Rise and Snooze.

I recently installed 3D Studio Max 8 and wanted to test drive the new version of Mental Ray renderer. It's supposed to produce better quality renders even with a low samples setting (compared to the previous versions), and faster. So I took my Bedroom scene, which I call "Rise and Snooze" just to explain away the young lady's laziness, and tried my rusty rendering skills on it.

For the renderer, I set the settings thus:
-GI: 500 Photons/sample, 100000 Photons/light, Max 2 Reflections, Max 2 Refractions;
-Final Gather: 50 Samples, Max 2 Relections, Max 2 Refractions, Max 1 Bounces;
-Renderer: Mitchell 4x4, Min 1 Samples/pixel, Max 4 Samples/pixel;

(Max. Bounces is new to this version and it controls the maximum number of times a difuse ray is bounced in the scene.)

The angle below took 40 minutes to render. I don't have the figures with 3DS Max 7 to compare this with. Nor can they be compared because of the relatively small number of samples required to acheive the same result in 3DS Max 8.

The lady is 'Jessi', a biped from Poser6, made to lie in that pose. Making her was easy, importing her to Max was, to say the least, tough. And the bed spread is my first Reactor cloth. Other than these, the room's pretty basic. When I say basic, I mean that it is made of cuboids and cones. I am a simple man.

;;

Semper fi? Don't think so.

I had high hopes for Doom the movie when it was announced almost an year ago. Sure, the cast was only mediocre (except for The Rock, of course), and so far no video-game-to-movie movies were effective in acheiving their intention.

But this is *Doom*. How can anyone mess up? So, my expectation for this film was quite high. I had kept away from spoilers for this movie, and the only spoil I heard was of the short FPS sequence that was supposed to be included in the film. If anything, my anticipation went only higher with this news.

I finally got to watch the movie on DVD. Even just a few minutes into the movie, I could tell that none in the production department had played Doom or even knew its storyline. That, or they simply thought that the tried and tested plot of gene mutation monsters was better than Doom's hell portal theory. Sure, there were a couple recognizable Doom creatures like the zombies, the Imp, the Hell knight aka the Baron, and everyone's favorite Pinky, and the story takes place in Mars. But apart from that, it's definetly not Doom.

The main story in Doom, or atleast Doom 3, is about an ancient civilization on mars who research and succeed in inter-dimentional travel via teleportation. But they find that they had opened a portal to actual Hell. Hell demons start to invade mars. The martians create an artifact called the 'Soul Cube' through sacrifice of almost all of the mars population and arming their strongest warrior with it. The legions from hell were beaten back by the warrior. The remainder of the Martian population teleported to another dimension/galaxy, while a few others teleported over to Earth and became the first humans. The martians leave behind a detailed documentary on stone tablets, of their opening of the portal, the evil that followed, the usage of the soul cube, it's location and how they advise other civilizations not to try this in their backyard. The Union AeroSpace Corporation, UAC, establishes a research facility on Mars and contemporary scientists, upon finding the tablets, attempt to recreate the portal opening. They succeed but they are not aware of the Hell-concept. So, many scout teams and researchers, no matter what they are armed with, return either as dead bodies, lobotomized zombies with extra-large blood lust or as a giberring wrecks. Dr.Bertruger, the lead Evil scientist at the base, leads on the research no matter what the body count. This is when you get enter the UAC facility. You were a Marine who disobeyed a direct order to gun down innocent civilians. Giving a fatal punch to your CO is not a very good way of disobeying. The CO gets military burial while you get your can kicked over to Mars (on the theory that your body will naturally follow it). Dr. Bertruger has plans of his own. He goes through to hell, gives the soul cube to the Devil there and reaches a pact with them.
From here on, though the game becomes schwarchenegger-style-kill'em-all, it's the attention to detail on the horror element in Doom that really makes it Doom. For exampe, I remember one time when the light flickers for a few second and then ther's an Imp just behind the iron staircase. But when the light came back on, there wasn't anything there or behind me. All this I noticed on the corner of my eye. I still have't worked out if that was actually scripted, my hallucination or a bug in the game's clipping code. (Actually, I replayed the game and saw the Imp again. So it *was* a scripted event :) )
All along the way, you hear distant voices of your fellow marines getting acquainted with the demons, see things that aren't there, witness giant bloody growth all over the base, humans, disfigured and dismembered, arranged in some satanic art, cries of babies and women pleading you or beckoning you. There's just too many scare devices to count. And then there's the no-scotch-tape-on-mars syndrome, which means you can't mount the infinite battery-life flashlight on your weapon. A shame when you consider that powercuts are virtually permanant on the base. The creatures from Hell are a bit too demanding on the maintenance crew, I guess.

