It’s finally happened. Final Fantasy VII is on the Playstation store, for PSP and PS3. If you’ve played it before I’m sure you’re also busy swallowing the 1.3GB download (although it’s apparantly only going to take 55 minutes), but if not go and get it!

It’s without question in my mind the best Final Fantasy game, and I’m hoping it won’t feel old (as some older games do). The graphics were amazing (as was the story) and it’s really a part of the epic history of the game franchise.

Check it out!

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If you’re a jQuery lover like we are, check out vTip at Vertigo Project.

vTip is designed to quickly provide very lightweight (1.11KB js, 272b CSS) tooltips to users of jQuery. The zip includes everything you need (including an example page), as well as jQuery for the examples to work.

They look great and are extremely easy to use, try them out.

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I’m assuming this wouldn’t do well full scale as the spammers would catch on, but I recently saw a wordpress plugin which adds input fields to your comment forms that are hidden using CSS (e.g. display: none). Then if data is submitted in those inputs you can tell it wasn’t a human with a browser, but rather a spam bot filling all the fields as they usually do.

It’s a pretty simple concept to implement into a personal project or smaller site, and according to the plugin writer, completely eliminated all spam.

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People have often questioned what the affect of irregular updates on a site have on their traffic ranking. Blogs have been introduced to many websites in order to help keep them “fresh” and make sure that search engines come back often. This has a direct impact on advertising earnings as well as visitor loyalty.

We’ve been pretty inactive on this blog over the last couple of weeks and we’ve noticed a decrease in our stats across the board. A stats package such as Google Analytics can help track these trends and here’s some proof to the topic.

The first thing most people look at when tracking stats is pure traffic; how many visits did the site have over a period. This can often be a misleading statistic depending on the purpose of your blog. Do you want many people coming and not doing anything else but reading what they found on Google, or would you prefer a few less people but they are an active part of your site commenting on posts and starting conversations which in turn increase the user experience of your site?

Let’s have a look at the visits on this blog over 2 separate time periods.

The last time period of consistent updates on this site was from 01/2009 until 04/2009

01/2009 – 04/2009

These stats show a pretty consistent amount of traffic over the period with it having the usual of trend of spike dip spike where the first spike becomes your new average after the 2nd spike (we’ve noticed this trend across a number of our sites).

Now we look at the period 04/2009 – 05/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

The images speak for themselves.

Next we look at “visitor loyalty”. When it comes to blogging, visitors are more likely to come back to a blog that is regularly updated than a blog that seems to be dead and forgotten. This is a harsh rule and can apply rapidly. For example; if you have been running a blog for 2 months and have managed to make at least 1 original post per day, people start to see this and will come back every day to read what you have to say. But then, you go on a long weekend holiday and don’t have an update for a couple of days. Next thing you know your stats are showing a decrease in return visits and less traffic from search engines etc. The word “loyalty” in blogging can be thrown around loosely. To me it doesn’t carry the standard definition of “faithfulness or devotion to a cause or person”, but rather something along the lines of “I’ll keep you around while you’re of use to me”.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

This is the “loyalty” I mentioned before. Returning visits are down and there is a steep decline in the 2nd period’s graph. The other sharp decline can be seen in first time visits. A blog will never build up a base of returning users if users never get to the blog in the first place. Most of the blogs I frequent were found through Google – I was looking for something and came across an answer on a blog and enjoyed the content and as a result I know frequent that blog to see what else is going on. This is probably one of the most common scenarios in building up a returning user base.

Search engines enjoy new content. If a site is regularly updated it is seen as a good source of information and search engines will give it preference over “stale” blogs. Search engines can be just as cruel as visitors and will drop you in the blink of an eye.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

You can see clearly from these graphs that when the blog was being kept up to date with regular posts, the amount of referrals from Google were on the rise. This doesn’t just relate to the new content i.e. the latest posts being the most searched for but also some of the older posts that have been crowed pleaser’s for a while. When your blog becomes less attractive to Google even your most popular posts will start drifting off to the 2nd page and even further down on the search engine result pages.

To put it quite simply, no matter how popular your blog is today it can be a baron island that no one can get to in a matter of days if you do not work on it.

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On the cards for a while now, it seems it’s finally happened;

“Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. ‘We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,’ said Oracle President Safra Catz.”

Let’s just hope that MySQL isn’t let go in favour of Oracle DB. That would piss a lot of people off and make the internet explosion slow to a fizzle without the help of a top end free database engine.

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• Hot: Oracle acquires Sun for $7.4bn (themindstorms.blogspot.com)

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I played the first installment of the series, for maybe 15mins. Then I gave it back to fx.

I didn’t like it at all. There was so much hype surrounding the game, that for me, it just didn’t live up to the expectations created by all the mad stories and bloated press releases. I would like to say something detailed about the game and what I didn’t like, but to be honest, I don’t remember. The game was just that for me, forgettable.

Now it’s time for part 2, and I wonder if it will go the same way.

So far, it looks like they’re going the viral route. They’re giving just enough of nothing to give you something, but not enough of something to give you anything. There’s a teaser trailer on the official site done to the style of the famous Da Vinci blue prints. That’s already establishing quite a level of expectation for the game, Da Vinci sketched finned mortar shells after all.

Now I am torn. In my mind I’m thinking “Holy shit, this is going to be epic. It’s a guy with a blade as his arm” but at the same time I’m thinking “What the hell was level 1 :/”.

April 16 has been given as the date for more information to be published in Game Informer, and we will probably be given some more pictures and the plot of the game. But until the game is out, and people have actually played it and the hype has died down. I don’t think I’m going to be spending a cent on this franchise.

