the week in review

well, found out firsthand why shorter rather than longer posts would be the norm for a blog: it does take a bit of work (and a fair amount of editing) to post -- and of course, if you're busy with something else; well, that takes precedence.

this week has been a case in point. happened to make a suggestion in a meeting about the upcoming rendering project about theoretically using the dual-proc mac g5s as part of the render farm in their off hours. suggestion received warmly -- naturally, guess who gets to prove the theory's feasibility...

boy, that took a fair bit of work -- and we're not out of the woods yet. first order of the day was to get the render management software to work on the mac. the installation instructions didn't work as advertised, and there was something that prevented the mac from being seen by the license manager for the render system. next step was to get the mac to connect the server's shared resources so as to appear as a folder in the root of the mac's hard drive (in similar fashion as we used on the linux/xeon render boxes).

i was trying to do both at the same time -- in hindsight, perhaps not the best way to go about it, but i had a deadline to come up with an answer.

and there were just so many variables. the mac itself, the render management software, the render license server on win2k, the main fileserver on linux, and our main 3-D software.

imagine the possibilities where the communication between these disparate packages would, could, and did, fail.

several times i gave up and handed the machine over to others and walked away. our future prez took a shot, and gave up. then came the resident troubleshooter of our umbrella company. to his credit, the troubleshooter managed to get the mac to be seen by the license server -- it was a deeply hidden setting on the mac side. the filesystem mount he ran out of time for -- it was already six-thirty on friday night; and there are problems with staying over beyond closing time...

saturday morning, i attacked the problem on the linux server side. lo and behold, it worked. so: license server visible, render management system daemon up and running, filesystem mounted; then the 3-D package wouldn't run. reinstalled that, and ready to fly.

go back to my machine, run the submit script... ...nothing. i'm almost out of time. ok, worse comes to worst. decide to run the render manually, off the command line. render running, and i begin to get some rendering statistics off a test scene i've been using as a benchmark for various machines.

...the results later.

later that day, paul and his fiancee wed. i had new leather shoes, and they were killing my feet severely. so i was somewhat distracted during the wedding proceedings themselves, and walking around church was a challenge.

however, the reception made up for the discomfort -- the food was great, and i overate (actually woke up at three am the following morning in some pain -- happens when i indulge overmuch in food).

anyway, to paul and rowena, congratulations! hope you enjoy our gift of 'light'. (",)

thus was the week.