I don't expect a Fraped version of the game play relesed as movie, (Mainly because it would be nauseating and boring without the interactablity of the game, but actually because there are such videos of Doom3 and other games on the net. They are called SpeedRuns of the game. But unless you've played the game well, you can't follow the video or it's intent. 100% runs, in which the gamer finishes the game as fast as possible while collecting all the collectibles and killing all the killable NPCs, are hard to come by. But they would give you some idea of what the Doom experience is all about. VisualWalkthroughs is a great site for those who want a low bandwidth Doom experience), but I certainly expected the movie to exceed my expectations. You know, get creative and novel and stuff.
But no. There's the old gene mutation theory in cloak, the human genome containing the 'blueprint' of the soul (?), cliched one-liner dialogues, despicable characters whom we don't care if they rot in, well, mars, a heroine (is she?) who can do autopsy on hellish monstors but annoys viewers by her constant screams upon viewing a zombie lobotomizing itself on the other side of a bullet-proof glass, a civilization that can travel at the speed of light but still uses guns and metal bullets, ...

The movie in question is not bad at all, as a movie. It has a weak-but-OK storyline of the kind you would expect of an action movie, an OK cast (The Rock only sways rather than rock in this movie), an occasional nod to FPS gamers (Dr.Cormack, BFG, the FPS mode), couple of catchy one-lines ("Semper fi, mofo!", "Kill them all, let God sort them out."). I did root, root when the FPS mode started (About 3 minutes long), and I did watch the movie about four times. Infact, if they had named the movie something along the lines of 'non-Resident Evil' or 'YARE (Yet Another Resident Evil)' or 'Resident Evil in Mars', then I am sure that the movie wouldn't have recieved so many sighs from gamers and film critics.

Being a marine, Dwayne Johnson flouts the US Marine corps motto, "Semper Fi" (actually, "Semper fidelis") all over the place; whether it be on his extra wide shoulder tattoo or when talking down his adversary in the final boss-fight ("Semper fi, mofo!"). The exact meaning of the word is "always faithful", but, as Sarge, The Rock translates it as "Faithful to the core". But well, I don't think this movie is faithful to the core at all. It just isn't Doom.

WTF - Event 2

Well it seems that my problem may be caused by Tune up utilities 2006. It was probably messing some registry value, which I found the hard way. And since Windows is a tangle of inter-dependencies at the level of the (badly designed) monolithic kernel, it became inexplicably crippled. But since I wasn't wise about the TuneUp Utilities causing trouble, I installed the software again after Event 1 and restarted Windows. There was the same olde problem staring bleakly at me. So I just popped-in the XP boot CD and started the installation.

But hey, if the setup was uneventful, there's no point in the post! All for no (obvious) reason, I had to restart the setup forever because of an angelic error dialog (more like a monologue) :

Fatal error:
Setup failed to install the product catalogs.
The signature for Windows XP professional upgrade is invalid. The error code is 426. The service has not been started.

Microsoft support site reckons that it’s cause by a catalog folder left behind by the previous OS installation. So the support article asked me to press SHIFT+F10 at the error message to get a cmd prompt window. From here I am supposed to cd to windows\System32 and rename â€ï¿½Catroot2’ to â€ï¿½catold’. It’s cool to know that you can access cmd prompt from here. It isn’t very useful but at least it’s more functional and workable than the recovery console.

