Drive Operation

I’ve been an admirer on the Linux sidelines for a long time now — many years, in fact. I think my first brush with Linux was in the dense text listings of Amiga PD (Public Domain) software magazine ads, where a single item often read “Unix-like operating system for the Amiga”. I even came across a very early version of Red Hat in its infancy, on some magazine cover CD that a friend gave me. At the time I didn’t even own a PC. Once I moved over to PC land, and became familiar with the internet I came to know Linux well, at least by reputation. And since then I have slowly but surely moved towards open source software, culminating in the present time when all my professional design, illustration, video, and web development work is carried out purely using OSS.

A CD drive disassembledCircuit board inside the driveThe only hold back in this migration is Windows which I still use, but after some recent glitches and file losses, I have finally begun looking towards Linux for an eventual shift. Before I left for my vacation in January, I started downloading and trying out a whole slew of Live CD Linux distros, to get the hang of it and also the find the one that suits my needs best. Since I got back I continued my downloading spree but found to my dismay that my computer refused to boot from the CD any more. That certainly put a damper on my playful experimenting so I set out to find the culprit.

The drive motorIt wasn’t the BIOS as I first thought, but instead it seemed to be a dirty lens in the CD drive which just didn’t allow for a quick pickup on the bootable discs at startup. The normal way of doing this is the much hyped “CD cleaner” discs which come with a special CD that has a cleaning brush on it and some special solution for the cleaning, but I’ve not had much luck with those in the past and my drive is quite old. I though perhaps it was in need for a fuller treatment. So I took it apart for a thorough cleaning, and these photos resulted.

The prognosis isn’t good however. While I might have managed to clean the lens, this drive has had other problems before, including a drive mechanism which sometimes gets stuck. Once it was all opened out, these problems are appearing again and I can see that there are obviously some mechanical issues with the gear system in there which makes the opening and closing mechanism and the one that raises and lowers the drive head not co-ordinate as they are supposed to.

So for now I have moved on to a spare drive I had lying around, and this patient will have to wait for some future leisure time when I can tinker, decipher and understand.

How to anti-crash a wedding in 5 easy steps – a case study

runaway guest illustration

The concept of crashing a wedding, or any other large and noisy gathering of human beings for that matter, is very clear and well understood. The crasher tries to gain access to the said public gathering without the luxury of approval in the form of an invitation. So clear is this phenomenon in the minds of the general population that this complex social interaction has been reduced to a single representational term that is fathomed by even the most naive citizens of the world. They named a mass-market romantic comedy after it, for God’s sake. How complicated can it be?
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Babel-ing Gurus and other touching anecdotes

babling guru illustration

A trip to India usually includes a very liberal dose of cinema tickets for me. On this trip the first film to catch our attention was Babel. So on a random day when the mood struck us, my Dad, Vishal and I took a long bus ride to South Bombay and stepped into the historical Regal Cinema for our fix. The next day Babel won the Golden Globes Best Picture award. But a few hours before that I had walked out of the darkness of the cinema hall and I loved what I had just seen. In spite of the minor vandalisms by the Indian Censor Board, Babel was quite simply a beautiful piece of cinema. Movies are very much like people, and very much like people we can love them for many different reasons. There are those people who make us laugh, and those that make us feel special, and those that inspire us or make us proud. But if you look carefully you eventually find a small minority that we like not for these sometimes self-centred reasons, but essentially because they are simply impeccable human beings. They are bright and shining standards for the rest of us to live up to. Babel is that kind of movie.
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Lessons in learning, language and literature

macro photo of a blue hardbound book on a bed of dried red chillies

The listing in the newspaper sounded innocent enough:

EYE YOGA…
If you wish to get rid of your spectacles, attending Sampoorna Eye Yoga Camp can do it the natural way. The camp will teach you eye exercises, Vedic in origin, that will help in relieving you of eye disorders. Register for a free lecture in South Mumbai. On January 17. (Tel: 98xxxxxxxx)

My vision is quite normal and I don’t wear spectacles, but my brother and father do, and so this was of interest. We decided to go, and I went along for moral support, and for remembering any useful details as the member of the clan officially interested in this sort of thing.
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March to your own tune

Did you know that March used to be the first month of the year?

