Shiben's Blog

Computers' Suck

2011-12-19T18:58:00.006+05:30

Disclaimer: Its just cussing, alright?

I was having this chat with J yesterday and we started talking about what amazing piece of machine the television was in the 80s, when they had a wooden shutter, hard knobs to change 10 available channels out of which 9 show static. Then we went on to cameras in which you have to buy a film roll and how your dad will be angry at you if you take a bad picture because you ruined one film. That made us thinking, after all those advancements, what has been happening after that? Nothing but computers.

And that led to some severe cussing. Don't you think computers has dumbed us down a lot? You know, when I was a kid, I dreamt of a future in which we will see flying cars, or fast elevators, or rooms in top of towers like in the jetsons or cancer and aids being cured.

If we see around us, whether you are living in the US or in Sri Lanka, we wake up in the morning, still doing the same thing you would do 20 years ago, brush your teeth, take a dump, take a shower, get dressed and then reach your office through a tiring crazy traffic to do work. What next? Come back home, watch tv, eat dinner and go to sleep. We are still guzzling petroleum same as 20 years ago, but we wanna process 40GBs of earth terrain data on a 1GB memory GPU card. Women still feel pain while giving birth to a baby and men still feel pain when kicked in the nuts, instead of solving these problems, probably simulating a 1000x1000x1000 voxels explosion seems more important.

What I mean is, all we have been doing since 2 decades is computers. What about some invention to brush my teeth? Or take me to office really fast on some intelligent transport system? Or may be some nice real entertainment in a good channel instead of advertisements about internet services and 5 minutes of a movie in between. Or if someone met an accident, then reproduce liters of blood in the lab to give it to him, hell, replace his broken limb with a brand new one.

I think computers has really held humans back on the innovation level. People have gone lazy and computers is all they want. No kid wants to be a chemical engineer to make a re-creational LSD in a meth lab, all they want to do is learn how to use computers.

You know if computers were not there, people would have gone out of home and solve real problems, like making a microwave oven of some kind which can instead of just heating food can make you a food item. Say I tell the oven, make me a sandwich, and bam, it does that! I don't wanna voice control that thing with some siri bh talking to me. I am fine with turning 3 knobs, sliding 2 sliders and pressing 4 buttons.

All computers have done is process data. All computers have done is create more data for it to process, think about it, otherwise they wouldn't exist. Your computer goes faster, but your operating system goes more memory hungry, so you need an even faster system. And this never ends. A typical operating system today contains easily 7 layers of abstraction eating up your processor cycles and guzzling up GBs of memory so that you can create a word document as you were creating 10 years ago. Computers only create problems for itself and we solve problems so that the computers can compute more of its own shit. All the computer is doing is being a virus and growing on its own feeding on our life forces.

This doesn't end here. It started with punched cards, then assembly language, and then C. Things seemed fine till then. But they wanted to make it look fancy, so some idiot came up with C++, lets write 4 classes, 2 virtual classes and 1 static class so that we can cross product two vectors... in a clean way. *cough cough bullshit cough cough*. They did not stop here, they made perl, php and python so that every thing can be done being lazy all the time, no need to write that amazing hash data structure or no need to write the string replacement code. No sir! we are a developing race, we have left such things behind.

4 cores of intel processors, 8 cores, 16, 1 GB of memory, 4 GB of memory, oooh ooooh bluray and SSD and omg this is like orgasm, SHUTUP man. You know, if instead all the geeks went ahead and made 1000 story buildings or time warp machines, or explore another planet, then it would have looked like we have advanced as a human race, damn, may be chicks would like geeks then, but nothing has happened. Just everything has gone digital and we have this internet containing videos of kittens and angry nerds like me cussing on a blog. If you really see, digital age has done nothing but replace dials with digital displays.

And yet I cannot live without computers, internet, C++ and python.

Get out from your couch and invent some real shit!

My Old Friend

2011-10-23T11:41:00.004+05:30

Guys check this out, my 15 years old 'Samurai Little Master' Famicom system (An 8 bit Nintendo system). And I have brought it back to life from its slumber.

I tried a lot of things to play my old NES games, emulators on laptop, on my PSP, and hacky java stuff on my PS3 but none of them gave the exact same feeling as the touch of my old controllers.

My controllers' start button was not working (apart from few others), which for you non-gamers means I cannot start any game but stare at its menu, LOL.

Man opening the controller revealed some truth. We are lied since our birth man. God, Super hot mermaids, Shrek, Krishna, Jesus and Sarah Michelle Gellar exist and that video game controllers were magic but it turns out its just a stupid ass circuit with a bunch of wires. Lies all lies!!!

In anycase, after settling down and with that revelation, I felt good about us humans that we are capable of making something so amazing as NES (or actually that we can copy NES and make cheaper and affordable famicom systems).

The super awesome engineer that I am, I opened it and fixed it. My Dad also got the assurance that I definitely learnt engineering at that college called triple eye something and he probably felt a bit proud, good for him and me.

All your's favourite was probably Mario, but my favourite was always Contra. Guns Blazing, aliens, thunder storm, explosions with screen tearing, random mercenaries firing bullets at random directions, etc. yeah totally my style.

You probably will think I am joking but ever since I got my nintendo back, extremely hot chicks have started stalking me. Weird, I wonder if it is the Nintendo they want. May be the Continuum Transfunctioner is inside it.

Well in any case, I am off to play some real good games, while you guys can play the exact same game over and over again which comes with different names, e.g. Call of Duty - world is at war and you didn't know, Call of Duty - Modern shit is good shit, Battlefield - we copy call of duty, Halo - counting polygons on screen is fun and we like yo money.

Body art on my arm, because I am a fan

Durga Pooja, Jabalpur, 2011

2011-10-11T20:24:00.010+05:30

I am going to show you around how Jabalpur looks during the festive time of Dussehra. You might remember a similar post I posted two years back, and here it is again. This time I got a bit more.

As discussed before, Jabalpur's Dussehra is craziness. Madhya Pradesh is quite possibly the only state which contains a perfect mix of people from every region in India. From that it derives that a lot of Bengali people are here as well to celebrate Dussehra. However that is only half the reason. Bengali or not, Dussehra is celebrated by every Hindu as well as Sikh over here.

Pandal created by one of the Punjabi celebrations

This does not comes from statistics so I could be wrong but after Kolkata, Jabalpur's Dussehra is considered biggest.

One very important reason could be that Jabalpur's a city considered blessed by certain Goddesses, all of whom according to Indian mythology originate from the single Goddess, Parvati. And Dussehra is a celebrated for one of the avatars of Parvati: Durga.

Each of these statues that you see are easily more than 10 feet tall, no questions asked. However, they are made completely green and are light, around just 6 people can lift it.

There are fairs that spread across some of the famous religious locations
and the prices at which you can buy some toys are unbelievable. Not the best finishing which is well acceptable at those rates.

Its probably not visible but that's a decently big hill and it is decorated with lights. They are showing a small play automated with levers and gears. This is really common here, these plays are shown every half and hour or something at some select places. Half a mile of the road is blocked because everyone wants to see the play.

It is actually quite unique that I am seeing the celebrations at exactly the same streets and corners since as many years as my age.

The amount of detail in the artwork is commendable. If you can see, apart from the statue of the Goddess attacking the monsters, the decoration around involves two women playing a trumpet. There is more if you look closely, people probably skim through all that.

This is a famous location where ever year a very expensive pandal is decorated. There are around 100 small statues around the pandal telling the story of Krishna's Childhood apart from the very well carved Durga's statue.

You know I am not even a religious person but I do enjoy this festival in this town. It really brings people together. More photographs follows:

Rahul Gandhi = Epic Fail

2011-08-26T20:24:00.005+05:30

And we actually believed that there is something called heredity after all these years of research and studying science. This is Gandhi's legacy we are talking about but little did we understand, science got defied. Not by scientology nor by the church, but by Indian politicians.

Look at him smiling ^

Rahul Gandhi's supremely unintelligent speech today proves that our government thinks they rule over fools. And regrettably sometimes I think that is true.

How carefully crafted speech targets Jan Lokpal bill to be converted into something which would'nt even take birth. An institution which will take ages to form and probably die out in the corners of some god forsaken political office. Also, that is enough time to stash the black money in other different banks of this world, may be buy a few islands in Dubai or something.

If it is to be made into a constitution, then why not start with the bill? Proceed forward, see it in action, experiment, learn from it, refine it and as it gets famous (infamous amongst political mammals) convert it into constitution. What is the logic behind not passing the bill while talking big words of democracy? And what is the logic behind me trying to think this with logic?

"Corruption is pervasive" is what he says, shamefully, in yo face! Oops, what does shame mean for the shameless? I did not watch the sabha but I bet every member of parliament was clapping after the speech. I am actually surprised Cambridge university failure was able to pronounce "Mahatma Gandhi NREGA or the Land Acquisition Bill" while giving some random example. He might have felt proud of himself when he was writing it though. He can write, right?

