Tag Archive for 'binary bonsai'

More Droidmaker

Jul 20, '09  ·  Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

I know, I know, it’s starting to look more and more as if Binary Bonsai was reborn as a Star Wars and Droidmaker-reblog site after its hiatus, but if I merely updated the older entries with this information, it wouldn’t propagate, and dammit, when I have something to take credit for I’ll damn well use every excuse in the book to take it!

Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.

On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Europe who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.

The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. And I finally feel like my work with this is done. #

Exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of Droidmaker since it came out. I plowed through it in a few days, which is honestly rather rare for me. I hope to have the chance to meet Michael when we’re in California; a fitting encounter on a trip which is already taking us to see Pixar, Skywalker Ranch and a John Williams concert.

I honestly don’t know how all of this could get much better…

The Amazing Contemporizer

Jul 9, '09  ·  5 Comments Tags: , , , .

It’s not that I’m embarrassed by my younger self, but… I’d prefer it if my blog continually contained mostly things that feel contemporary to me. Thus, employing government-sanctioned reality distortion field technology, I once again got Brian to do the heavy lifting and build me The Amazing Contemporizer1 while I kicked back, drank piña colada’s and cackled at my cat.

The Amazing Contemporizer is a plugin for WordPress which automatically sets posts older than X to private, causing a wave of privacy to flow over your older and perhaps less… refined, past as a blogger.

PS: Backup you blog before using. Seriously. No… Seriously!

Notes

  1. ↑1 Other names suggested were ‘I was young, I needed the money’, ‘It’s not that I’m embarrassed, but…’ ‘Youthful Folly’ and ‘The Ice Floe’.

While You Wait

May 18, '09  ·  Closed Tags: .

Test

A Copyright Infringement Claim, Flickr and Me

Dec 15, '08  ·  22 Comments Tags: , , , .

C-3PO, avert your eyes

The holidays bring the amazing wonder of a fixed feed (no more raw textile markup), non-invisible pages, working search, a lifestream and some polish on the theme here and there. Hell, the about page even has my e-mail address on it, so people can go ahead and contact me directly, instead of having to go through flickr.

Now, speaking of flickr, it has now been two weeks since my sizable Star Wars collection was removed from flickr.

Continue reading ‘A Copyright Infringement Claim, Flickr and Me’

A New Look

Sep 22, '08  ·  Closed Tags: , .

I’m not going to make a big splash here, but I’ve activated ahead of time, the design I’ve been working on, mostly because I grew bored with the previous one faster than I thought I would. As you can see, this one is quite low-key and set entirely in Helvetica Neue, with exception of the header logo of course, which I drew in Photoshop one sunny sunday a couple of weeks back.

I wanted a more ‘serious’, almost book-like feel for the site, to complement my writing — and to be honest, to lend it some seriousness I can’t manage to bring to the table on my own — and hopefully this design manages to do something along those lines.

It is however a work in progress, but as usual I don’t have the time just now to get everything up and running as I want it; yet another case of me being better at dreaming up ideas than coding them up. And as such, it’s got plenty of errors, and some of the recent entries have hardcoded widths for videos and what not (thanks Flash), don’t worry, life goes on.

I hope you like it.

Habari & Kalamari

Aug 11, '08  ·  Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…

Hello Habari.

Mmm. Sweet, sensual, built Habari. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a pitch for you to do the same (though, please, take it for a spin; you never know). It’s simply me celebrating that I’ve finally gotten on with my online life, and getting even more involved with a project that has so far been both incredibly rewarding and ditto challenging.

And it wasn’t that WordPress and I were in a painful relationship; at least not in last year or so. It was more one of those courteous ones where we had both made peace with the fact that we weren’t meant for each other. That over time, we had grown apart. And… Alright, alright; enough of this blasted girlfriend metaphor; it’s creeping me out!

Seriously though, I’m really happy to finally move in with Habari. I’ve long had a keen interest in interface design and blogging tools, and my involvement with Habari has allowed me to follow up on both of those, and hopefully in the process creating a blogging tool that others will find exciting as well.

As a writer, if anyone would stoop so low as to call me that (thank you), what happens behind the scenes doesn’t really interest me. I do most of my writing in Textmate and then copy/paste it anyway. And after I’ve turned off comments, I don’t even see the whole admin section that often. But just because you only use the car to go down to the supermarket, why shouldn’t you be driving a black Countach?

I thought so too.

But please, have some patience with the design (which is new, and very much in progress), the archives and the feed (new permanent address, I’ll try and do some clever rewriting to get the old links to work). I’m working on getting all my ducks in a neat little row, and hopefully everything will settle down within a few days.

Well, except for the design.

I’m calling it Kalamari.