It’s true. In fact, January and February didn’t even exist until they were invented by the Romans around 700BC. And it was a whole 650 years later that Julius Caesar declared January to be the first month of the year. He really liked pushing people around, that guy. But some people refused to be pushed. You’ll be surprised to learn that January didn’t become the official beginning of the year in France until the 1500s. And the British colonies didn’t accept the January New Year until the mid 1700s.

Now put yourself into March’s shoes. It must be the most disgruntled month of them all. How would you like to have enjoyed the limelight for so long and then to be cast aside as simply that calendar month that appears between that very short month of the year and April fools day, and everyone was told to beware of your ‘ides’? Not very glamorous is it?

Purely to make it up to our much loved and very hard working month of March, I present to you this table calendar that you can print out and put together. I hope you enjoy it and I encourage you to forward it to everyone you know who would appreciate the chance for a fresh start.

Wishing you a very Happy New Year. It’s never too late for new beginnings …

Download PDF (483 kb)

For all you wallpaper enthusiasts, here are large versions of the illustration from the calendar for your desktop:

Resolutions:
1024X768 (75 kb)
1152X864 (88 kb)
1280X960 (103 kb)
1280X1024 (106 kb)
1600X1200 (161 kb)

1280X800 (92 kb)
1440X900 (112 kb)
1680X1050 (141 kb)
1920X1200 (189 kb)


Mental note 001

I submitted an image for last weeks Weekend Challenge over at Elysiun. I was thinking of putting it up on this blog when I realised that I have not recorded my previous two etries into the WC either. So here, for my own reference more than anything else, is a list of my last three entries for the WC – along with links to the appropriate Elysiun forum threads, so that I don’t have a hard time finding them in the future if I need to.

All Alone WC entryWeekend Challenge #101 : All Alone
Voting Thread
My thread in Finished Projects

This was a composited image using a regular photograph I took specifically for this project. It started mainly as a test of some compositing tutorials I came across on the forums. It turned out pretty well and the simple character model really did end up looking very lonely. Also, surprise surprise! I actually WON this challenge, in spite of this not being a pure Blender entry. Although it was only by a hair. I later modified some of the shadows falling on the character to make it a little more realistic. You can view that modified version of the image on my portfolio page.


Cyberpunk WC entryWeekend Challenge #103 : Cyberpunk
Voting Thread
My thread in Finished Projects

I had a very complex scene in mind for this challenge, which involved sprawling desolate landscapes and futuristic towers littered around the landscape. I managed to complete most of the modelling and texturing, but my trusty old Pentium 1 laptop simply could not handle what I was throwing at it. So, I used the models I had come up with, i.e. the gloved hand and the futuristic tower, to create up a simpler and more iconic image. I was pretty happy with it and liked the slightly renegade look of the scene, but I was not totally satisfied that it was finished. There were only a handful of entries that week and I came in a very far second in the final count. I went on to improve the image by strengthening the ligting and adding a bloom/glow effect in Blenders sequence editor. The modified version is on my portfolio page. Hopefully one day I will get back to these models and recreate the original scene I had in mind. Hmm …


Primitives WC entryWeekend Challenge #112 : Primitives
Voting Thread
No Finished Projects thread for this one

I decided to participate in a challenge after a long sabatical, not only from the WC, but also in some ways from Blender (barring the Techman character I’v been updating on this blog). While I got the idea early, the execution of it was one of those last minute things and was finished in a couple of hours. I wasn’t very happy with the result, and the challenge that week was very well populated. I stood a far nowhere in the voting. But, I do think this scene is a good start, and I do intend to finish it to my satisfaction. Once that is done the new version will definitely be put up here. Untill then, the latest Weekened Challneg is also coming to a close tomorrow. I’m going to try my best to throw in my hat into this one as well.

Samir