TITLE: ODBC NAME: Jeff Goeson COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: jgoeson@msn.com WEBPAGE: no TOPIC: Unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: odbc.jpg ZIPFILE: odbc.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.1e TOOLS USED: POVRay 3.1e, MS PhotoPaint for conversion to JPEG RENDER TIME: 0h 24m 11s HARDWARE USED: P233, 64MB, Win95 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Open Database Connectivity is the bane of my existence and the food on my table. With a connection so faint and brittle, how does it work at all, and how do the engineers who developed and released this thing sleep at night (other than with their trophy wives that they can afford with their buttloads of money they got for foisting this barely- polished turd on us...) On the good days, everything works well. When the sunspot activity has decreased noticeably and the winds blow in off the desert just so, my screens populate well and quickly, and my users rejoice in my skills and sing songs around the campfire in praise of my code. On bad days, the data source will not stay connected. I can verify that the database engine on the server is functional and the database engine services are running and the network is blipping, but timeouts abound. On these days, my users curse my name and date of birth and sing songs around the campfire calling for the removal of my hands and erasure of my drive. Users are so fickle... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image is my second submission to a competition. I try to not submit unless the topic really grabs me. I've been battling data connection problems lately... Anyway, this image is essentially two cylinder chunks (databases) connected with a third cylinder (data pipe). The DataStreams texture is intended to show just how scarce the connection really is. It's made with a color map that allows very little of the surface to actually get any color. The light sources that I have embedded in the databases are supposed to look a little like fiber optic connections, only with blue going one way and green going the other way (I'm not a big fan of red...). I embedded the light sources inside the databases so that you can't necessarily see where the blue and green are coming from, but you can see it reflected well on the opposite database. That kinda looked cool, but then I decided that it would be cooler to have the ability to see where the light sources were beaming from, so I reduced the diameter of the data pipe. The sky is a modified high wispy cloud sky. I made it dark and imposing... just like it should be when looking at ODBC. I'm not bitter, though...