To compensate for that, the navbar can now be adjusted to either stay fixed (default behaviour) or to remain at the top of the page, so you can scroll past it, so that browsers/systems that are not vertical-pixel-gifted may still utilize it to its full extent. Once I did that, I came to the realization that a restructure of the layout was in order. Once that was done, I came to the conclusion that my code is starting to get ugly - I have tested it on Firefox and on my PSP, but have no idea how it functions on any other browser/embedded platform. I'll get an iPhone/touch user to take it for a spin to see if it works there, and maybe I'll just download another browser or two and test it out there while I'm living on my brother's futon.

I seem to be having some success with my time management lately vis a vis my recent bundle of portable RPGs. Yet I fear the worst; I may try to score 100% completion in KH:DS's Challenges after all.
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Boxing Days (Complete: 61%)
09/10/12 at 20:24 EST

Well, it has certainly been busy around here, lately. Unfortunately, there isn't much to talk about. I haven't done any development on the website lately, so maybe in the coming days when I'll be left to my own devices, I can add something new. I've gotten a couple feature requests - whether or not I develop them before I make my Reviews page will be up to my preference at the time I decide to do something constructive. At the very least, I shouldn't have to worry about doing much more packing any time soon, since we would no longer have anywhere to put it:



Also contributing to the rising probability that I'll get something done is the fact that KH:DS is more or less wearing down on me; with all standard missions at 100%, all that remains for me as far as completion goes is the Challenges, and some of them are so intolerably vicious that I may even give that goal a miss entirely.

On the other hand, I've been putting more time into Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days, and that's never a good sign when there's work to be done. Those games are a dangerous time-sink, and I haven't yet mastered Disgaea 2, either. Assuming it is in the midpoint between Disgaea 1 and Disgaea 3 in terms of post-game content, we're looking at roughly 80 to 100 hours of game-play to be had. I'm looking forward to it.
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Frozen In Time (End of Days)
09/10/08 at 21:51 EST

The basic layout of the Photo Gallery has been completed. All that remains to be done is a more elegant photo viewer; a "viewphoto.php" or something of the sort. A bit of extra work, but nothing too severe. Thanks to PHP's delightful substr function design, it was very easy to get the page to do what I wanted it to do. Negative offsets are a beautiful thing.

I cleared Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days earlier tonight at roughly 32 game hours. It was a good length for a game, and perhaps the longest Kingdom Hearts game to date - my original clear time in KH2 was 40 hours, but a lot of that can be attributed to non-linear exploration/going the wrong way/leaving the game on pause. While I've been able to whittle my KH2 clear time down to 16 hours or so, KH:DS is very linear, very straightforward, and essentially improbable to get lost in, so most game time would be saved simply via skipping cut-scenes and not playing Challenges.

So upon completion, I decided to begin tackling the Missions portion of the game. There are at least 18 playable characters in Mission mode (I'm not sure if I have them all, but it looks that way), and while they all have their strengths and weaknesses, I've found my match in Lexaeus. If you're looking to get the job done quickly, use Lexaeus. Make sure you have the Brick Wall ability as well; not that he can't manage without it, but because it's so fitting for a Goliath like himself, and that it makes things easier. Bosses that took me several minutes with anyone else goes down in just a couple combos with this behemoth of a fighter. On enemies with low enough defense, he can damage enemies faster than the game can animate HP drain. I can "Defeat the Neoshadow!" before the "Defeat the Neoshadow" information window vanishes - no need for spell-casting here!

At any rate, I'll try to avoid discussing KH:DS at length any more than I already have; I plan to have a media review page joining the website some time and I'll address it then.
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The Dead Walk At Six (Day: 277)
09/10/07 at 16:55 EST

As was foretold, a basic search engine is in place. At the moment, the entire search term is treated as being in quotes, so searching, for example, "and if" will only return matches of "and if", as oppose to anything that contains an "if" without a preceding "and".

Also soon to come will be a photo gallery section. For now, though, I'm not in the mood for uploading the pictures and writing the code. It'll come later. Within the next couple days, I'm sure.

In other "news", I've been working diligently at progressing through KH:DS, and have now hit a point where things are starting to go bananas. There was an "easter egg" (if you can call it that) in KH2 revealing something of a spoiler for KH:DS, but that easter egg in itself was so messy it was tough to make out. Still, I felt like a fool for not noticing the reference immediately - in fact, it wasn't until the game looked at me and said "Hey, remember this?" (figuratively, of course) that I made the connection. But beyond that, there's a riddle in the title of this post that I'm not going to elaborate on; I'm trying to avoid revealing any spoilers...but for any of you who solve the riddle of my suspicions, this is something I had made claim to since Chain of Memories was released (in English) for the GBA. I may be over-analyzing this, but I'm not going to under-estimate Nomura's sneakiness, either. There's no reason to believe 'he' isn't still out there.

