The MacDeskBlog

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.

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.

MacDesktops finds itself with an unusually short submission queue right now. I am currently processing the last of the August submissions, and scheduling them to run in December. While digital photographs of landscapes, flowers, sunsets, etc continue to come in steadily, other categories have seen a significant decline. In particular, Apple logos and Mac-themed desktops have been sparse, as have Movies, Music, Portraits, Animation, Illustration, Games.

So, if you’ve been thinking about putting together some desktop pictures, or have some which you’ve already made and would like to share, this is a great time to send them in.

Historically, the submission queue has run as long as 10-12 months. I think the last time the queue was only 4 months was back in 1999 or so.

My personal theories about why submissions have declined are: the larger resolution requirements (currently 1600×1200 or larger) inhibit some artists; the server problems this year and last year had an impact on performance and may have discouraged submissions; I neglected MacDesktops over the past couple of years while life and work required more attention. Though the resolution requirements will only continue to rise, I think the other two issues are much improved now.

As all of the regular or semi-regular patrons have noticed, I run a lot of picture series on MacDesktops.com. People who have frequented MacDesktops for years, probably remember that a new TAZL picture graced the page every Wednesday. Beto Chavez has provided various series over the years. Tim Fielding, Laurent Lachiver, Jiho, and many others have provided themed desktops for periods of time.

There are a few series on the site right now. Frank J Sinkavich provides a steady stream of flowers, sunrises, sunsets, insects which are featured on Fridays for the foreseeable future. Edward N Urbanek‘s works include architecture, still life, and flower pictures, and are featured on Mondays. Aaron Kraus is taking us on a journey through Europe on Sundays. Stan Peyton landscapes adorn the site on Thursdays. I periodically feature my own photographs on Wednesdays, and am doing so at the moment (though I think I am about to run out again soon). I started up a NASA series in March, which runs on Saturdays at least into July. I just recently started an Anime series, running Mondays for the foreseeable future.

Additionally, I am trying to get back to my tradition of running Apple and/or Macintosh themed pictures on Tuesdays and/or Thursdays. This tradition is easier to keep going when Apple announces new products (like now) or new advertising campaigns (like now), and a bit harder in the periods between. Mondays have been for Movie pictures (therefore the new Anime series on Mondays).

As always, feel free to send in your pictures, whether they are just a few or form a long series, or send in a single one you wish to share. While I don’t publish all of the submissions which I receive, I do post many of them and am dependent upon them to keep the site going. And also, please send your comments on pictures you like to the artists who submitted them; the artist’s name under each picture is an email link. Comments about the site are welcome via e-mail or here in the blog.

I hope you’re enjoying the current series, and those which will come in the future.

I’m sitting at Willie Mays Field (two days after he turned 75 and who knows how long until the field actually gets named that) with an hour to go before first pitch. My usual pre-game ballpark dining haunt, Primo Patio Cafe, is closed due to a gas leak, so I just had garlic fries and called it dinner.

I’m not of the habit to bring my PowerBook to the ballpark, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. And tonight, it turned out to be a good thing. I realized as I waited for the train to bring me up here that I needed to queue a few more pictures for this week. So, I whipped it out, hopped onto the free wireless network here, and took care of it.

I’m waiting for my friend John from college to join me. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years since he moved to L.A. for a writing job. He just moved back to San Francisco last month. Tonight, we get to catch up.

Batting practice is finishing up now. The Giants just finished up a horrid road trip. And Barry is not expected to play tonight. Lowry is off of the DL and starting tonight. The sky is clear and blue, and the temperature is nice.

Life is good.

Eight years ago today, the Macintosh Desktop Picture Archive was born with a dozen pictures available in up to five sizes each. Several hundred people visited the site each day, which prompted me to start generating and posting two new pictures weekly. I picked up the MacDesktops.com domain several months later.

I had just recently picked up a magnificently huge 17″ display, and couldn’t find any desktop pictures which looked good on the monstrously large 1280×1024 screen. Things have changed a bit in the past eight years. I’m not quite sure, but I think that I was running a PowerMac 6100/60 back then, powering Photoshop 3.0. I had a wicked fast 128K ISDN line, which really sped posting of pictures.

