Monthly Archive for November, 2004
I would normally seperate something like this onto the sidebar, however since I am very very much looking forward to this DVD set, I figured it could do with some primetime.
There is a new 6 minute preview of the Return of the King Extended Edition up.
I don’t think it had really hit home with me, just how much I really am looking forward to this, the final reunion and goodbye with the greatest trilogy of all time. As I was watching the preview, I could feel it welling up in me once again.
My fingers will be numb for a week when I am done penning my homage…
PS: I have finally flickrized the best of the photos from the Return of the King Premiere, here in Copenhagen last christmas.
The Firewire bus on my Powerbook is dead. Most annoying. But wait, because the story is longer and more complex than you might think…
Last week, I had brought my Powerbook into work, as I often do. At work I have a 800Mbps Firewire HDD that I use for ‘home burns down’ kind of backups. I usually plug it in when I arrive and have the scheduler take care of business around lunch time.
Meanwhile in another part of the building, Thor was having problems with his iPod. That in itself is a long and convoluted story, but suffice to say that his iPod was refusing to mount on his Powerbook, and thus he hauled it down to our floor. First Jeremy, who also has a Powerbook (we are legion), gave it a go, no dice. And then Thor came hoppin’ along to me. I tried various combinations, but I couldn’t mount it either. At one point I also rebooted, and when OS X came back up, I noticed that Tron (that’s my external HDD) was missing. Launching System Profiler, I could suddenly see that the Firewire Bus was acting weird…
And it was about that time I found out Jeremy’s Firewire bus was gone…
So. What’ve we got then? Three Powerbooks, all with dead firewire ports. Bugger. And after jumping through a couple of hoops (resetting the PRAM, leaving the battery out over night and so on), it seemed evident that it was beyond the brink.
Fitting as it is, that we’re a few days from my little titanium-clad baby’s birthday…
So barring any revolutionary solutions popping up in the next day, I’m going to give Apple a little call and have them send the nice UPS man to pick it up. Thor got his back in 3 days flat, and that is if nothing else, a slight comfort.
PS: Did I mention that my iPod also decided to die on me recently? Yep.
One of the new features I talked about in Freya Dissection, was that of ‘noteworthy’ entries, or ‘favorites’. As you may recall, I sent out a call for someone to help me take an idea from concept to plugin. Jamie stepped up and offered his services free of charge, and earlier today I installed the latest version of the plugin, which works pretty much as I had hoped.
So if I can just draw your attention to the Halo 2 entry that preceeds this entry. Notice the heart? That’s an icon denoting that said entry is tagged as noteworthy. What this allows me to do, is to create a small list of noteworthy entries within a certain category. So if you go to the Games category archive, you’ll find a small list on the sidebar…
I chose to finish this, my Halo 2 review, even though I havn’t actually finished the game yet. Unorthodox, I know, but also I might add, very telling of the game.
You see, when I played Halo, the first Halo that is, I really really liked it. Bungie had crafted exactly the kind of sci-fi story that boys like me used to dream of when the lights went out and we were tugged in our beds (this was before puberty). Lumbering spaceships, alien civilizations, fullscale warfare on a distant planet (or better yet, a ring), mysterious structures and gameplay that would knock your teeth clean out of your mouth. On top of that, they even threw in some nice AI and vehicles that kicked every other first person shooters ass up and down.
So to call me psyched about Halo 2 would be an understatement. And yet I haven’t played it for a few weeks now, but I would wager that I was about 85 – 90% done, when I last threw down my controller in frustration.
This is what Halo 2 promised, from its very first showing at E3: You’re the Master Chief and you’re going to defend Earth from an alien invasion by kicking some serious bee-hind. And this is exactly what Halo 2 doesn’t deliver!
From here on in, this review is full of spoilers.
We have, at work, what I can only refer to as a ‘somewhat paranoid’ IT department. And God bless them, we wouldn’t want another Half-Life 2 like sourcecode leak or anything. But it does lay out a couple of bumps in the road from time to time. Take my mail for instance. I can’t communicate with external mailservers. So whenever I lug my Powerbook to work, I’m unable to send or receive mail from it, which is most annoying, as it pretty much serves as my communication nexus to the world!
Currently I have a number of active and semi-active mail accounts. Mostly I use my Binary Bonsai account, which works great. But with Gmail having now finally been brought into the grown up world of POP3 access, perhaps now is a good time to reassess whether I should be using a webmail solution for my mail. This way, I can send and receive mail from anywhere, as well as through the mail app of choice. And with Google’s notifier app, I can even feel at home while working.
But before I go through the ordeal of letting everyone in the world know that I have changed my address, I want to just send out a ping to see if any of you have any experiences with Gmail you’d like to share?
Lying somewhere around the apartment, in the living room I think, I have a stack of sketches with design explorations that I made in the first few weeks of the redesign that has led to what you’re looking at right now. A flurry of attempts at coming up with a new form. Something to break the backbone of the blogosphere; the monotony of header, content, sidebar, footer.
