The MacDeskBlog

Be general. Be specific. Be public. Reply in the blog with your requests. Perhaps you will inspire someone to send in your heart’s desire.

The picture queue is down to two months now. That may sound like a lot, but it’s really quite small. Please keep sending in your beautiful compositions. Photographs are great, and original artwork, product compositions, portraits, movie, animation (all of those non-Flora, non-Landscape categories) are even better. If you send in something which will be less poignant in two months, please remember to add “Time Sensitive” to the subject line.

Sorry folks. It has been a crazy week, and I fell behind a bit this week. My wife had her ACL reconstructed last Friday. Her recovery is going extremely well. I’ve been home all week to help her, which includes trips to the doctor, trips to the pharmacy, trips to the DMV, i.e. driving around. And I did manage to get over to MacWorld for about two hours yesterday evening. In hindsight, I should have been one of those hours putting up pictures for today and this weekend, but it slipped my mind. Plus, I’m still working full time, albeit from home. Anyway, I’m not complaining. This has been a very fulfilling week in which generating and posting pictures required more time and effort than I was about to allocate. My little stumble with Chris Bassett’s picture on Tuesday was a precursor to today’s gap in service.

I will try to catch up (which means get ahead) tonight and over the weekend. I could use some help in the form of some MacBook Air, Time Capsule, iPod Touch, iPhone, Mac Pro, and Apple Logo submissions. High resolution product photos are provided by Apple PR. I didn’t get any good pictures from the show yesterday, but if you got something desktop-worthy, please send it in. Remember to add “Time Sensitive” to the subject line of your product and MacWorld desktops.

After a very long spell without them, I put ads back on the site. I removed them for performance reasons. I hope that the new implementation will avoid the performance problems caused by the previous implementation.

Please support the site by supporting the sponsors.

Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard is just around the corner. As a couple of people have pointed out to me, Leopard sports a translucent menu bar. This means that you will be able see not only your desktop picture behind your menus, but also the credit tags which appear at the top of every picture from MacDesktops.

I have not yet seen Leopard in action as I fell out of the ADC program a few years ago and haven’t pestered my connected friends for a copy. With that caveat, I will say that I am taking it on faith that Apple has implemented this feature in a way which will not render this entire archive useless. Looking at the screenshots on Apple’s site does not lead me to any conclusion. It could be a close call.

I think that one of three scenarios is likely. The first scenario is that the translucency will be mild enough, i.e. will obscure the background image well enough, that the text tag behind the text menus will not be overly distracting. The second scenario is that we will be able to adjust the translucency via the Terminal using ‘Defaults Write <yadda yadda yadda>’. The third scenario is that we will be able to adjust the translucency in System Preferences, either on a sliding scale or simply on/off.

While I am hoping for option three, I am more inclined to expect option one at launch with someone quickly figuring out that Apple actually gave us option two. If using the Terminal with Defaults Write does indeed provide necessary, I will post instructions here in the blog as well is in the FAQ/Instructions.

If one of you who happens to be running 10.5 in beta (and I know you are out there) right now would care to share a bit of enlightenment on this topic, I’d be thrilled to share it.

One thing which I have been asked is if I will change the way I tag pictures in response to this new functionality. Not at this time. Currently, I am anticipating that no change will be necessary. If I prove to be incorrect on this, then I will probably adjust the tagging only to the extent of reducing its contrast against the backgrounds rather than moving or eliminating it.

So far, I’ve sidestepped giving any opinion on this new interface change. My first pass at this post a couple of months ago was entirely flame. I didn’t limit my flame to the translucent menu bar. My kerosene splashed heavily on the Stacks and streamed down onto the 3-D Dock. Obviously, I never actually posted that one, and in a brazen fit of lucidity, I finally deleted it outright, never to be seen by the world. Instead, I’ll share this little parable.

One day many years ago, a young man discovered that through the magic of the Terminal he could make his Terminal windows utterly transparent. And he did so. And life was good. Except that he soon discovered that he could not read what was in his Terminal windows because parts of what lay behind his Terminal windows were black. And so he employed the magic of the Terminal again and made his Terminal windows less Transparent. And life was good. Alas, he soon discovered that those his friends were wowed by his partially transparent Terminal windows, he still could not read them effectively. And back to the Terminal he went again. And this time, he set his transparency such that he could just make out vaguely what lay behind his windows, such that he could tell where his other windows lay yet was not distracted by them. And life was good. A few years later, this transparency adjustment found itself directly within the Preferences of Terminal. And life was grand.

I could also convey The Tale of Super-Slo-Mo-Genie Effect at this point, but suffice it to say that the Genie’s escapes from the bottle all occurred within a few mere months and numbered less than a score.

I should have posted this days ago, but I completely spaced. MacDesktops.com email is down today (August 16th) due to a planned PG&E outage in our neighborhood. The power went out at 8:30AM Pacific time and was due to come back on at 2PM. Assuming that the power came back on when scheduled, the mail server is waiting for someone to turn it back on. So, if you sent something earlier today and received a bounce message, please resend it tomorrow.

I will be upgrading WordPress for http://macdesktops.com/weblog before next week. Previous upgrades have gone smoothly with just some brief cosmetic changes during the upgrade. If anything goes wrong, I’ll rollback and try again later.

I accidentally let the domain expire. When I realized that on Tuesday, I promptly renewed. The corrected DNS took several hours or perhaps overnight to propagate, but it should be fully refreshed by now. If the site still is not working from some of your computers or locations, just give some more time to refresh.

I’m very sorry for the inconvenience,

Ryan

MacDesktops.com will be offline Sunday morning from approximately 11:15PM PST Saturday night until approximately 4:00AM PST Sunday morning due to a power outage at the primary hosting provider.

See DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Planned Power Outage for detail if you are interested.

I heard back from DreamHost, and it turns out that these errors are showing up because of memory limits applied to all accounts.

I have two options. First, I could decrease the memory footprint of the site. Well, that would be a huge undertaking which I’m not up for. Second, I could add another server and share the load. That will require some setup time and testing effort which I’m up for but not necessarily right now.

So, if you get an Internal Server Error, then just wait a few seconds and try again. I’ll try to have a second web server sharing the load some time within the next month or so.