But the thing is, the time between the start of the â€ï¿½Installing windows’ mode (the shift+F10 trick starts to work only in this mode) and the appearance of the error dialog is about 10 seconds. I raced against the clock to delete/rename the damn catroot folder, but it was a no-go situation.

Tired of doing the catroot thing, I ran bootcfg.exe and lowered the amount of RAM visible to windows to only 128MB of the 1GB. Of course, I know this was a long shot and won’t work, but some setup related problems with lower versions of windows go away with this trick.

I tried to move some important files to my other partition. Next I tried running the setup.exe in the Windows setup CD from within the cmd window. And it launched the setup! But, unfortunately, the “child setupâ€ï¿½ also stopped at the same spot as it’s “parentâ€ï¿½, with the same error message.
In the end I had to do a quick format and fresh install like I did in my previous post. I could’ve avoided this format by deleting the entire partition of Windows related files, but it would’ve smelled like a boat-load of bilge water to find some file I forgot or something. This time around, I've steered clear of tuneup utilities. But how I miss it! But hopefully, this the end of my 'formatathon'.

PS: On google, as of this writing, my blog is the only hit for the word 'Formatathon' :)

May you live in interesting times.

Nicolas Copernicus had shown that our home planet, the Earth, is not at the centre of the solar system, but rather a relatively small planet, lost among ranks of a sundry group. Any hope of the concept of 'speciality of human race' (anthropocentricism) that remained among certain fanatical philosophers, was constantly put under stress as facts like our earth not being at the centre of our galaxy, our galaxy not being at the centre of The Local Group of galaxies and our galaxy cluster not being at the centre of the universe, were dicovered successively.

The Copernican theory, in itself being profound, induced more spectacular scientific cornerstones to be created. One of those is the prediction, discovery and subsequent mapping of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Another, not very known, observation is by Richard Gott, who used the non-speciality of an observer's view of an event to predict the longetivity of the event. Of course, the theory, being based on mathematical constructs and not on some vaticinatoring knowledge, there's always a confidence level associated with the prediction. This prediction works only so long as the observer is observing the said event at its non-special time of existence.

To understand this wierd condition (non-speciality), an understanding of the Standard Normal Curve is in order. If you are thinking, "Math? Run like hell!", then don't bother running. I am only going to tell you what I know, which is more like English

If you make a large number of observations which have some true random noise, then the results tend to arrange themselves in a bell-shaped curve called the Normal Curve. The curve shows up no matter the range or the data being observed. The curve aligns itself over the data with it's peak or apex right on top of the average of the observations. If u take a chunk of the curve about the central line of the curve, then the area of the chunk gives the confidence level in percentage that the next observation lies within this region.
So, for example, given a range from 5 to 15, with average at 10, you can predict with approximately 0% confidence that the value is 10, or with 68% confidence that the value lies in the range of 9 to 11, or with 95% confidence that it lies within 8 to 12, and so on. But the requirement is that the randomness involved be really random, and not be because of special circumstances that can be accounted for.

Note that, you cannot, however, predict anything with 100% confidence that the value lies inside the range of 5 to 15. This is because the curve's property of never "touching down" at any value. It just goes on to infinity on either side. I guess that if it didn't, then we would all be cassandras (and her male counterparts).

Now that the primer has been laid down, here's the actual content. Richard Gott says that if you are an observer who 'just happened' to observe an event/entity at a non-special part of the object's existence, (that is, neither on the day of its conception not on the day of some event (like war) that could destroy the entity), then your observervation can be mapped in a standard curve which stretches from the entity's creation to it's (future) destruction. And, considering that your visit is non-special (for example, you didn't invited to witness its end), then this situation bears no significant difference to the curve in the above paragraph. Which means, we can apply the same prediction-with-confidence-level trick here too. The resulting prediction will tell you, with some confidence, in which percentage of the entity's lifetime you are observing. From this data, you can predict the entity's lifetime, again, with some confidence.