We all understand how amazingly desperate the government right now is. It is throwing everything it can towards Jan Lokpal Bill. For them it has become like a pin ball game. Keep taking chances and trying to hit that particular point no matter how many coins they have to put in the machine. No matter how shamefully bad they look in the game parlour with every other kid laughing at them, they are still doing it. This speech was yet another similar trial.

I go to office everyday looking at people, Indian, French, American, British, working hard, producing something beautiful out of their intellect. I wonder if the political mammals feel jealous of us, they probably wonder how it feels to live with an order of magnitude less guilt and sleep with satisfaction of valuable work earned with sweat and sometimes headache.

Mr. Anna Hazzare has brought us together, we joined hands because of him, and I request every Indian that no matter what happens, we keep holding hands for love and strength. I would say I (whoever I am) am proud I was alongside with you (whoever you were) in the rallies, and I think we are starting to understand that as long as we are together holding hands, we are strong as a fucking bull.

Get the most out of your Android

2011-06-19T13:34:00.009+05:30

So I wanted to buy an android phone since a long time, and I narrowed down to buy LG Optimus P500. This phone has all features a capable phone should have, and its pricetag fits in my won't buy-a-phone-costlier-than-10000rs rule. But this post is not really about this phone, it is mostly about efficient use of android, especially for an Indian audience.

(Keeping widgets and icons on the Desktop)

First things first. Get an internet plan on your phone, even if you think you are around wireless hubs all the time, sometimes we need information while standing on the streets. I will not recommend 3G (because not worth for the cost), get a gprs plan. I am using the Airtel 98rs plan which gives me 30 days validity with 2GB download limit on my prepaid number. 2GB for a month, is a lot for a phone, trust me!

Alright, lets assume we are all set, first lets talk about some of the non-internet applications that would be of great use.

1. OI File Manager: Just so that you can browse around files and have the flexibility of exploring the garbage that android keeps creating on your SD card, I found this file manager to be working pretty great. Came installed by default. It is simple and sweet, and is not heavy at all.

2. Notes: Again, a notes application should be easily accessible on your phone's desktop, and should allow you to jot in whatever you want instantly. I found the app named "Notes" being again very simple and fully functional.

3. Thinkfree office: Functionality of Microsoft Office (doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, txt) and Acrobat Reader (pdf) in one single application. I think enough said.

(Different supported file types)

(Reading a PDF file smoothly)

4. Dictionary: Well, an offline dictionary always helps when the girl sitting in front of you says something intelligent and you cannot respond because you just don't know the meaning of that one word. Well tell her that you need to process what she said, while frantically finding the meaning, and when you have it, you can start talking smart saying civil disobedience is such a menace in this nation and needs to be eradicated while maintaining... and more blah, to impress her.

5. QuickPic: This is an application which doesn't behave stupidly like Gallery which comes in your phone by default. Yes, gallery shows images and albums in 3D and what not, but it has very less options. It tries to create ablum of every image it finds on your phone including thumbnails and downloads all your picasa albums and you cannot even hide or delete albums that you don't want to see.

Basically just get QuickPic, it lets you select folders to look in for images. And gives you a simple UI to go through your clicked images and share them accross facebook or email or whatever. I havn't found anything simpler and better than QuickPic.

6. PicSay: Now if we wanna take pictures from our camera, it would be great to edit them and then share them accross, don't you think? PicSay is pretty much the application I have found which doesnt have irrelevant gimmicks and does its job perfectly well. You can transform the image (rotate, scale, crop, even shear) with ease, add text bubbles, put some filters like sepia tone etc. All in all, a brilliant app.

(UI lets you resize rotate and crop at the same time)

7. SketchBook Mobile: Ok, only if you like to draw, this is an app for you, also it will cost around 55rs or something, it is not free. The app is made by AutoDesk, so you instantly know that they have taken care of sketching workflow really well supporting brushes, pens and layers with working undo and redo functionality. I love it.

8. Aldiko: This is a fantastic book reader, and I love it, because unlike Amazon Kindle, you don't have to log into some server to read a book. In fact, you can download a lot of free books from it's market and best part is you can import epub books which you might have downloaded from elsewhere on your PC. Basically a beautiful looking book reader for someone who likes freedom of choice as well. I am not going to talk shit about Amazon Kindle's book reader, I am sure that is awesome too, just that I did not find it logical to log on to Amazon to read a book that's stored on my SD card.

(This app simply looks great)

9. Shootme: Some of us geeky ones like to take screenshot of our phone's display ones in a while when they run some crazy shit on their phone, or sometimes when a guy gets a crazy message from a girl, he would wanna share it on the internet for everyone to laugh upon. Yup, it works, and its fantastic. Screenshots on this blog post are taken with ShootMe.

10. Compass: Umm well, a small ancient navigation tool is handy when your GPS is not working right? This one is really up to you. The app is simply called "Compass"

Ohkay, now that we have covered some of the basic non-internet applications, the fun begins with the apps which connect to the internet:

1. TubeMate: I have always found it better that I download a youtube video I would see again and again. Also, if the network is slow, I don't wanna wait around for it to get buffered. Lets just download that youtube video as an MP4 on your SD card and see it later without hiccups. This smart app, actually can resume your inturrepted video downloads as well. I find this app really important over a slow data connection like GPRS.

2. Facebook, Gmail, Gtalk, Twitter: I don't want to describe. If for some reason you don't have these on your phone already, just get them.

3. Buxfer Mobile: This is a very handy application, you just paid a bill, you wanna record it instantly and split it accross a bunch of your friends. It is instantaneous and you don't have to go back to your computer at home and then try to remember who the hell paid for that last tequila shot?

4. tTorrent: Umm, well, because that 2GB never gets used fully from my data plan, I like to consume it a bit by humbly downloading small things over our favourite website called piratebay, lol.

5. ShopSavy: Honestly this is a fun app and I havn't yet found a good usage of this yet. You can scan barcodes of items and get information on that instantly. Well, its fun.

6. QRDroid: Lets you create and read QR codes for a piece of text, or a hyper link. Now use this only if you are into creating QR Codes, because ShopSavvy does a pretty good job of reading QR codes.

7. SwiFTP: is for creating an FTP server on your phone, so that you don't have to go through your collection of USB cables to connect your phone to your computer just to transfer a small file. Your computer can connect to your phone's FTP server and download that file instantly, with out the need of a cable. How cool is that?

(FTP Server is started on phone, and I am wirelessly connecting to that FTP server to browse files)

8. AndFTP: is an FTP client, nothing much to add. If you have a web server and you wanna upload or download files from it, well, there you go.

9. ConnectBot: is a fantastic SSH client for your android phone. I faced a problem of DNS name server errors, and I had to use IP addresses of the servers I connect to instead of using the name... but other than that, works pretty well.

10. BookMyShow: I have not used this application yet, but I find it quite amazing that you can book a movie ticket right from your cellphone. Bookmyshow does not include PVR so that sucks a bit and I am hopeless on PVR creating an app like this. But over all, I think bookmyshow should be a really good application if it does what it says on the market.

Few applications which seem necessary but you don't need them

1. IMDB: IMDB application does nothing, but open imdb.com for you and not display the address bar on top. Trust me you don't want to run an application to browse IMDB. Just bookmark imdb.com on your browser.

2. Google Docs: Opens docs.google.com on your phone and nothing more. Again just bookmark it on your browser.

3. Newspaper website applications: Again all they do is open their website. Just book mark em.

Now why I am ask you to bookmark them, is because you can have these bookmarks as shortcuts on your desktop, while they look like applications. So your immense hunger of filling up your 7 desktops with app icons is fulfilled while not installing crappy apps.

(These are not app icons, these are bookmarks)

Since we are talking about that, these are some of the best sites to bookmark:
Google News, NDTV Active, Imdb, Engadget, Tech2 (Indian tech news), Beemp3 (to download mp3).. for gamers: Kotaku, Gamespot.

Now lets see some of the crappy application you wanna stay away from.

1. Gallery: If you read above, you already know my complaints about this application. Its just so dumb. Gallery may be shows images and albums in 3D and what not, but it has very less options. It tries to create ablum of every image it finds on your phone including thumbnails and downloads all your picasa albums and you cannot even hide or delete albums that you don't want to see. Not under my recommendation.

2. Adobe Photoshop Express: As tempting as it may sound to install photoshop on your phone, trust me this application sucks balls. It will run in the background all the time, doesnt really have all those features you would expect, and the worst of all, you can edit only and only the pics you took from your camera. What if I wanna edit a Sketch I made, or a general case in which I wanna edit something I downloaded off the internet or some friend of mine emailed me? No Sir, you cannot! I think photoshop puts effort in restricting you only to your camera pictures. Royally sucky. Stay away from bloatware like these.

3. Google Docs: Now I am putting it in the list of "stay away" because it does nothing that the description of the app on the market says. It just opens docs.google.com and then you are limited to what you can do on docs.google.com. Don't waste your memory, don't install.

4. PicsIn: Ohkay, now here we have an image editor which provided has all the features like those of picsay... But it is supremely slow, installs two app icons I dont know for what godforsaken reason, runs a service in the background additionally running itself in the background, and asks you to register on their own random album website. I just know a bloatware when I see it.

