I’m a huge fan of Apple’s minimalist style. I love how OS X keeps you in a zen-like state when you’re working so I was really disappointed when I saw the new Dock. It’s shiny, has icon and window reflections, and somewhere in the chaos has little glow-bits indicating which app is running. They are so incredibly hard to see that for the 10th time today I thought to myself “Oh crap, Mail isn’t running, it must have crashed”… Pre-Leopard builds of OS X always had simple black arrows pointing to the running app that were incredibly easy to see at a glance. What went wrong?
I took it upon myself to swap out the indicator resources w/ some RocketDock indicators (that are basically the same as the old Tiger ones).
If you’d like to do this yourself, try these steps:
- Browse to: /System/Library/CoreServices/
- Right-Click on Dock.app and select “Show Package Contents”
- Browse to the Resources directory
- Back up the various “indicator_xxx.png” files
- Replace them with your own
- Run terminal and type “killall Dock” (without the quotes)
Notes:
- indicator_small.php, indicator_medium.png, and indicator_large.png are for the 3Dish dock, while indicator_small_simple.png and indicator_small_medium.png are for the flat dock.
- Copying over the png’s can be problematic. You will have to authenticate and it may not even work the first time because the Dock has them in use. I had better luck “moving” rather than “copying” my png’s over the originals.
As Skunkie mentioned earlier, we’ve been trying to fix our XBox ‘disc scratching’ problem and I’m happy to say we have solved it. For those of you who don’t know, we bought a new XBox 360 about a year and 1/2 after launch. We thought that MS would have fixed some of the problems if we waited long enough. Not so unfortunately. EVERY single game we place in our 360 becomes physically damaged after about 10min of playing and can no longer be read. With an unusable console, and $50 per game, that would be about $600 wasted if we weren’t willing to gut the thing and void our warranty. When you combine that with 100’s of hours developing workarounds for Windows “features”, broken API’s, and the excremental wonder known as Internet Explorer, you can see why we’re not exactly MS fans…
The fix we used involved taking the 360 apart, opening the DVD drive, and gluing padding inside to keep discs from wobbling out of control. I think a some pictures are in order. :)
Note: We got a little creative w/ the padding so you might want to avert your eyes if you’re prone to prudish outbursts.
Edit: Special thanks to WhisperingWillow for the padding :)
So Skunkie’s making me blog about my speakers… Not much to say except these things have amazing sound! I love ‘em :)
I got my new Cinema Display today and wow! This thing is bright, I actually had to turn the brightness down all the way to avoid a headache ;)
It’s so nice to have actual desktop space to put my millions of icons for once… Now I can’t wait to get my new keyboard and speakers… This is going to be nice :)
I had thought that Steve Burns of Blue’s Clues fame was now in the band The Flaming Lips… Apparently I was mistaken… So I thought I should clear this up here for any of my friends who are confused on this too… Apparently Steve has an album called “Songs for Dustmites”, and Steven Drozd from The Flaming Lips did a lot of work with him on the album… So now that we all know which Steve is which… I need to find a copy of “Songs for Dustmites” because I really have to know what an ex-kid show host’s band sounds like :)
Edit: I found his site: http://www.steveswebpage.com
A New Direction
Since starting Punk Software in 2005, we have made friends and enemies… We’ve switched from Windows to Mac OS X… We’ve learned new development languages and techniques… And now we are rethinking our goals. We want to start new projects that are either platform independent, or run on our OS of choice (OS X)… We aren’t giving up on our existing projects, we are simply moving in a new direction. With this change, we are considering changing our name to “Punk Labs” which I like better because it’s shorter and doesn’t pigeonhole us into software…
A New Project!
We have been working on an amazing project for 4 or 5 months now and I’m proud to say that it’s almost ready for a public beta! I think it’s safe to say that this is our most original project because, to my knowledge, there is nothing quite like it in the wild… It is a Flash-based application w/ a sprinkle of AJAX that will allow people to create Avatars, Userbars, Monsters, and Mayhem! It is a very social and collaborative site which means that people can build off of eachothers’ works to create bigger and better things. Everything submitted to, and/or created with the app falls under an open license that allows anybody to use the images for anything. This means you don’t have to be an artist to use and create great things. Think of it as a hippy commune without the smell… Yeah, it’s that good…
Be prepared :)
So here’s my second attempt at seeming like I know what I’m talking about. Apparently I was close to understanding our server issues, but not quite right. After reading mysql and plesk docs I believe the problems were actually caused by a combination of things…
The Real Problem:
It appears that some of our CMS’s were not always closing their database connections… I would have thought that this would be done auto-magically when the PHP threads terminated, but apparently not. What made things worse was our mysql timeout settings were all extremely high (at least an hour)… So, this was leaving many threads/connections idle for long periods of time and eventually preventing new users from accessing the databases… My initial solution of increasing the max_connections was only delaying the problem by a couple minutes…. We’ve now set all MySQL timeouts to be 2 minutes which was a much simpler solution than digging thru our 5-odd CMS’s and fixing the cleanup code…
It’s been 9 hours and we’ve had a max of 27 simultaneous connections which is much nicer than 300-400!
No more perpetual digg effect for us :)
Well after a long search for the source of the server problems I think we’ve narrowed it down to a battered mysql server. Most of the CMS’s we run on our various sites don’t have an option to use a “persistent connection” to the database which meant that every page-view on every site was establishing a new connection. Since we get millions of page-views a month, our poor little server was having a heart-attack… I modified a few files in Joomla, MODx , and our own code to utilize persistent connections and so-far-so-good… We should know by tomorrow if we’ve solved the problem and can stick w/ our current server for a while longer. :)
Skunkie and I were looking at Engadget today and we saw those infamous pictures of what could be the new Mac keyboards… and I’m drooling. I’ve been using a MacBook for months now and I’m completely addicted to the new style keys they used on it. I would kill for a full sized keyboard in the same style and it seems that’s what Apple may be working on. Could we see them as soon as August 7th? I freakin’ hope so :)
MegaNice9 has been branching out into new comic genres lately like “Obese Marmoset” and “Atheist Superhero”… I think they both could be counted as one if you consider Snee a freak of evolution :)… Anyways, she has Richard Dawkins shooting “educational bullets”… so I suggest you all read it now, or suffer the consequences!
Enjoy!