The title of this post, 'May you live in interesting times', is supposedly a chinese curse. I don't know. But this post gives it a whole new evil dimension. Since you are required to be an observer at non-special times of the entity to make a prediction about it, you can conversely say that the as long as you can predict the longetivity of something, the entity will remains relatively unchanged. Take the act of predicting the longetivity of humanity. If you are eligible to predict, then you are observing it at a non-special or non-interesting time. But if u are living in interesting times, then you can't predict anything because you belong in humanity and something big (possibly bad?) is going to happen to it. Give me boring times any day!

A go at Google:
So now, how about we predict something? Something like Google's existence? Googl has been around since September, 1998. I am making this observation on November, 2005. Since there's nothing special about me observing google today, I can say with 95% confidence that Google will last for more than 2.25 months but less than 281 years.
You can predict the logetivity of other companies, human race, organizations, your relationship or how long your college/university will last, if that will give you pleasure.

Dear Suse,

A week ago, I went to ConneXions, Annanagar to buy some interesting book and other miscellany (including a cool mouse pad, whose review will follow). I noticed that Suse 10.0 OSS version dvd was bundled along with the November issue of Linux For You magazine. Since this was during my XP formatathon, I purchased it to try it out.
I installed it in some 8GB of unpartitioned space I had. I don't think there's any point in talking about the installation part, as linux installation, for the past couple years, had been simple enough to go through (except for some wierdo distros aimed at sooper-nerds). Maybe it could've been worse if I had tried to install linux on my raid-0 array. Infact, suse told me that I have a software raid contrary to what my BIOS informs her! Whatever. Since I didn't want to install in the raid partition, the install went uneventfully (if u don't count successfully installing linux as an event, that is). For those who want to have a look at the install though, here's a flash movie :)
One thing I noticed at boot up was that now there's a splash screen with progress indicator. Newbees rejoiced, as they would've found a bunch of growing dots less intimidating than the pages of scrolling dos text à la hollywood style or a progress barless screen that I was used to. Of course, this feature might've been introduced in earlier versions and I only noticed now. But I was annoyed that some things stayed the same. I mean, even after so many years since I last checked out linux, why should I still manually enter the monitor frequencies when I don't have to do so in any of the windows OS?

Yast2
Imagine having to know how to extract vcd frames from a vcd just to watch a movie. Many geeks reading this may be able to do so. But you are not the main market for the vcd industry. The average joe who just want things to work, are the ones, fortunately or unfortunately.
Following this analogy, I would say that linux is a right pain when you want to install anything in it. With utilities like Yast, this has almost been eradicated. Yast2 was good. The apropos style searching for programs and drivers is appreciable. Only thing that you have to do manually is to seek out installation sources: the path to software packages on the Internet or local disks. This step too could've been automated with something similar to GWebCache in gnutella so that we get only the recent list of servers hosting some essential packages, or atleast the packages that come with the DVD.
Another thing with Yast was that, by default the installation source had one entry named 'cdrom' something. But it didn't search my DVD drive at all, even though that's where I installed it from. Later, when I added "dvd:\" or something like that (after googling), I was able to search for some dependencies in the DVD drive. Also, it took minutes to refresh from all the Installation sources (3 sites and dvd). Maybe because of slow sites.
The first thing I did with yast was to download Nvidia driver for suse. I would've had a tad trouble finding drivers for my old ATi card (9700pro), but, thankfully, NVidia pays equal importance to linux version of its drivers. With or without the drivers, the way linux renders everything onscreen has been, somehow, delightfully different. I tell you what, you take the same webpage and view it in linux and in windows and compare the quality for yourself. My friend Balakrishnan used to say the same thing of linux when he tried to make me abandon windows forever. Not just the visuals, the sound is different too. And again, it's delightfully so, as the volume goes higher and sounds more amplified without any jarring artifacts. I couldn't believe it was the same computer that ran under windows the first time I ran linux and I've just rediscovered that feeling.

Multimedia keys and Mouse buttons
Other things that I've gotten quite used to in the windows world, but couldn't figure out in the linux "woerld" were my keyboard's multimedia keys and my mouse's forward & backward buttons [link]. There were tutorials to make the mouse buttons work by changing the mappings in Xwindow. I followed the example for a 6 button mouse, but it turned out that my mouse was 7 button. I haven't gotten round to try the new mapping yet.