Still, if it turns out that Axel is Riku, I'm going to be briefly dissatisfied. That's just nonsense.

Well, Sadie's yappin' at me. Time to go.
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Barren Living (Day: 225)
09/10/07 at 01:04 EST

Started today off with a friendly early morning trip to ye olde lande fille. I was hoping to smash the old CRT TV and monitor by throwing them into the "Pit", alas, it was not meant to be. It seemed that computer hardware had its own neat, intact pile...




It was like Christmas...

However, I did still get to smash an old sculpture I had made. You'll find a video of that in the new Video section. Oh, that reminds me...

Website improvements. I went ahead and added a visual element to the navigation bar up there in the top left. Also added an About page, but that's really just a placeholder. I'm thinking of implementing a proper search engine today (that's still tomorrow for those of you westbound of Eastern Standard Time) just for the sake of having it.

Had to do some errands today. While that in itself is not worthy of extensive detail, I will say that it required me to get in and around town, so today was the first day I got to drive my "new" (read: used 2005 Ford Focus) car beyond the extent of "drive home from the lot". So far I'm pretty impressed with the handling of it, and the acceleration is pretty top-notch. The sound system is really the only thing I'd consider replacing at this point - standard single-disc CD player, which is okay, but the sound quality is standard. Sub-standard, in my books. I think one of the speakers is damaged or even absent; I'm picking up a softer range in the upper left than everywhere else. Oh well. It gets me from A to B, and blasts some good ol' metal while it does so.

My original excitement over the 5.50 cfw Disgaea 2 patch subsided when I encountered a problem with Parasite Eve 2. PE2 is very picky regarding which prx files it will run on, and basically every firmware post 3.40 is out of luck when it comes to booting from the flash, so you're stuck using a popsloader plugin (not that that is a problem in itself.) But when I updated from my old 3.71 to 5.50 (big jump, I know, but I didn't want to disturb my at-the-time fully-functional firmware) my popsloader plugin obviously became obsolete and I had to replace it with one compiled to run on my new firmware. That proved to be a challenge in itself, (as the many bogus seplugins folders will tell you) but after an hour of trying this or that, finally got PE2 to boot without hanging or freezing while running my 5.50 GEN-B firmware. As an added bonus, when booting with the 3.11 pops prx files, my save file remained intact and detectable. Downside to that is, the game hangs if I try to load it. I view it as a small loss: 2 hours of game time I'll have fun replaying anyway, but it may still be salvageable. I might have reached the Disc 2 overlap hack without realizing it, and the game may just be hanging because it expects me to be on Disc 2.

Modification to the EBOOT files has to be done to PE2 (meaning my legit self-compiled files would have run me into a dead end, anyhow) because the game is a multi-disc title, and the PSP, unlike its PS3 counterpart, does not offer any disc-swapping functionality. This isn't a problem for most titles, such as the PSN Popularity Queen Final Fantasy VII, but Parasite Eve 2 (ironically from the same company) offers you no chance to save in between discs, hence why the game needed modification. It makes me wonder how people downloading Metal Gear Solid off the PSN manage - the homebrew community managed to develop hacks and cheats to allow non-multi-disc eboots to get through to disc two without the swap screen. I'd hope Sony was smart enough to compile a multi-disc eboot of it, otherwise anyone looking to take MGS on the go in a completely legit fashion are getting shafted.
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N1 Disabled No More (Day: 172)
09/10/05 at 23:43 EST

I don't know who I'm supposed to thank for this (perhaps Klown?) but Disgaea 2 - Dark Hero Days is finally playable on my PSP, thanks to a 5.50 firmware patch of the game. Now I can remorselessly purchase a UMD of it, enjoy it, and not have to disable the majority of my PSP's functionality in the process. I believe Persona 2: Innocent Sin will also now work, as an added bonus. Now I've got four active portable (Action) JRPGs on the go. Which will be handy in the coming days when I make the move. I'm only driving one way, and with two return-trips, that makes 4 rides in which I'm a passenger, clocking at around 110 minutes a piece.