Now some things about unlocking your phone. Well, you don't really need to unlock your phone. Unlcoking your phone means that you have the root password for your phone. And what does that mean? That means you can uninstall all those crappy stock applications which comes installed by default on your phone.

You heard it right, you cannot uninstall the stock applications, if your phone is not unlocked.

Lets see some of the stock applications installed on my phone.

1. BollywoodJi: The name of the application itself is so fucking lame, that I don't want to go into what it does. Ok, I guess I will go into what it does, it drops bollywood bullshit news about what celebrity is having anal sex with what another celebrity since they were together in some god forsaken event. You understand the gravity of the situation right? I CANNOT UNINSTALL THIS FUCKING APP FROM MY PHONE. And of cors it runs in the background, how about that?

2. Bollywood Music: Just look at the icon of this thing, fucked up lame stuff. I like hindi music but I will play my MP3 thank you very much if I want to listen to them.

3. Games: is a link to a crappy mobile game website. Wow! How amazing is that?

4. Now there are apps installed like Layer and PhotoFunia etc. which I havent used but have heard are quite good apps, but I dont want to use them.

Really man, these applications should be uninstallable like any other app I download off the market. These app run in the background and you can do nothing about it unless you root your phone and lose warranty. There are ways to hide them or stop them but ultimately they are unwanted stuff on my phone occupying my phone's internal memory.

Oh well, just can't get rid of bullshit from our life can we?

So all in all, the recommended apps for android are what I found are the ones someone should have at minimum. They are perfect for a regular everyday normal guy like me. You can go crazy on the market and get even more amazing free apps. That's it people, let me know if you found this post helpful.

India Wins World Cup 2011

2011-04-03T00:48:00.005+05:30

This is super crazy, it is a bit hard to grasp. Honestly, I was really oblivious and was not following cricket, and was resenting people thinking they are wasting their time. But when they beat Australia and then Pakistan, I wanted to watch the final.

During the last two overs of the match, I did not want to watch the match, because I was not being myself at that time, and was wondering if I would be able to hold myself together if India does it. This is happening after 28 years. I did not watch the ceremony because I went outside in the streets to scream out loud and give hugs to as many people I could. During few moments seeing people celebrating, I was feeling a bit emotional. I did not cry though, but I believe people who actually follow cricket like a religion must have cried a bit.

Then there were fireworks all over the country, I could feel it. I would hear it, I could smell gun powder at every street. And while seeing the fireworks, I felt really proud.

We are world champions guys. Can you believe that?

ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 Official Theme Song

2011-03-10T10:19:00.004+05:30

The Official ICC 2011 World Cup Song is made by India and is beyond a level of suckiness. What matters here is that this song is representing the whole India at an international stage and I guarantee you that India is much much better than this.

I am not saying that the song should be something western, e.g. some stupid rap or some electronic music. No, it should definitely be something India centric, something which reflects the rich culture and variety of classical instruments and dance. It could have been a collection of everything India is known for and is good about. Something, which "Mile sur mera tumhara" does fantastically. It is really shameful for our current generation that they came up with this crap when 20 years ago someone made an amazing video like "Mile Sur Mera Tumhara".

If you are looking for a fast song, it has been done before. Afro Asian Games 2003 theme song was made by Indian dudes and you should listen to that. It has a wide variety of Indian themes. Flute, tabla , raga, even punjabi beats arrive from time to time. They even included some African themes in middle because the games were "Afro Asian games". Brilliant piece of music. Something brilliant like this should be expected when you have to make something at an international level.

AR Rahman's CWG theme song was pretty awesome, but I would say that if you argue that the song was too western, I would agree with you, but it is still worth mentioning. It is pretty good.

The ICC official song is really really bad. Hey, bad songs are made from time to time, it is no big deal, but I will again stress that the whole world is listening to this... really bad for our self esteem. It could have been something like what Euphoria makes, I am not a fan of Euphoria but they make zealous songs and if that is what was expected for a cricket video, then be it Euphoria, it would have turned out much better. It could even have been something like AR Rahman's Chale Chalo from Lagaan.

The ICC 2011 song is a street side crappy slang bullshit, and I know that this is not India, it is better than that in many ways. Don't give me the regular reply that I should not resent my own country and that I should know where I come from. You know what? I perfectly know where I come from, I completely understand and that is why I think this song is a mistake. Indians are known for not accepting their mistakes and that is why I see that some people will actually defend this song while hating it. I will end this post by quoting 2 of many comments from the youtube video which did not sound like trolls:

"After such wonderful compositions for movies like Kal Ho Naa Ho and Taare Zameen Par, Shankar Ehsaan Loy come up with this for the World Cup.
If this is not a joke,then it is the biggest embarassment for India at the international stage.Even A R Rahman's song for CWG was better."

"not in really Indian standards , cos India is a well known country in the world when we talk about Music either Classical or Pop type. but this is not really in good standard i expected much than this"

Time Pass Artwork at Office #2

2011-02-11T03:12:00.008+05:30

Most of these are made with a wacom tablet in my free time in the office.

A tropical thing. Sunset kinda location.

First Person Shooter!

My favourite movie this year no doubt was "The Social Network"

KungFu Panda 2 will be awesome (this artwork is made by me and is not dreamworks asset)

Everyone in the department went to the German Pub one night, was a lot of fun!

Antoine Dodson is gonna find you!

We are FX Challengers

This is typically what goes on in Star Trek.

I became a really big fan of Pendulum... these guys are amazing and I am looking forward to their concert

Tried to make caricatures of fellow colleagues

Ok this is not time-pass artwork. This was the final painting I did in our art class

Thats all guys, thanks for checking them out :)

My New Gadget is so rad!

2011-02-02T10:17:00.005+05:30

Hey guys, check it out, I decided that I will buy myself a pretty advanced thing right here so that if I roll with it, people will think, that guy is so handsome and amazing. So when I saw this device I was like, Oh snap, this is the gadget thing I need.

Behold, the Nintendo GameBoy Color. Man, this thing is so advanced, it has a screen and some buttons in it. I mean most things have screen in it, for example my motorcycle over here.

But there's no color on that screen of that odometer, its just black and white. Also it has only two buttons, which are to start the bike and other one to honk.

Anyway, the games come in these advanced looking cartridges with circuits and all. I am playing this game called "Metal Gear Solid" in it, and I gotta tell you, this game is the shit man. Look at the graphics.

I bought the gameboy and the game, not because I was getting them for a total of 5$, but because I appreciate next generation technology. That's how thoughtful and attractive-to-the-ladies I am.

I finished Lost and I liked it

2010-09-12T23:31:00.008+05:30

I finally did it, I finished the Lost series some time back and I am glad to write about it. One thing is for sure about Lost, it's very entertaining and keeps you with it. There are many questions left unsaid which sucks, and IMHO I believe this is what Lost's creation must have went through:

!!severe spoilers marked in red!!

Season 1: "We have to make a show people, present some ideas, this boardmeeting better not go waste", One of the dude just saw Tom Hank's Castaway and shoots that idea in the air shamefully. Well, naturally that idea wasn't bad at all and crew decided we will call it 'LOST'. "We will show plane crash and let people know how horrible it can be to stay away from our perfect lives in tall buildings". They decide to put a one or two mysteries, which they can decide later in it to keep the audience hooked up. Meanwhile, there is a quiet guy who works on the characters' backgrounds and his job is considered least exciting and boring. He has the smallest cubicle and he is a shy type. Chicks don't like him.

Season 2: Lost gets more reception. "Oooh oh, we gotta put more mystery man! shove more mysteries in there". At this point, the authors started taking drugs to come up with the story. "Put more people on this island, just put a shitload of people inside this island, but don't show them yet". Meanwhile, the quiet man is working on the characters' backgrounds.

Season 3: "Oh crap, not getting any good ideas, just... just... fuck, keep the fucking episodes going, forget about the numbers or the hatch if you cannot make anything out of them, just make new mysteries".

Season 4: "Oh man, this is not good, people are making fun now, we gotta give them something, more mysteries won't help. Oh I know, lets show flash-forwards! Proof that they do get off that island! FUCK YES, am I good or am I good?"

Season 5: "Daddy daddy, please put time travel on the island too", "No son, go to your room, let Daddy work!", "Sir, he is right, we have fucked everything up, might as well put time travel in there, we might not get canceled by channel for making rubbish". "Alright Time travel! Woohoo!" After a while, "So you wanna send them back to the world, you sure? Should we do that?... What do you mean we already did?... When? When did we decide on that?... Crap, bring them back, what were you thinking? we gotta keep this shit running for one more season".

Season 6: "Alright people, welcome to the special board meeting, we have fucked everything up real bad, we have fucked it up so bad, that we aint got no chance to make no sense. So the sales guys have decided to say in the press conference that Lost is all about characters background story and not about the mysteries. Which is a relief since I don't believe you guys can solve any of the mysteries you created yourselves. Hey character guy, yeah you, the small cubicle guy.., you are up, we give you a cabin with a nice view, come up with good stuff". He is not the simple type anymore, Chicks like him now. "Rest of you guys, please I beg you, don't mess this shit up more".