The same's the story with my keyboard special keys too. Tried quite a few advises from various forums, but all of them had wireless multimedia keyboard and none of their advice worked on my wired one.

AmaroK
I love iTunes (you won't like it only if u haven't tried it). There's, of course, a Mac version too. But sadly, there's no iTunes for linux, yet. Just what Apple means by it, I don't know. I searched around and found that crossover office users can now enjoy itunes on linux. But I found a worthy temporary place-holder for iTunes, called Amarok. I could connect to my last.fm account using its intrinsic plugin. It uses recommended music based on my history of songs in the 'dynamic mode'. Kinda Ok feature, but tends to annoy you by repeating songs over and over. It's got an OK interface. With so many features spread over horizontal and vertical tabs, it could tend to be complex and non-intuitive. For example, I can't figure out how to “uncheck” a song to keep it from playing. And it's context menu could do with some more entries, like what iTunes has. But I loved the automatic lyric display (based on some OSS plugin which lets you submit lyrics), artist/album/title search (using some interface to wikipedia) and context functionality that displays the various context in which the current song appears. I would love to have some of these features in iTunes.
I couldn't find any codec installed by default that would play my mp3 or mov (quicktime) collection. So I had to install a windows codec collection called w32codec-all that really did contain almost all of the plugins necessary. My media collection is in a space-sparse 80GB harddrive in NTFS format. Amarok had a very good album art manager which, unfortunately, couldn't write to the NTFS media drive. The last time I checked, there was only support for over-writing files in NTFS. But maybe I would've found a fully supported ntfs write driver if I had searched for it in Yast.

FireFox
The onboard nvidia ethernet card was detected correctly. But I was looking all over to setup a ppoe conection. Finally found it under the ATM devices setup. A minor observation, and nothing more, in firefox is that, double-clicking the address bar in the Windows version selects the text till a delimiter. But in linux it selects the entire text. It was a bit annoying as I was used to do this to quicky select and change the last value in the url (like, http://forum.com/?forum=32) to quicly move among sub forums.

At the end of the day, Suse's Yast rules and the new versions of Gnome and KDE look promising. Though I am sure I haven't enjoyed anything that is exclusive to Suse 10 version, it will be the future patches, apps and derivative distros released by the OSS community that will make the impact of the OSS decision felt better. Already there is an OS effort called SUPER (Suse Performance Enhanced Release) to release a slimmer and nimbler Suse. I only checked out the gnome desktop. Many seem to favour the KDE environment, but I find gnome to be less cluttered and simple.
But I am still not using linux as main OS because I don't want to hassle with making visual studio, my games and other apps that I use to work in linux. It's the general laziness prevalent among windows users.

Charles Darwin in Chennai?

Annanagar Talk, a local news paper, reported that on Nov 14, the great-great-grand daughter of, none other than, Charles Dariwin himself was going to do a book reading session here in Chennai. And specifically, in Annanagar, my neighbourhood! She was also supposed to have an interactive session after the event.

In all my excitment, I forgot to glimpse at the title of the book she was to read out. Well, I did glimpse at it later and it was "Tigers in Red weather".

Ruth Padel, as it turns out, disappointingly to me, don't talk much about Evolution in her book or in her after-book-read-interactive-session. Rather, her book is supposed to be a travelogue of sorts delineating the various places tigers live and focuses on the "physical, scientific and political significance of the tiger" and is versed well for the 'spiritually kindled' and the 'poetic-eyed'. Old people, in other words.
Shame. I was hoping to get a glimpse of Charles Darwin's spirit in her eyes as she builds on her great ancestor's ideas. Maybe He still glints in her genes, but I defer the chance to meet her if she's going to ramble on her books only. I've got more significant tasks planned for the evening. Like going to a Food fest FoodPro2005 at the Chennai Trade Centre, for example. I always wanted to see a chocolate fountain.

But anyways, it great to hear that she will be around in my neighbourhood and she'll always be welcome.