I sure have been waiting and eager to replay Disgaea 2, though. I've played Disgaea 1 to death, four times now, and the 200 hours I've clocked into Disgaea 3 was enough to 100% that, but I've never completed the post-game for Disgaea 2, so that should be at least 100 hours of something to do. Disgaea 2 is also the only one I haven't purchased yet, and I owe it to Nippon Ichi.

But with a new Kingdom Hearts game and now Disgaea 2, Katamari Forever may have to be put on the back-burner for now. Unless I can snag a job within weeks of settling in my new home, I'll have to budget my money - especially for something I don't need, or further yet, something I already have. At least my insurance was $500 cheaper than expected.
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Tag Implementation, Round Two (Day: 155)
09/10/05 at 17:25 EST

By the end of today (and by that I mean within an hour or two) I expect to have the Tags system more or less completed. It's not 100% dynamic, but the rate in which I add new tags should be so low that it won't be a problem. It's something that can be added later, at any rate. This post serves more or less to test out automatic tag filing.

On the other hand, I finally got the last of the bureaucracy out of the way for my car, and it is now legally mine; the plates are on, it's registered, insured, all that jazz. I can legally drive it around, now, and have already populated it with various metal CDs, though I'm not completely certain where my first ARMCANNON CD is. But I will find it in due time.
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Tag Implementation, Round One (Day: 121)
09/10/04 at 21:17 EST

I've started tackling what I originally considered a herculean task, tag searching, only to find out that, like everything else so far, it was much easier to implement than I ever would have thought. Tags are now functional; however the task is at present done manually. Currently, my post interface does not include a means to add new tags (this feature should take about 10 to 15 minutes to write) nor is there a way to identify which posts have which tags within the posts themselves. That will also be very easy to add, but I want to save some coding for later.

After that, perhaps I'll add a generic search feature. It won't be particularly difficult to add, but it will be time consuming. Before I do that, though, I should really add a proper background to the sidebar.

For anyone keeping score, I've progressed further into KH:DS to what I would estimate is roughly the 33rd percentile, and there's one more thing I thought would be worth mentioning that I'd consider to be a reasonably potent design flaw: Command blocking. At certain points during your adventures, there is information that is presented to you by means of a little black Information bar with a scrolling marquee of text. It blends seamlessly into game-play, allowing you to smack the Heartless around without interruption, however, while the information bar is present, your command window is not. Meaning, certain actions cannot be performed such as Examine, and worse yet the Shortcut menu. It's okay if you want the command menu to disappear during Information bars, but to disable the player during active game-play serves only to make a nemesis out of something designed to assist you. I generally operate under an aerial melee build, but I can see this being horribly obstructive to magic users. Apologies to that crowd.

And it's about damn time they promoted me a rank.
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This Just In (Day: 74)
09/10/03 at 20:32 EST

The comment moderation system took significantly less time than I had anticipated and, as best as I can tell, is completed. Commenting is available again.

Update: Fixed a bug that allowed users to comment with a NULL username. Further improved it to ignore non-alphabet characters when checking if it is valid (those characters are not stripped, however).
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Comment Moderation (Day: 74)
09/10/03 at 18:36 EST

A lack of initial foresight has given rise to a new development, and a new venue in which I may spend my time.

I've decided to begin development of a comment moderation system, so that comments are not immediately made public, and instead are stuffed into a bin for me to later sort through, and approve or destroy as needed. I'll have to develop an interface and module for that; I hardly expect myself to have the resolve to do it by hand (though I imagine the volume of comments inbound would be sufficiently small enough to handle manually) so for now they will float in limbo while I write some more code.

I've delved deep enough into the world of KH:DS to be met with a few gripes. Though they're hardly worth mentioning, I'll do so anyway:

Complaint #1 - Recon missions. This amounts to wandering around methodically and yet without direction until an indicator appears on screen. This is essentially just a game of Hot/Cold minus the notion of "warmer" or "colder"; your only states are "nowhere near", "near", and "you found what you're looking for", and that last part is worth further mentioning: what you're looking for is not specified, and in the Agrabah stages literally amounts to a grain of sand at times.

Complaint #2 - Emblem collection. The premise I am alright with; while it feels more like a distraction than an actual mission designed to advance plot, it's the implementation I am not keen on, as it is possible to find yourself in a situation where, while the mission is always possible to complete, if you aren't fast or methodical enough it isn't always possible to master the mission (fill the mission gauge), which results in requiring you replay that mission from the beginning. It's often only a few minutes of wasted effort, but this is the sort of thing that belongs in the Challenges portion of the Sidequest menu.

Oh, I also don't like the battery life on my DS, but that's not a fault I can pin to the game.
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