frustration

...seems to be the theme for today.

caught a bus at just about the perfect time to get one; a few minutes after 8. it was a fairly fast trip -- at least until we got to alabang. the driver decided to not to line up where the buses generally stop; instead he made for the intersection where the light was currently red. naturally, people got off slowly -- as i got within three people of the door, light turns green. now, other than that initial stop, there are no real places to let people off (where you won't get caught, anyway).

so the bus decided to finally pause long enough for the rest of the passengers to get off (damnably, at a 'no unloading' zone just shy of the re-entry ramp to the south superhighway. i wanted to cuss and kick the driver's head in.

it was a full 12 minute walk back to the jeepney terminal, crossing at designated places, etc. another irritant was the small triangle of land between a "y" intersection close to the terminal. in it, the direct route from the crossing at one side to the other was barricaded so that the flow of pedestrians absolutely had to walk through a greenhills-style shop maze.

abso-bloomin-lutely irritating.

got across, and totally unwilling to indulge in the aggravating jeepney system of transportation, decided to take a cab.

luckily, an empty one passed by just as i got to the loading/unloading zone.

get to work -- and discover that the massively high-resolution render i had submitted to the farm had not rendered at all.

the resolution was 7500 by 5700 pixels. i was wondering if it was too high; tried it on my machine, and it quit with a 'not enough memory' error. tried using a render subregion switch with the render farm submit script -- which came back with an error that the option was unrecognized.

wtf?

it was in the documentation, how the hell could it be an unrecognized option?

after lots of gritted teeth web searches and trying all manner of options, it turns out that the software has two ways of rendering -- the main software itself which in turn calls a standalone render, and the standalone renderer itself invoked directly. and the kicker: command line switches for either one are different enough to cause unwarranted agony, especially if one has no idea why the render is failing.

arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

---

more tests, an sms or two, and the issue finally came to light. apparently, a convenience feature in the software had again reared its ugly head (this had happened before). it was all right when the windows machines worked with the linux server's 'windows' shared resource; but when a job was submitted using the linux farm (which uses an altogether different method of 'mapping' network shared data), the software feature would hang the render process altogether.

so, after a whole day gritting my teeth, got the render to work; and surprisingly, it rendered with a different render engine altogether (the renderer has four options of render 'engines' -- the one that seemed to work this time was one that required a license per processor). have to look at that unexpected thing later.

in the end, also decided to render the whole picture in one go, no more subregion shenanigans.

...not a pretty picture, though. still much work to be done.

at least, now i know how to render it.

end of day.

update

interestingly, the level of frustration that had built up over the day did not diminish with the trip home. not even 'the fairly oddparents' or 'spongebob squarepants' managed to take the edge off how i felt. just on a lark, and this is fairly odd for me (i've somehow lost some urge/need to see movies unless they're something i really want to see), i put the dvd of 'atlantis: the lost empire' on. 'course i fast-forwarded through the painful first few minutes and settled in to watch once they reached atlantis itself. i think it's still a good movie, even if it didn't perform as disney wanted it to. i'd have to agree with a friend's assessment that disney's adherence to a formula and a certain seemingly prescribed time limit in the end does more harm than good. at the same time, it can be fairly hard to say what'll sell and what won't. i liked 'iron giant' too, and that didn't do well either...

...does that say anything about my taste in movies? (",)

anyway, i'm feeling much better now. losing myself in the latter parts of atlantis certainly did much to improve my mood.