Having played around for a few weeks with the elements that combined constitute Binary Bonsai, I eventually landed on the inevitable conclusion that the revolutionary layout I was looking for was a wild goose-chase, and the inevitable conclusion was to restart the redesign.
Having run this site for a couple of years, I have if nothing else, learned a lot about how I personally utilize it, and the new design needn’t necessarily invent a new form, but rather further the previous one through the experiences I’ve gained.
I hereby present, header, content, sidebar and footer…
Everyone, please welcome Freya, previously designated 4, the new glazing on top of the bittersweet pudding that is, Binary Bonsai. There are many things to say, many things to apologize for. Feel free to leave some comments while I run her through the necessary trials to see if she is ready for the world. Though keep in mind that I will come back, hopefully later tonight, to write a full super-size entry on all the thoughts I’ve had or not had and why things are in new places and in many cases in their old habitual place.
Needless to say, the minor incident this morning set me back a trifle; while I quickly covered the major rewrites, minor changes are still lingering in the recesses beyond the frontpage.
Though for what it’s worth, I’m quite happy with how it turned out, though I regret not having had the time to flesh out some of the details that I have planned. But I could feel that I had to activate it today or slowly get bogged down in the repetitious routines of adjustments ad nausea.
Now I will leave you to it, while I head off to clean up the code a little and patch whatever holes I might find.
Update: Freya Upgrade Continued
My friend Rasmus told me about this ‘little’ deficiency in OS X a while ago, when something similar happened to his parents Mac. And it is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever come across in an OS.
Now hold on to your hats:
In my local WordPress 1.3 folder, where I’m currently working on 4, I obviously have a wp-content folder, inside which all my theme files reside. After asking on the WP hackers mailing list about a new function, I figured I’d give the latest nightly a run for its money, and so I downloaded and extracted it, opened the folder, selected all the files and dragged them into my local WP13 folder.
What do you think will happen?
I’ll tell what’ll happen, and what just happened. In OS X, the new wp-content folder will replace the old wp-content folder completely, throwing out everything inside of it, replacing it with the content of the new folder, keeping nothing from the old folder. And while you can undo the action, moving the new folder back where it came from, that won’t undo the deletion of the old folder!
So you’re up shitcreek without a paddle, hands tied behind your back.
This has got to be the most fucked up braindead ‘look at me, I’m a moron’ way of doing things I have ever come across. User data is sacred you fat fuck of an OS! How the hell did this ever make it past the desk of whoever decided that it would be a good idea? And how in the world did he keep his job?
Luckily I had 5 – 6 files open in my editor and a backup on the server, but I’ll wager I’ve lost at least a days work…
This is the best game I’ve ever played. Review follows shortly. For now, consider this a spoiler entry.
You are in charge of the order form on your web-based store. And you’re wondering why I’m screaming and shouting, flipping you the bird and throwing feces in your general direction.
Here’s why: In Denmark, and I’ll go out on a limb and say, in large parts of Europe and probably the rest of the world, sans the US, we do not have ‘states’ or ‘provinces’!
So stop forcing me in to filling out it out with something as redundant as NA. It’s easy, here’s how you do it: If I pick Denmark or any other non-state/provincial country from the dropdown, make the state/province input field non-required.
You’ve got dynamic pages and everything, it’s not that hard.
This is the official Binary Bonsai Half-Life 2 entry. Leave your comments about the game in here :)
Please keep your comments generally spoiler free.
Holy headcrab Gordon, my copy of Half-Life 2 is now preloading onto my harddrive here at work. And if you’re doing the same, you can head over to GameSpot and read their Half-Life 2 production feature or their full review while you wait.
Update: List of when Half-Life 2 gets unlocked, depending on your timezone. 9am, here I come.
While reading through the Audion story (the article is, like Panics software, great), I stumbled into the first mention of the iPod on Slashdot. I can’t help but wallow in the irony of the end remark.
“At an invitation only event Apple has released their new MP3 player called the iPod.” […] No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” #
Considering not only how long ago it leaked, but also the fact that it leaked in both English and French editions. It is not without some interest that I note Halo’s opening day, domestic only, ending somewhere north of 125 million dollars. Making it the largest opening day in any and all entertainment media ever.
I don’t know where I picked it up, but someone somewhere, once said something along the lines of:
“A city isn’t just a big village.”
And it is ever so true.
Update: It was Jane Jacobs.
I’d like to congratulate the hard working Firefox team on, what is ostensibly the greatest thing to happen to the Internet in quite a while. Good job!
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, paperback edn., ROC, 1992, p. 254.
Over the weekend, the Binary Bonsai flickr group rounded the 100 member mark and counting. If you haven’t already, please by all means add a screenshot of your Kubrick site to the group pool. Thanks.
PS: With this post I have created a new category, called Milestones. Also, I’ve now added my del.icio.us feed to the sidebar, under Clippings. It’s messy just now, but I’m just testing to see if it works properly for the launch of 4.
PPS: If you experience old entries suddenly cropping up in your aggregator these days, it’s for the same reasons.