Nevertheless I think that it was thoroughly entertaining. Looking back I really had some of my favorite mysteries and some favorite characters from the show. Season 1 presented this mystery about numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42, being unlucky and having a deep connection with the island. Man, I was totally stoked on this one and honestly speaking, this was the very reason I wanted to watch this show. One of the FFFFFFUUUUUUUUU moments was when Sayeed hears about Rosseau's transmission and she say's that the transmission originally had the numbers repeating in them. I shit brix listening to this.

Second mystery which I got crazy about was 'The Hatch', dude, think about it, its a computer in which you have to press a button every 108 minutes or the world will get destroyed. Man, I got hooked up to Lost after the end of season 1. I did not have this much respect for any other mystery that lost created because later it was becoming tad lazy that they are just raising more questions instead of answering previous ones.

My favorite character would be John Locke, I really respected that character and his background story was incredibly rich with raw emotions. John Locke was a broken man and regained his spirit after coming to the island. What I really liked about this character was that he was a believer, understood all along that the island is special and always had the curiosity to know about things.

It was a shame that John Locke character was cut short and his glory went into vain. I believe they did it because John Locke was stealing the show, everyone was like, this dude is the man, he knows shit and way awesomer than the whinny doctor guy. Since the show wanted the Jack guy to be the main hero of the series, they just had to cut John's character in the middle so that they can glorify Jack in the end... this sucked for me. If they could have kept John going on, I bet less people would have died in the show. Honestly I did not like the Jack character at all because he was shown way too perfect and his problems in life were really shallow, whenever I saw him sad, I felt like telling him, "Get over it you whinny idiot".

The character I hated was Juliet. For the main reason that she was way too manipulative and consistently played with people's emotions. Ohkay, may be for the greater good, but there is a limit. Apart from that I think the actress playing her made her look worse than she already was. The actress was not good at all, and she would give this arrogant and full of attitude look at all possible times. I may be in denial but possibly I hated that actress more than that character, but I will go with just hating the character.

Hugo and Sawyer were my favorite buddy characters, I mean, I would like them as my friends. Both of them were really funny and especially sawyer's attitude was just crazy awesome!

The character I had most sympathy for would be Desmond, he was simply an amazing guy, accepted the facts, believed in what's going on, and always ready to help people. He was like one of those side-kick supporting characters who do a lot but the thunder is stolen by the hero. E.g. I respected the Samwise Gamji character much more than the sissy Mr. Frodo. Also, from Indian mythology Ramayana, I liked Hanuman much more than Ram. Problem is, these guys are credited much less than what they have done in the story. Desmond sort of is similar.

I furiously hated the Jacob guy and, call me evil, but I was with the Man in Black all along. When they showed the past story of Jacob and MIB, I felt his mom did really bad things to them. Kept them concealed from the world without possibly knowing the truth herself. She brainwashed the Jacob guy well but thank god not MIB. The way story was portrayed, I would say, MIB was not bad at all, he never was, he just wanted to go out and explore, and that is where the island gave me a feeling that it is nothing but a religion. Think about it, the show was about religions stopping us from experimenting and keeping us in dark, in constraint of rules, so that we don't become bad if we go out. I don't know if the show makers realize this, but to me it felt like, they showed that religion won over science in the end. I am not going into that debate but Lost's end might look like 'Good won over Evil', but the hidden meaning was 'Religion won over everything'.

I have written quite a lot which proves how much I was interested in the show and I wish to see it again. I want to buy the blurays of all lost seasons so that I can see it all over again in HD. That will be a treat to myself. Let me know what you think about the show.

Inception is the next matrix

2010-07-18T18:13:00.007+05:30

After watching a good number of cliche'd hollywood movies since a number of months, I was not excited at all when Ranta told me about Inception and that he was going to watch it the other day and if I wanted to see it. But when I remembered the trailer I saw months before, I felt it may be is a good decision to watch it.

The concept of the movie is nothing new. (POSSIBLE SPOILER START) The idea that what is around you may not be real (POSSIBLE SPOILER END) has been tried several times with many successful as well as unsuccessful movies. (POSSIBLE SPOILER START) The key point of controlling dreams in this movie (POSSIBLE SPOILER END) especially has been tried before too in movies as well as Video Games.

However Inception still excels. Why?

I don't know if it was the complex plot, or the really good soundtrack, or the hype train (which I did not climb since I just didn't know about it), or was it that it was just technically brilliant, but I found the movie very good, satisfying and most importantly thought provoking. There have been questions about its unnecessary action packed hollywood sausage mixture, but I think it is challenging for a director to satisfy both the casual movie watchers (who don't understand the USP of the movie) as well as the obnoxious critics whom I am typically scared to talk to. Slow-mo, guns, car chases and explosions were probably not necessary, I honestly don't know, but I did not find them redundant or hurting the gist of the movie at all. One complaint is that (POSSIBLE SPOILER START) those bending buildings have been over used in its promotions when it has no importance in the whole movie start to end, the movie has everything except anything around those bending buildings, (POSSIBLE SPOILER END) and this can/may be considered misleading. Fortunately the movie is awesome, so the complaint is diminished :)

It is not difficult to understand the movie if you keep up with it, best part is that the movie keeps telling you what is happening, most confusions are instantly answered by the characters. The mere feeling that if you are (STRONG SPOILERS START) dreaming, you are faster, and if you dream inside a dream, you go faster and faster and that 10 hours can become a decade in your deep dreaming, and that if that deep dream is a nightmare, would you risk going there and be stuck for 10 years, (STRONG SPOILERS END) itself is ecstatic and screws your brain. It is the next matrix because the movie and the concept are two different things, and Chris Nolan (the director I did not cared about before) has weaved them so awesomely that people will keep asking questions, suggest them to others and will always be ready for Inception II.

Time Pass Artwork at Office

2010-06-16T15:24:00.004+05:30

On the writing pad, during build and code fetch wait times, or simply when I was bored--

With respect for Kratos, The God of War (click to see actual size):

I saw this somewhere, felt like drawing it:

Hairs are roots:

For Cricket Fanatics:

I liked Road Movie a lot:

On the white board --

Photoshop CS5 Content Aware Awesomeness

2010-05-15T15:32:00.006+05:30

Ohkay, so I got my hands on this cool iMac and Photoshop CS5 was finally available too, so I gave it a try. Apart from touching them up in the regular ways, I tried the content aware thing too! Check it out.

I went to this trip some days back in Bangalore and my friends took some pictures, example one of these below, the electrical lines are quite a distraction...

Yeah, if I don't want them, they gotta go. There was a guy in the grasses, he gotta hide too!

Now check out that bozo trying to show off riding that bicycle in front of a beautiful cottage, thinks he is a hero...

BAM!!! He is fucking gone! A picture of only the cottage left *. He is not a part of the system. Note that I fixed the broken plaster on the walls too!

Ok, so following picture, the idiots on the road annoy you? No big deal...

Yeah, they are gone, as I said, no big deal.

Now these two images are nice,

Why not put them together and let Content Aware Fill take care of the stitching in between?

Hmmm, so I really like the following picture, but that IGN.com watermark is pissing me off!

Take that bitch! Prince is kicked out of Persia too

So why are video games always about violence?

Yeah remove all elements of violence *

Hope you guys liked them. Disclaimer that the ones marked (*) needed a little more work. All of this was very much possible in earlier versions of Photoshop too, but what's amazing here is the ease. Photoshop will be doing most of the stuff.

I played God of War III and ...

2010-03-17T13:15:00.006+05:30

IPhone's Brushes App is great!

2010-02-06T17:59:00.007+05:30

Amal has an IPhone and he just bought this software in it for 5$ only called Brushes. After using this, I gotta tell you, IPhone's touch screen is quite responsive. I have used those 1 lac rupees Window's Tablets and tried drawing on them, its not a very good experience mostly because the response time of the touch is so low, that the drawing gets spoilt.

The Brushes app is really nice, lets you choose brushes, colors, even layers seems basic but is quite powerful. I tried drawing crap and over time I got used to. It is fun :)

Update: Just made this one...

3 Idiots could have been so much better

2010-01-07T01:29:00.005+05:30

This movie, which 'was' meant for youngsters, has been severely contorted to suit the general audience.

Honestly speaking if you are keeping this movie in the segment of funny and stupid movies like Awara Pagal Diwana or Hera Pheri then it is good!... because it was quite funny and quite idiotic as the title suggests! Unfortunately, I don't think, that is the direction in which the makers wanted it to be.

No wonder Chetan Bhagat is a bit pissed. He is shouting credits this, script that,.. he is not able to convey his point proper (yeah why is that Chetan? just say it!) that the movie is not good and creates a wrong impression of his book. I have not read the book, don't know if its good or bad, I aint no fan of his either, have been making fun of him on twitter... whatever, what am sayin is, if he wrote it for young people (right?) and if the movie is fully kiddish, then surely he is not comfortable with this movie.

