Mike Afford Media ::: Blog

A few weeks ago I started to notice something was amiss with my trusty G5 Mac - just the occasional flicker on the Desktop which soon passed, and I thought no more of it. A few days later I began to see tiny tiny corruptions, mainly around the edges of my browser windows - just a wee bit of speckling there in the drop shadows…

A few more days went by, and by now the corruptions had spread to the Desktop icons. Something was definitely going wrong, so of course I did a Google search on things like ‘Mac Desktop Corruption‘ or ‘G5 Desktop Corrupted‘ and found the usual suggestions - reset the PRAM, change screen resolution, empty caches etc. In fact, changing display resolution in System preferences (from 1920×1200 to 1600×1200 and back again) worked a treat, every time, so I thought maybe whatever latest software update I’d performed might have made something go screwy and I’d see if it righted itself eventually. I had a workaround right??

Er, no.

About a week and a half ago the corruptions got worse, and this time changing screen resolutions didn’t fix the problem. Back to some more serious Googling. Eventually I found a forum post titled Help! Weird Screen! being attacked by barcode hash marks! And a couple of screen grabs that showed identical corruptions to what I was experiencing…

Apple Mac G5 Desktop corruption from www.typophile.com forums

If you read through that thread you’ll see that it turns out to be a symptom of a dying graphics card.

So here’s my own advice…

If you’re reading this and your Mac has got a few little corruptions like those in the picture above, then I’d advise you order a new graphics card sooner rather than later, because before long your Desktop will look like this (my grab below)

Apple Mac G5 PowerPC Desktop corrupted

And in no time at all it will get much, much worse - so bad in fact that eventually you will find it almost impossible to do anything on your machine - in particular install new drivers for your replacement card when it arrives! And no amount of clearing PRAM, changing resolution, reseating your existing card or taking the card out completely and cleaning all the gunk off it (I tried all of those..!) will make any difference.

So anyway - respect and thanks to dezcom at Typophile.com for posting images showing his own graphics card failure. Hopefully anyone else experiencing the same thing might stumble across this page as well. By the way, I’ve just fitted my new graphics card. Just in time too - I pretty much had to guess what I was clicking at during the installation. Anyway, I’m typing this now from a lovely pristine squeaky clean good-as-new Desktop.

OK, here’s the background. Damien Mulley has set a challenge to get your site listed in first place on Google.ie for the search term ‘geansai gorm’ (which means ‘blue jumper’).

Anyway, I decided to give it a shot today, in between getting the baby to the creche, doing some shopping, doing some proper work, and overseeing a bit of minor building work at home. I built a quick webpage, set up a subdomain on this site, blogged about it briefly on my other blog and even uploaded a shoddy video to YouTube. And when I eventually got back online this evening, I was ever so slightly disappointed to find that not only was my site NOT on the first page of Google, it wasn’t actually anywhere on Google at all. (Yes, I clicked all the way to the end).

Reckon I may have to rethink my strategy. Or maybe hope that there’s a prize for the WORST bit of search engine optimisation in Ireland.

Update: After a brief spell at around the 30 spot, the new ‘improved’ WordPress powered site has disappeared completely. Either dark forces are at work, or I was a bit over-enthusiastic with the cross-linking (especially beween my own sites, all hosted by the same ISP. I’m not surprised I’m now in Google’s bad books!). I’m removing links now, but I’m thinking ‘horse, stable door’…

Update (2): Roll back the carpets grandma, it’s party time. My geansai gorm site has rocketed back up to page 2. It’s now the 16th result out of 71,000 odd. And that will do me just fine.

Well, OK. That’s not strictly true.

For starters, the BBC Election Night programme in 2006 didn’t use REAL holograms. But then neither did the recent CNN election special.

For the secrets behind the CNN programme you should visit the VizRT website where it explains the process of using 35 HD cameras and a bunch of Viz boxes to place a real person into a real studio with a fuzzy border around them.

BBC Hologram from 2006

On my own site you can read some of the background behind the 2006 BBC Election Holograms - whereby we placed a real person in an entirely virtual studio (which matched the look and feel of the real studio next-door) and introduced a number of graphic ‘projections’ which were, of course, just animated textures designed to look a bit like Princess Leia from Star Wars.

The BBC production was put together on a bit of a shoestring budget (luckily enough for the licence payers), but we were fortunate enough to pick up a Broadcast Designers’ Association (BDA) award for the ‘Ascent of Tory Man’ graphic sequence.

The reasoning behind the use of ‘holograms’ in 2006 was three-fold. The production was already going to be using the Brainstorm VR system. We were also looking for something that complemented the night-time feel of the programme - ideally ‘lighting up’ the graphics in some way. Lastly, I was keen to make an obvious visual distinction between the virtual ’studio’ elements and the virtual ‘content’ elements (i.e. the analysis and the results) - so the flickering ‘projected’ quality of the images was extended to include the histograms, line graphs etc, while the surrounding VR studio was designed to look as much like the real discussion studio next door where David Dimbleby was hosting the main programme.

Election Hologram

Anyway. I’m not suggesting that what we did in 2006 and what CNN did last week were the same thing. For one thing, we were only inserting flat graphic elements as opposed to real live people. The image of Tony Blair here appeared as though it was being projected somehow into the studio space, but obviously if the camera panned round the back we wouldn’t see the back of his head. Still, I think we did a pretty good job of faking a holographic ‘feel’.

I expect that CNN could quite easily have embedded the ‘holographic’ people seamlessly with the real studio, rather than fuzzing them up a bit (actually it ended up just looking like very poor keying - probably intentionally). But unfortunately if they’d made it look more professional then no-one watching would have noticed anything strange or clever at all, and might have been tempted to think - what on earth was the point of all that????

Actually, come to think of it, what was the point of all this??

As promised - here’s a quick rundown of how I tweaked the default WordPress theme to match my own website. Pretty much everything was achieved by editing either the style.css or header.php files.

The changes to the basic proportions of the page were made by increasing the #page and #footer divs from 760 to 900pixels and adjusting the right sidebar content to be 250px wide (to match my own ‘content_sub’ div) and expanding the rest of the content to fill the gap.

Next I changed the basic colour scheme - or as much as I could using color values in the style sheet (text etc). I searched all the template files to see exactly where the background images appeared and then added my own versions (at the new widths) including a body background, a footer image that closes off the main grey box backround, and a new ‘topper’ image that does the same at the top (this needed a new div - added to the header.php file).

I changed the header box to be left aligned and smaller and removed the top margin from <h1> tag (blog title).

Lastly, I put a new DIV into the header php code - this is where I place all my own header content.  I also moved the background image from the body (to stop it scrolling when the browser is resized) into my own header code.

The last few tweaks were mainly little cosmetic changes - a bit of margin/padding adjustment and a new background colour and border around the comment boxes. And that was pretty much it.

The week before last I went on a ‘Blogging For Business’ course held at the Leitrim County Enterprise Board in Carrick-on-Shannon. It was a one-day course, but a lot of useful info was crammed in - WordPress, RSS feeds etc - I’d recommend it to anyone who maybe is just starting out setting up their own business website, or is looking for new ways to drive traffic to an existing site - probably not so useful if you’ve been running your own blog successfully for while - but ideal for beginners.