Here’s some artwork as well as the teaser trailer…

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I’m going to go ahead and assume majority of the blog readers have played Promisance (aka Prom) at some time; if you haven’t you can google it. It’s always fun to play once in a long while and when one pops up everyone seems to get in to it but there is a new, more graphical and more in depth online (once a day style) game called Travian.

It’s by no means brand new, but its new to me and I’ve been enjoying it for more than a week now (on Server 7).

When you start out you get a section of land, covered in resources and a city centre with hundreds of options of where to go from there mainly focussed around either being a military force or a market leader. There are thousands of players online at any given stage, and if you want to join them have a look! [and its free of course]

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I don’t know about you guys, but for me COD4 was one of the best online games I’ve played. Sure there were some teething problems, but they fixed those and ended up with a killer product.

Modern Warfare 2 has a release date currently set for the 10th of November, and personally that couldn’t come sooner.

Additionally, Activision Blizzard acknowledged the “Call of Duty” series will move forward yet again with “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ coming this fall. No details on the game were released. [via]

As soon as I find out some more details, I’ll be sure to post them here.

“Last year we had probably beaten most expert expectations by growing the Call of Duty franchise over the tremendous success that was the first iteration of Modern Warfare,” he said. “For 2009, Modern Warfare is coming back, we expect it will be the most anticipated game of the year. Perhaps the number one game of the year despite the fact that it’s only going to launch in the holiday season. [via]

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Speeding up Vista is something I read a lot about – its more of a niggly habbit really but I’m the kind of guy who defrags files more than once a day, so when it comes to disabling services; cleaning up the drive and improving performance I’m a bit of a nut.

Enter the Entropy Supercharge Guide. This is a collection of all the worthwhile tips and applications organized and sorted to use applications and methods designed to be easy and safe. I’ve butchered my Vista before with a bad tool or some custom work, and the below is all what I consider to be “safe”. There are more extreme optimizations, but as far as I’m concerned this is applicable to almost all users.

Step 1: Required Applications

We’re about to pimp your shit, seriously. Now we need the tools to do it – all of these tools modify things like services, the registry and/or delete unneccessary files but they are the best of the bunch and are tried and tested – don’t download some crazy shit and then be suprised when your PC burns out like a pack of no-name microwave popcorn.

Download and install the following applications:

• CCleaner [download]
• Defraggler [download]
• Advanced System Care 3 [download]
• FileHippo Update Checker [download]
• Vista Services Optimizer [download]

Be careful not to allow them to install any toolbars or set your default web page – but they are all option based, there is no real spyware risk.

Step 2: Optimize and Upgrade

We’re running through the last three first, because you’ll want to defrag and clean after doing any major maintenance on your machine. There are full guides available for all of these topics but they are easy to use – follow the simple instructions below and move on to step 3.

Run Vista Services Optimizer

I advise using the more advanced “Manual TuneUp” as its still simple and asks you questions you can answer easily.

Let it disable any services you don’t use, optionally you can use the “Automatic TuneUp”.

Now start Advanced SystemCare 3.

Go to the top icon, “Maintain Windows” and run a scan – let it fix your problems.

Now go to Diagnose System and untick Security Defense and Disk Defragment. Run a scan and clean up everything you don’t need.

Next go to utilities and use the Disk Cleaner to dump any trash.

Now FirefoxTCP Optimizer and let it auto optimize for you.

Next run the Shortcut Fixer and delete any out of date shortcuts.

Now run the FileHippo Update Checker.

You’ll be suprised how much faster some programs will work if you are running current versions, and just in general you’ll have a happier and cleaner PC. Upgrade your programs. Also, I’m sure I don’t need to say but make sure you’ve updated your Vista.

Step 3: Clean and Defrag

Now run through the whole of CCleaner, optimise your registry, your files, the works.

Use this guide: http://www.raven.za.net/tips/speed-up-your-pc-and-free-up-space-with-ccleaner

Once you’ve removed all the junk, run Defraggler, and go to the files tab to defragment all the files it displays after an Analyze.

Now reboot, and you should have a better, cleaner PC.

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The new(est) iPhone is coming out mid June, its faster and better than any competiting device, is a universal remote, HSDPA and more according to Boy Genuis Report which says its 100% guaranteed. I’m excited I wont lie, although I just recently received my 3G iPhone (6 months or so) but I’ll be sure to upgrade as I’m currently very happy.

The full list is as follows, and the source is apparantly a high up AT&T exec:

• New iPhone announcement around mid-June (duh)
• New iPhone will be faster and have a more seamless experience unmatched by any device (could be just talking about 3.0, but we think it’s also a new iPhone)
• U-Verse iPhone application; will allow control of your home DVR (play, pause, rewind, etc.)
• The annual iPhone launch is “becoming a tradition.”
• Nothing official is being confirmed, but they said that people should prep for an exciting time this summer.
• AT&T is said to be working with Apple to create a unified product with an unparalleled experience across all their products and services.
• Apple’s 3.0 software should tell us where the iPhone platform is going… uh, k?
• They said customers shouldn’t need to choose from AT&T’s high-end devices because of features, they should choose based on preferences. The gap in capability should be filled with the new iPhone. Ok, bets on slide out QWERTY, autofocus camera, video sharing, blah blah?
• Seems like the higher speed HSDPA (7.2Mbps) is being hinted at too which should confirm the earlier rumors of the new Infineon chipset.
• The $99 3G netbook will start selling this summer, and the first one won’t be a Windows OS.

Source

Will you be upgrading?

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