The judgment is yours. You can see this movie with mom, dad, uncle, aunty and your super young cousins. Its a proper family movie. Its like that Koi Mil Gaya or Tare Zameen Par movie. It felt like that all the time. FYI I liked both BUT in the context that both of them were meant to be family movies.

Rock on movie had a much entertaining as well as serious way of telling us, more or less, the same message this movie has.

My point is, this movie could have been made so much better just with a little intensity, seriousness and reality. This whole movie is joke after joke. By my personal experience (or anyone's for that matter), I know it was not always fuuuun time with friends in college. There were heated arguments, proper fights from time to time. This movie is making it look like only clowns go to college. It's just unnatural. YES, again, making it the-way-it-is makes it a family movie (thus more audience). But a little intensity from Gulaal kind of movies could have made this a brilliant piece of work.

Above are my concrete thoughts. But I am not able to decide the following:

May be its for the good? Because, of course, becoming a family movie, it is accessible to the parents who really need to see the message. Or may be, I can also go and say, this movie is hypocritic, as it asks you to follow excellence but it itself followed success by applying methods of comedy movie rule book. What do you say?

Check out Lady ORB

2009-11-18T16:19:00.003+05:30

There was a T shirt painting event at da office, and white tshirt with the some paint and brush was given to us. Then they said, you can keep the shirt and there is no theme, and I was like, wateva, I'll do wata wannnnn. Thus I created Lady ORB. Lady ORB, is super sexy and can play guitar. This tshirt is mine now, its totally my shirt.

I did not get any prize :(. I don't think anyone can appreciate this. Never drew on a tshirt ever, good experience. Then people started roaming around. Everyone who came near my shirt was like "Wut? wat iz dis lulz, its crazy, haz 2 b Shiben's", weiredness at its ness :D

(Web Comic #5) Ding Dong

2009-11-01T13:07:00.002+05:30

To, The chatspeak haters club on the internet

2009-10-24T13:56:00.006+05:30

This is to all the bozos who think that they are much full of intelligence, consider chatspeak as a retard's teminology and care about their younger generation that they will start sucking in grammar.

So... Wat iz wrong in dis sentence? Grammar FAIL, rite? Lets talk.

Every place has its culture, behaviour, a shape, ascent. These entities define these places, it brings a sense of heritage to the place. And in the same lines I think that internet being a place, should also have its culture. Hey, you cannot sit and decide it one fine afternoon, it just builds up by itself. And thus, OMG u c wat has been built up, LuLz!!111. Not saying that chatspeak was the best thing that happened to the internet, but every culture has its problems. I am not very proud about a number of things of my nation's culture, my mother tongue has issues, my institute's culture had few jerks, but I respect them, I relish them, proud of them! It's my heritage!

YES its difficult to understand it first, but that's what defines it. When you are able to understand and when you write chatspeak, you feel like merging in the internet society. And not to forget, you as an individual, can always go about writing proper grammar english, like I am writing in this post. I, for one, think that chatspeak is awesome! I sometimes like to write it that way, and will continue to write it that way whenever I feel like, and you artards can't do shit about it. Suck it up.

Not to mention chatspeak is quicker to write! And seeing that whatever we read or write on the internet is mostly garbage, why waste your time writing full words? Yes, I knowz adding a 'z' after a word rather makes it longer, but other than those few anomalies, most of the words in chatspeak are shorter versions of oh-so-holy-proper-grammar's version. Also, its funny to read as well too sometimes.

And my excessive usage of internet does not affect my vocabulary at all! We humans are capable of adaptation and understanding many languages/ascents. When I have to write formal emails, I automatically follow grammar and I don't lose it. Moreover many words from different cultures/languages are included in the oxford English dictionary, why not a few from chatspeak?

And seriously, who, in the world, has ever given a fuck about the upcoming generation of your unborns? Fine, few of you care, but, there's your mother tongue, which affects your pronunciation of english, there are bad teachers, local influences, blame them? but, "nooooooooo!! internet is the culprit! Ruining our society and bringing war to this world." Lets face it, you were new in town, got flamed with chatspeak, and now you just want some attention, because no one really wants to hear your shit.

wateva, wateva, i'll do wat i wan! roflz, lulz!!111 omg wtf? imho dis shit doesnt make sense

IGG Bash was sweetness

2009-10-12T14:53:00.005+05:30

Last to last weekend, At Lionhart4xtreme (Gagan)'s house in Nagpur, Reeteshomatic (Reetesh) from Hyderabad, scorpio_gamer (Neeraj) from Chennai and ORB (Shiben) from Bangalore, gathered for some gaming awesomesauce of 2 days. Dude invited us for some gaming time on his 46" HDTV with all possible consoles. Reetesh and Neeraj also got some of their carriable rig, so the total hardware there was: PS3 with 4 controllers, 360 with 5 controllers, Wii with 3 controllers, 2 Nintendo DS, 3 PSPs. I couldn't get my stuff coz my visit to nagpur was uncertain till last moment. Anyway, check out the pics of craziness :)

Gagan's game collection

The gaming room

he sez, the gaming room was a bar before

4 player halo3 splitscreen

Gaming and booz go together so well

gagan's hotel

Little big planet 4 player co-op

Sleepy, but wont give up

Gears of war 2 horde mode

Lunch and booz (from left: Ashish, Reetesh, Amit, Neeraj, Shiben, Gagan)

All enjoying, so is me, bottoms uping a white wine.. hehe it wasnt a full bottle of course

they are bz playing fifa, so i m playing wario ware on nintendo ds

ok now, 4 player motorstorm splitscreen, rox!!!

Wooooohoooooooooo!!!!

pav bhaji

IGG members (btw, v r Indian Gamers Guild, visit here)

Yeah! thats what I am talking about party people!!!

Full album here. Had a great time, thanks man Gagan 4 inviting us and thank you ashu, reetesh, neeraj, amit for the pureness. I will also invite you guys sometime for an IGG bash

Durga Pooja, Jabalpur, 2009

2009-10-08T16:24:00.007+05:30

Durga Pooja in Jabalpur is seriously serious. The count of pandals all over the city is incredible and the quality of artwork is brilliant. You will just keep looking at the small small details the artists work on. Easily second best Durga Pooja after Kolkata hands down. I was blessed to go home (jabalpur) during dussehra this time around. Some pics:

The wish to be unique is visible in many statues. Single color, marble sort of look given to the whole setup:
Goddess on lotus (giving the illusion of) floating on water.
Pandal entrance. See the crowd. Perfect for pick pockets. But you know what? I havn't heard any such cases, people really have faith during the celebration.
Some like to go unconventional, and try to depict a war scene mixing with the traditional stances
Some organizers maintain consistency. For e.g., the Pooja at telegraph are known for angry face goddess Durga (since my childhood, thats arnd 25yrs, they have remained consistent)
This is one of the small pandals, believe me
See the size of the following statue Some times, just watching the pandals gives the fillAgain, compare the size of the statue with the person standing in front. Truly divine.Check out the complete album here

Bird Pooping problem [pyaj]

2009-09-08T18:36:00.002+05:30

Recently birds are pooping over innocent bystanders on the road riding their Honda City, Audi or expensive racer bikes. This kind of havoc is giving mental trauma to these simple people on the streets. Upon endless number of complaints, authorities have finally shown a ray of hope as they said they are working on a solution. Recently the municipality chief said that they will cut down the trees of Bangalore to remove the habitat of birds, which in turn will remove the birds. This of course is the most straight forward way to go.

However, industrialists see an opportunity of business here, and are stalling authorities by saying that they can remove the birds without cutting down the trees. Their business claims that they can catch the birds, put them in cages, and sell them with high price point. Even though their main motive is business, they claim, this will improve prople's buying power as all of them would really like to have birds closed in cages. Since rich people have a lot of money and time to waste, it will feed into the countries economy.

This of course stirred up the environmentalists, as catching birds and caging them is not a natural way to get rid of them. Cutting down trees will incidently remove the birds from a city of peaceful, simple and calm people. As nature plays its roles, destroying birds habitat will remove the birds too. The natural way to go according to the environmentalists.

Although along with all the debate going on with the big bodies, it is finally the innocent people who suffer at the end, who just want to live their lives peacefully inside an AC'ed office, sipping coffee, calling various customer care centers and talking to peers about their credit cards and taxes.

Disclaimer: Above all is arbitrary imposition of text, absolutely meaningless, is not supposed to attack anything/one. However, definitely has a deep meaning based on our society and media.

PS2 added to my Rig, sweetness

2009-06-21T18:49:00.005+05:30

And thus I become SONY Complete, Playstation2 as you know, was the best console ever created, and after ten years it still has its charm. I have all Sony Consoles now (all of these three can play PlayStation One too, but they cannot play each other).
Kept Just beside my PS3, PS2 feels proud among it's homies
Thus you can see the deal on the table :D
And you guessed it right, the first game I am playing on it is God of War, the amazing Kratos's adventure. Man seriously, this game is so fucking awesome, its epic. I mean no wonder it made PS2 such a huge seller (it still is a huge seller). Note that most games support widescreen so it doesnt look flat on a widescreen TV (not HD though).
Kratos about to enter the Pandora's temple
Kratos between circulating blades trap
Also I tried this game called Black, man good graphics cramped in such an old hardware
Of course GTA games too. This is Liberty City Stories.
PS2 is of the same size of your typical DVD drives in your computers. Its a modded one and I already have around 25 games for it :D. OK let me get back to God of War :)

And thus she gets vectorized!