These days, my screen has shrunk to 15.2″ physically and to 1280×854 logically. My processor has sped up from a 60MHz PowerPC 601 to a 1.5GHz PowerPC G4, running Photoshop 7.0 (I haven’t upgraded in a while). And MacDesktops has grown to 4877 pictures (and counting) in 15 sizes (not counting the portrait sizes which I no longer generate), consuming 23GB of disk space which are accessed by about 15 thousand unique visitors each day.

Oops. It was pointed out to me this morning that today’s Waikoloa Sunset desktop is a duplicate. Sorry.

There are two things to learn from this.

First off, I’m pretty consistent in evaluating submissions. So, if you send something in more than once, I’m going to arrive at the same conclusion each time I look at the picture. This is largely because my criteria are at least 75% objective: is the resolution high enough and is the picture quality high enough? The remaining 25% is subjective: do I like the picture, will someone else like the picture, is it content that’s appropriate for MacDesktops, etc? I’ll generally arrive at the same conclusion looking at a picture in June as I will in December.

Secondly, I don’t always realize that a particular picture is a duplicate. Most of the time I realize it when I’m evaluating the pictures. Occasionally, I get through generating all of the sizes and notice before I actually queue up the copy. Twice now, I have actually posted the duplicate thinking it was new. With the archive growing ever larger, odds are increasing that I won’t recognize duplicates right away.

Please do not send me a particular picture more than once. If you send in a picture and don’t see it posted for a long time, please do not re-submit it in the hope that I’ll change my mind. Chances are very high that I haven’t even seen it yet! It takes me about 5-8 months to get through submissions (I’m currently finishing up submissions from last year!). Mind you, this is good. I get nervous when submissions drop off, as I have previously mentioned.

Keep those submission pouring in.

I caught up on filling in the missing pictures. There were two which I couldn’t figure out which picture was supposed to be posted, so they’ll get mixed into the queue going forward. There were two others where I made my best guess.

The database and file system locked horns again tonight so I had to restart the database. Grr. Oh well. I’ll need to figure out some way to identify that problem and automatically restart the database in the short to medium term, and some way to isolate and correct the problem in the long term.

Not tonight though. It’s after midnight. Well past my bedtime. G’night.

I filled in a bunch of the missing pictures tonight, and found the names of the five which eluded me previously. I think I have 42 left fill in. Friday is looking pretty reasonable at this point to finish that process.

The database hung again tonight. It looked like it hit a write lock or a file lock for some reason. Had to restart it manually. :-\

On the house front, we passed rebar inspection for the slab floor this afternoon. We’re clear to pour tomorrow.

The good news is that with about an hour of hands-on help from Rob Egan, plus some sporadic IM help for the rest of the afternoon, we managed to get the new Dedicated Server up to date using yum and rpm! It then took me over a week to get almost everything up and running the way I like. The phpAdsNew gave me fits for a few days, but I ultimately tracked the problem down. I don’t have MySQL replication working yet, which makes me a bit nervous, but I do have full database backups running nightly at least.

So onto the not so good news. I haven’t rebuilt the past 2 months of missing data yet, and I haven’t filled in the queue going forward yet. Also, as mentioned in the last post, I think I lost some blog entries, and definitely all of the blog user accounts and comments. I’m not worried about the blog entries and comments. Also, not all of my other sites are back online yet.

I could try to rebuild all of the missing data, and I’d likely get most of it correct. However, that wouldn’t really be very fair to people whose pictures were posted the last few days before the crash, since the pictures didn’t get a full week up on the front page.

On the other hand, I could skip rebuilding the missing data, and just post everything again as if it were new. However, that wouldn’t really be very fair to all of the users, since you’d be getting pictures you’d already seen before.

So, what I’ll probably do is rebuild the database as best I can from March 13th through April 27th, and repost pictures which originally went up April 28th through May 4th as if they had never been posted. Any pictures which I’m uncertain about whether or not they were posted previously will also get treated as new.

I have picture titles, categories and artist initials for all of the missing period except for March 22, 23, 30 and April 10. If you still have email announcements covering any of those days (daily or weekly), please send them along to me at the feedback address.

I hope to finish recovering from this by the end of this week. We’ll see how well I managed that. Work has been insanely busy since the middle of last month, which dragged out this process already. This week promises more of the same.

Thank you for the notes of support,

Ryan