The MacDeskBlog

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

I learned one of the virtues of using dedicated servers this week. If you (meaning I) screw up the server you can just cancel it and get another one. So, that’s what I did. I ordered a new one and will cancel the one I ordered last month before I need to renew it. So, I’m back to having a fresh machine. Now, I just need to figure out how to use rpm well enough to upgrade MySQL to 4.1 and PHP from 4.2 to 4.3 (forget about PHP 5) and be able to back out of it if an upgrade fails. I’m going to be much more weary of online tutorials for this, considering how my last experience went trying to adapt a tutorial for something just slightly different.

On the down side, my day job is in crunch mode right now. So, I don’t have time to work on the new server much. If I can just get the data and configuration files copying over by Friday, I’ll be happy. Then, I’m off on vacation for 9 days, looking for good desktop pictures to bring home.

I’ve noticed over the past couple of months that the rate of submissions has been falling. Since I’m still processing pictures from September right now, I’m not terribly concerned yet. Though last year at this time, I think I was backlogged all the way to May or June. So I am noticing a change. I’m not quite sure why submission rates are declining, though I certainly have some suspicions. Of course, I like some of my theories better than others. I hope that I am way off-base on at least a couple of them. Feel free to chime in on this (and on anything else) and let me and others know your thoughts on the matter.

Theory #1:
As the largest displays keep getting larger, I keep nudging up the minimum picture size for submissions. This certainly has an impact as fewer people are sending me small pictures.

Theory #2:
As more landscapes and flowers have been appearing on the site, people might be thinking of the site as a source for just those pictures. This could be a self-reinforcing cycle if true.

Theory #3:
Poor server performance and poor reliability might be driving off patrons.

Theory#4:
The financial header at the top of the page could have been driving people off.

Theory #5:
People might think that the server problems impact submissions, and are not submitting because they don’t want to bog me down. The processes are entirely separate.

Theory #6:
Maybe there actually is a problem receiving mail of which I am unaware. I’m pretty sure this is not the case though.

Theory #7:
The whole Fahrenheit 9/11 drama could be having a lasting impact.

I expect that some or all of those theories are having an impact, and almost certainly some other factors which haven’t dawned on me yet. I have bigger problems to deal with at the moment, like the house and the servers and the site redesign/rewrite and other things. But I do want to put it out there than the submission queue is the shortest it has been in a very long time. So, if you have decently large pictures to share, please feel free to send them on in using the submission form on the site. I would especially like to encourage people with Apple/Macintosh themed content, music oriented pictures, portraits of men or women, humor and other content which you have seen less of recently to send in your works. Landscapes, flowers and sunrises/sunsets will always be welcome and will continue to be posted.

And if you have any theories, opinions, insights, etc, share them below. If you’d like to ask people to submit works of a certain type, here is a chance to do so. There is a Register link to the right, which should be working now. Once you’re registered, you’ll be able to comment on posts here.