2009-05-11T23:41:00.004+05:30

So I made a sketch long back, but she did not have colors, she looked very dull, and I am too lazy to sit with water and acrylic colors to fill her up. Thus, recently after getting comfortable with Adobe Illustrator, I could vectorize her! That is right, Illustrator (and Adobe Flash as well) can create paths and curves out of a raster image (too bad I didn't know). Anyway, after getting the curves, you can do a lot of things, and I gave her some colors. Rest speaks the image (click to see ):

My New Orange, Yamaha FZ16

2009-02-11T12:34:00.005+05:30

I saw that bike for the first time, I was like, I want that thang! I mean, did you see that? This bike is original man, fucking awesome. Every other bike copies something from some other bike. This is original stuff and this color, flaming orange, is killer. Its almost like, if ghost rider will ride a sports bike, he will ride this one man! He wont ride any other ghetto bike.
Its rear fat tyre is bliss to the eyes! Fat tyre on a bike looks fantastic. Even R15 doesnt have such a fat tyre, hell, even Maruti 800 aint got such fat tyres man. Its like when I overtake some dude, he will be like, "Sonova-bh, what the faaak is that?".
Talking about some technology shit, it got this mono suspension uh thing, which is supposed to be very comfortable. Check out the exhaust! Looks like a lazer gun. And a making-hulk-look-like-a-mouse headlight. It got this nice LCD display too dawg, shows some shit.
It got some serious kick man. Almost like, if I keep it vertical and fire it up at first gear, I can go to moon. This bike so advanced looking, that if I meet aliens, they will get scared since they'll think humans are advanced species.
I will put more updates about my bike. I luv it man :D its special.

What is that in my room? WTF!

2008-12-28T16:19:00.003+05:30

Now few days back this was my room like.
But recently it became like this. And that white thing is a Xbox360, yeah. Wait, WHAT? WTF did I say? OMG What the fuk is that? Thats a x-fucking-box 360! what the fk is that doing in my room?
So my office during winter has shutdown period. The console would have been waste for this whole period, so I brought it home, LOL.

That is Gears of War 2 on my widescreen. Its a killer!
Some GTA4 too
And I am not able to believe this, but I am actually playing HALO3 right now.
I wanted to play this game since ages man.
The game for which I wanted to do an internship in Microsoft.
So all in all I have the following games for the holidays
That includes GTA4, Gears of War 2 and Halo3... WTF!
So, these are the consoles I play my games on these days (apart from PC)
Happy holidays and Happy New Year guys!

I own awesomeness, HDTV + PS3 = awesomeness

2008-11-06T11:45:00.006+05:30

Alright I spent a lot but lets leave that and chk the shit out. This is a Samsung 26" HDTV with a native (maximum) resolution of 1360x768 (It can support up to 720p). It's connectivity is great! Connects to all kinds of stuff, even has a VGA input for PC.

And now comes the real thing = Da PS3!!1 The PS3 is connected to my HDTV with an HDMI cable (which I had to buy since PS3 doesn't include in its box). That's pure digital connection to run it in its full glory.

When I hooked it up, turns out my HDTV supports 1080p as well, lol! (Well its max resolution is still 1360x768 but it can support an input of 1920x1080 and filters it to 1360x768)
Bought 2 games to begin with. Heavenly Sword, that's a God of War style game, only with a sexy female as the main protagonist. And Ratchet and Clank - Quest for Booty, it was cheap and Ratchet Clank games are good I have heard since ages. Later I got Resistance too.

That's Ratchet and Clank game, a typical platformer like Daxter (PSP) or Psychonauts (PC) if you have played. Almost looks like an animated movie, this is not even a good looking stage.
Following is Heavenly Sword, this game is awesome and crazy.
The regions looks amazing! simply amazing!And there is this one stage, where you have to kill 500 enemies out of the 2000 rushing towards you. Epic-er than 300? (the lines that you see are because of the Digital camera)
This is another game called Resistance, quite a nice first person shooter game.

Of course the PS3 can play VCDs, mp3 CDs, DVD movies and BluRay movies, lets see if I can find some movie rental shops (for BluRay it seems difficult though).It is supposed to play typical audio and video files as well but I have not tried.

The PS3 connects to my PSP as well, and gives the control wirelessly over to the PSP. You can see the menu of the PS3 on your PSP screen, play songs, videos, internet etc.. The games definitely don't work in this mode. Dont really know the use of this for now.

The awesome controller! So the Indian version is still the old version (40GB), so this is just the six-axis controller without dual shock which is a bummer but if it doesn't exist nothing can be done. Heavenly Sword has some awesome areas where you have to shoot arrows and then the arrow is controlled by motion of the controller.

I have not even tried its online capabilities. It supports built in wireless. Ethernet port is also there. There is PlayStation store and shit, download trailers and stuff, only heard about these things for now. I desperately need an internet connection!

I got Resistance as well, Will get Resistance 2 and Need for Speed Undercover next. My friend (who has a ps3 too) already has GTA4, Drake's Fortune, Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Burnout Paradise, will borrow them from him.

New awesome upcoming PC games

2008-09-04T00:04:00.003+05:30

This end of the year line up of games is huge. 2007 sure kicked ass but 2008 is gonna do that even better. I am talking only about PC games, let alone considering all platforms. Lets take a look at the major ones which are bound to be pure awesome, releasing in or around november (It is possible that some of these releases can get shifted to next year).

Grand Theft Auto IV (Open World Sandbox)
Reference: All GTA games have been great.
Why will be awesome? Didn't you ever think... ok, GTA is good, but if it looked a little better it would have been so much better. Well now, there you go. GTAIV is truly next gen. And not only that, the city is your favourite 'Liberty City' with interactive elements increased. Its shooting has also been worked upon well and it doesnt feel like a turd as it felt in older GTA games. GTAIV had been sold like crazy on consoles with every game website giving it 10/10 rating (that doesnt happen in million years) and its heading to PC.. Isaac Awesomo!

Far Cry 2 (Open World FPS)
Reference: FarCry's awesomeness is awesome.
Why will be awesome? FC2 is not going to be in a green beautiful tropical island but in a hot african village sorta place. It is supposed to be truly open ended, there is only 1 level in the whole game, 1 single huge level. There is only one objective given to you in the begining which you have to accomplish in whichever way you can.

Crysis Warhead (FPS)
Reference: Last year's most beautiful game Crysis and 2004's hit FarCry.
Why will be awesome? Mainly because its based on the same revolutionary engine Crysis was based on: Cryengine2. Also because Crysis Warhead is claiming that its visuals will be similar but performance will be much better.

Prince of Persia (Open World Action Adventure)
Reference: Prince of persia sands of time, warrior within, two thrones
Why will be awesome? Its an altogether fresh game and not a sequel. We all remember the great level design of old prince of persia games, but this time there are 3 main features. First of all its open world, developers claim you can follow any path to reach your destination, second, combat is 1 on 1 with enemies, enemies are mostly big ones i.e. mini-bosses. Third that it's visuals are artistic, non photorealistic. Just see the fantastic abstraction in the screenshot.

Need for Speed Undercover (Racing)
Reference: NFS games (except ProStreet) have been rocking!
Why will be awesome? NFSUC is going back to its roots of telling a stylish blockbuster story like in NFSMW or NFSC etc. and ditch the simulation style racing of NFSPS. Best part is, have you seen Die Hard 4.0? rmr Maggie Q? She is the NFS girl this season! :O

Left 4 Dead (FPS)
Reference: Its by Valve (makers of Half Life games, Portal etc.)
Why will be awesome? L4D is a 4 player Co-op (play the whole game co-operatively with total 4 players) zombie shooter. You are trapped in a city full of zombies and you have to escape sticking together. Its by Valve, so it will be good anyway.

Project Origin (Horror FPS)
Reference: FEAR
Why will be awesome? Project Origin is sequel of FEAR... and FEAR was the most scary game I have ever played. Honestly, it was scarier than some best horror movies I have seen, since in a game, you are inside the fking atmosphere :O. And thus, its sequel is not a miss.

Mirror's Edge (First Person Action Adventure)
Reference:
Why will be awesome? You see the genre name? Thats a genre this game is going to create. We all have played action adventure games in 3rd person mode (Prince of persia, Tomb Raider etc.) but how about playing them in 1st person mode? No one has done this before, and thats the reason this game is gonna rock.

Tomb Raider Underworld (Action Adventure)
Reference: Tomb Raider games are adventorous and Lara Croft is a dream of every guy out there.
Why will be awesome? Well its a new Lara Croft's adventure. We dont get to be the part of her adventure every now and then you know. Secondly, every Tomb Raider game in the past have been a hit since gamers always wanted to see how Lara looks in the upcoming generation graphics. TRU is supposed to have killer visuals and we all are waiting to have a look at how sexy she is created this time.

Battlefield Heroes (FPS)
Reference: Remember all the multiplayer hours you had fun with the battlefield games?
Why will be awesome? Well 2 reasons, first of all its a cartoon shooter i.e. it looks are similar to those of an animated movie. A good multiplayer military shooter which the battlefield series is always good at. And that its a free game! :O

Call of Duty 5 - World at War (FPS)
Reference: Of course all the previous 4 call of duty in which none of them were flawed.
Why will be awesome? The related work speaks why this will be entertaining too. And oh wait, this call of duty game is going to have 4 player Co-op! omg!

Mercenaries 2 - World in Flames (Open World 3PS)
Reference: Similar to Battlefield games
Why will be awesome? Well, hearing the game's name I was not that excited but seeing the trailor I was thrilled. It is a (sorta) military shooter with 2 player Co-op. The game has just too much explosions. (Its out already!)

Legendary (FPS)
Reference:
Why will be awesome? A man opens a pandora box kept in meuseum and it unleashes monsters on the planet... ohkay, thats a cliche, how many times will games use that same story again and again? BUT when you will see the trailor, you will see how monstorous those monsters are, how destructive they are. There was a monster larger than buildings made out of the debri of fallen houses, cars and buildings; cars flying, buildings crumbling down, flying creatures tearing humans apart, Man! Its a total apocalyptic game! Never have I seen disaster shown in such vivid manner in a game. Has to be played!

Prototype (Open World Action Adventure)
Reference:
Why will be awesome? You will be a character who has the abilities to copy the appearances of anyone around (thus hide very easily) and you have special destructive abilities, and you are left open in a open world city. Do what-the-fk-ever you want now. I see that evil smile coming on your face

me doesnt plays RTS and RPG games, otherwise I would have written about
Command and Conquer Red Alert 3, Diablo 3, Fallout 3, Spore

Some more interesting games to look forward to:
Borderlands, Cryostasis, Burnout Paradise, Guitar Hero 4, Pure, Necrovision, Saints Row 2

The Last Guy - Awesome Funny Trailor

2008-08-29T19:37:00.007+05:30

"The Last Guy" is a Playstation 3 game being developed by Indians in a cave in Himalayas by 3 people (2 of them are bengali). Just see the fantastic funny trailer they made. If you know bengali its even better to hear! lolmao!

Youtube Link: http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=mU7JyZ3mKDw

I LOVE THESE GUYS!!!

EDIT: Turns out these guys are not the developers at all. Its just done by Sony-Japan. Oh well, but still the trailors fun isn't it? :D

Lipikaar.com इज सो कूल, फिकंग औसम। एल ओ एल!

2008-07-30T19:43:00.004+05:30

िदस वेबसाइट इज़ कूल, ड्यूड! यू कैन राइट लीट्रली ऐनी िथंग। प्रीिवयस्ली इट वौस नौट पौसीबल िदस वे। बट नाव इट िगव्स कमप्लीट फ्रीडम। रोफ़ल माओ! देयर इज़ अ फायरफौक्स एक्सटेंशन ऐस वेल। जस्ट अनेबल इट, ऐंड यू आर रेडी टू गो! गो Lipikaar.com गो। यू गाियज़ आर अमेज़ींग! यू पौन्ड, एफ़ टी डब्लू!

पी एस : एल ओ एल माओ!

We are here! We are here!

2008-06-21T21:12:00.006+05:30

Horton Hears a Who! Have you seen this movie? Go see it please! Horton Hears a Who is easily one of the best movies I have seen ever. When I say I liked Matrix, I liked a part of it... When I say I liked KungFu Hustle, I liked it for its action... when I say I liked Hot Rod, well, my crazy side enjoys it, I like inspirational movies like V for Vendetta and Lagaan... but Horton Hears a Who! is a movie that I liked for everything, all adjectives possible, for comedy, noise, values, fast-paced, drama, survival, emotions, inspirational... simply everything.

I know some of you have severe allergy from animated movies since they are (so called) kids' stuff. Well I wont spend time arguing that animated movies are good but I would like to convince you to just see this one animated movie please.

Those who like animated movies, you will forget all those older moving ones like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monster Inc, Cars if you see this one: Horton Hears a Who! Also you might have got bored of some recent copy cats of each others, like Madagascar, The Wild, Open Season, *some pengiun movies* etc etc etc.... NOT WITH THIS!!!

When these days it seems creating an oscar movie is incredibly easy... just make a war movie, or cast Robert De Neiro and other mueseum statues, or show gigantic production figures, or make something anti-racist (being racist inside, e.g. 'The Kingdom') or spell superb special effects... Horton Hears a Who! goes in a totally lateral direction. When movie critics (aka tards) think deep to justify some movie as a classic (serious gay oscar stuff), it is not hard to call this movie great and memorable.

Ok I wont be harsh on Godfather-ish style movies else you wont see this movie. I take all back what I wrote in above paragraph, else you wont see this movie. Please see it!

Horton Hears a Who! shows an elephant's extreme determination and amazing forgiveness (voice acted by Jim Carrey). The movie starts as a really good comedy flick but catches seriousness, wonderfully maintaining its humorous touch, not to forget the movie moves just quite fast. If you know 'Steve Carrell' (Bruce Almighty, Evan Baxter), he has also done some awesome voice acting of another main character in this movie.
The movie's soundtrack has unbelievable amount of noise! The context of the movie makes it really beautiful! The movie does have a message at the end which simply doesnt matter. The whole movie has just so many messages the last one sounds insignificant.
Nothing's perfect: the animation is not top quality but honestly it does the job of depicting everything in appropriate detail, nothing more was necessary but could have been better. That is the only complaint I guess I have from the movie.

Noticable thing is that this movie (I bet) will be enjoyable by everyone from a child to a teen to a middle aged to an old person. Whether a superficial viewer or a hardcore-movie-critic, you will enjoy it. A suggestion that I will give is that if at all you like this movie, see it again! It gets better and better in each replay.

Please see it!

CVIT Lab Board Art

2008-05-26T20:52:00.002+05:30

Click on the image to see properly, Click here to view the original (very high resolution)

Ayesha Takia is beautiful

2008-05-19T02:39:00.005+05:30

Talking about Ayesha Takia, the first thing which comes to your mind is SOMETHING but am not here to talk about that. She is simply the hottest actress in Bollywood. I am a fan of her since I was a kid, when she used to kill on 'Good Morning Disney' as a co-host. Of course it was mainly a cartoon show so I wasn't denied to see it :D. One day she announced she wont be hosting the show anymore because of her higher studies and stuff... it was the same day I stopped watching disney cartoons too. There was this video of Falguni Pathak "Meri Chunar ud ud jai"... Though lame video but, Man, she looked divine in that too!

If you see, Ayesha Takia has a really tall neck, something which is noteworthy in models (Deepika Padukon, Aish, Priyanka Chopra... If you noticed, Miss Felicity 2008 also had a long neck) and, I dont know why, but I just go crazy about tall necks. Moreover, her eyebrows shield the whole world, wine filled eyes, a perfect nose and dont even talk about how beautiful her face is. She is tall and has broad shoulders. She is a perfect early woman, an early encestor, may be she is a Goddess.

A long neck is just really artistic (If it is really an artist who has designed woman). It fits very aesthetially on a woman's body, It is like a tall vas, with the grasses coming out to protect its shine, and balanced perfectly on a tall and strong violin.

Its not like I dont have anything else to do but notice necks, its just really easy. Just see if the woman's hair are long but still they are able to reach only her shoulders, if, then her neck is long.

Yes I know, people have been talking about she is is growing fat which may be true, but her resume for now has very little experience (She hasn't acted in many movies + she is very young) so she will definitely take care of herself.

I recently watched Sunday, quite nice movie. Earlier I watched Salaam-e-Ishq in which her boyfriend's name was Shiven (that 'v' causes 'V for Vendetta'). I have to watch all Ayesha Takia's movie now.

Some more actresses with long necks:

Holly Walance

Aishwarya Rai

Eliza Dushku

Amy Walz (NFSU girl, She is the final boss)

Example short neck: Hilary Duff

(Web Comic#4) How wasted am I?

2008-05-09T14:19:00.003+05:30

(Click on the image to view it large)

(Web Comic#3) Sick!

2008-03-19T01:34:00.003+05:30

(Web Comic#2) Wire the less

2008-03-13T23:46:00.004+05:30

Tag Post - Tagged by p4t1

2008-03-10T12:51:00.000+05:30

10 things I miss in my Life (Chronologically)

- Mom's cooked food. Believe me, every day, before breakfast, lunch or dinner, I used to think, "Wow, something wonderful must be there today" and it used to be. I miss it the most. There have been many times when I would tease other ladies in the house for not cooking like my mom... mom used to be so proud of me at those moments, lol :D

- Evening cricket on the huge neighborhood ground. I was a emergency situation player, I was either highly effective or just average. So I was brought to play in critical situations to quickly take wickets or make some quick runs and then go out. I miss being that important cricket player.

- I miss this girl from 7th standard, divine cute. She had her roll number before me, so she used to sit in front of me in exams. Our thing was fantastic, I was good in math and formulation stuff and she was good in remembering things. So we used to cheat like hell, I would ask her all mugging based questions, and she would ask me the formulation and proofs stuff. Guys were quite angry with me that she used 2 get a rank within 10 bcoz of me, and I must admit that I was the class topper because of her :D. It was going gr8 until I started liking her, said somethings and things got messed up, Bah. She must be doing gr8, hope she is fine.

- I miss my sister a lot, she doesnt live in India now. She is the best. We went into fights from time to time, but not anymore. She was/is/will-be always helpful, caring and good to me. I just hope I did the same in past and would in future too.

- I miss this one epic moment of my life (8th class story). Father came home from office and said he got something for me, it was a big box, I was thinking, is it what I think it is? IT WAS A NES (8 bit video game console)!!!! OMG! I went crazy! I was insanely happy that day :)

- Free Periods in school. Well I was one notorious kid in school... Free period means I am going to go out of discipline completely and bug each and every1 in class. It was even better when the class monitor was a girl, I would just annoy her like hell. Later one of the girls got so annoyed she complained to a teacher and I had to face a lot of music.

- Bunk school for games. Well, this friend of mine and me, (10th class story) used 2 bunk school to go a video game parlor to play Sega Genesis games, mainly Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 & Contra Hard Corps. Later we started playing Playstation games, mainly Mortal Kombat Trilogy, King of Fighters etc.. Mom found out about this once and beat the hell out of me.

- Lunch time in school was girl watching session. Girls are generally typically mostly hot man, wtf?

- I miss KV (Kendriya Vidyalaya) school where I found amazing friends and created a lot of havoc. There was this chick in my class, killer hot, wrote on her desk when she was not there, "You are a property of Shiben". It was a small prank and the girl was fine with it. But the boys were angry like hell, haha, suck on that! Some flirting with a girl went too high to reach ears outside the school and I had a nice visit from 3 huge college students, man was I scared! Good thing they dint beat me up. On the geeking side, I used to write all kinds of stupid fox-pro programs in free time. Later I became too much of a geek and thus Jesus came here.

- I just miss the endless BC we would do in the wing outside our rooms. Some times it would go till morning and the next whole day would be sleeping. Sweet.

10 things I want to achieve in a decade from now (in no order)

- Have a lot of MOney! Haaaaaaaah!

- Long term relationship wali Girl friend.

- Build a personal killer Home Theater system, I have it all in my mind, just need MOney! haaaaaah!

- Play a lot of games, own consoles, make many gamer friends, and if possible, become an official Game reviewer hired by some good game website.

- I wish to stand on the stage of one of these: CES, GDC or Siggraph animation festival, giving a killer talk about something I (or my team) made, followed by a huge round of applause. I don't consider it to be achieved in the next decade, but this is my dream.

- Take good care of my mom and dad.

- Own a car, so that I can customize it, add vinyls, spoilers, bumpers and crap. w00t!

- Within 10 yrs from now I think I will HAVE to get married. So the thing I want to achieve is, I should get married to a good and caring woman.

- Learn some martial art, like Kung-Fu, Kick boxing, drunken master...something! This I have to do, this is highly important!

- I would like to have a hall in the house where I can practice KungFu everyday... "I know KungFu"... "Show me"... hahahhaa!! it will be fun and it will be good exercise too! Yeah rite, lazy ass.

Thanks for tagging me skp

(Web Comic#1) Why Why Why?

2008-03-08T22:23:00.002+05:30

Pirates 0wN Assassin's Creed

2008-03-06T11:47:00.007+05:30

Assassin's Creed is a game (from Ubisoft) released last year for xbox 360 and it got a lot of coverage and hype for its wonderful looks, highly artisitc style and it's producer Jade Raymond
(Man! She is hot!).
They decided to release it for PC (yay!) and April 8, 2008 was set as its release date. However pirates somehow released it in the pirate scene already. This is a double-yay but this is really bad for PC gaming future. I will talk about this in the end, lets see some screen shots taken with full settings (1600x900) on a Nvidia 8800GTX:

The game basically is a regular action adventure game with some gameplay elements improved, but the graphics are killer.
Not photo-realistic as crysis, but highly artisitc, looks fantastic!
The large environments it is able 2 show is amazing.
Inner areas look good too and Buildings, huge.

Because of piracy, first game devs (in general) decided not to release the games for pc, but later an even better solution was, to release the stuff for pc later. This way the game would have already been bought for consoles (and thus make money) and later when released for PC, if it gets bought, well good! else, oh at least the community is growing and its getting good marketing. Because of this people should not worry about GTA-4, since it will come for PC 1 year after its 2008's release on consoles (like what happened for gta3, gtavc, gtasa).

In the case of Assassin's Creed (and this has happened many times before with other games too) people who wanted to buy the game, will have to pirate it because they will choose not to wait!

PSP is da best!

2008-03-04T19:11:00.013+05:30

PSP (Play Station Portable) is a handheld gaming device which can also do pretty much all the other gimmicks Iphone-wannabe-handheld-devices boast about. PSP can game (of cors) with a powerful hardware behind it and a game database of over 800 titles. I bought it from my online friend Gagan on Gamespot.

I hacked my PSP to free it from DRM crap thanks to Suhail who also has a PSP. Games officially come in UMD for this device. But a modded PSP can run games stored in its Memory stick.

Let me show you some screenshots I took on my PSP and some pictures. This is God of War - Chains of Olympus demo, new game to be released for PSP... pretty awesome.

Racing games are fun with the analog stick. Since NFSps sucked on PC, I am gonna play it on PSP. This is Burnout Legends:

Fps games are good too, I finished COD on psp, this is Medal of Honors Heroes 2:

This is Patapon, a rythm game, its hella fun (This image is not forged)

Loco Roco is Physics based game... fantastic!

Being a powerful system, PSP can emulate NES, SNES, Sega Gen, GBA etc. and some old games (Eg. Doom) are ported to PSP as well:

And yeah, it can play MP3s as well (shocking!), with killer visualizations. It can play Videos as well.

Did I tell you, PSP has wireless capability as well, so you can browse on it too.

Also people with PSPs can wirelessly play multiplayer games. Suhail and me play Co-op games sometimes :D. Not to mention, recently Skype was released for PSP, so it pretty much becomes a VOIP kinda phone too. It's a little big but small enough to fit in my pocket. Battery life is 4Hrs for continous gaming, else its more... havnt noticed much, I just recharge it once a day. PSP has a big community, so community software are always there to enjoy.

Oh! and other than that, CVIT got another Graphics Card: NV Quadro FX 3700, this is an equivalent of a 8800GT

SlipStream movie review

2008-02-17T14:08:00.002+05:30

Anthony Hopkin's SlipStream movie is a pile of garbage thrown at the audience. Basically the movie is a practical joke and it works out pretty well. The fans will like it no wonder, "Anthony Hopkins this and that, Omg, its Anthony Hopkins!", and for the ones who didn't like it, the fans will start booing on them on not getting it. So for the movie maker, its a win win situation. Why do I care? Well, people pay (money/time) to see movies, thats why.

The thing is that the movie's concept is not bad but its done before. Well yeah, time traveling is done before too, but they use time traveling to tell stories. Here, the concept is the story, and it is a highly narrow class, and thats why it feels like a copy paste of the originals.

Basically the movie shows a story writer, working on a murder crap with a stressed brain, and he starts seeing his characters in his life etc. !!!SPOILERS! Basically he is dreaming the whole thing possibly at his last moments or at the moments of his brain's maximum stress (Well both are true, since there are 2 endings, one more ending after the credits). !SPOILERS!!!

The concept is good, but if from the starting of the movie, you sense the concept, the movie becomes meaningless (cause theres no story) and you seem tortured throughout the movie. If you don't know what is really happening, then that is even worse, since you will feel a kick in the nut when the movie ends. !!!SPOILERS! All of the movie's random segments just wants to tell you that its a dream and thats why its random, thus dont stress on trying to connect the loose threads of the story. !SPOILERS!!!

One movie which I know, uses the same concept, "STAY", but it is so beautifully done that whether you know whats happening or you come to know in the end, its awesome in both ways! !!!SPOILERS! The characters were so well woven in the dream of the protagonist and they were really likable. You feel for all the characters, you remember all the characters. And when the world is shown outside the guy's dream, you can connect all the roles of the characters in the real world with the dream world... and thus understand why such events in the dream. It is so wonderfully connected. !SPOILERS!!!

'Stay' kept a suspense which was really not needed, but still that worked out great. Suspense movies are not re-watchable since thats what really is in the movie.... but for Stay, it turned out opposite! It had to be watched at least 2 times in my opinion (Because of the suspense, a viewer can forget the events in context of what really is happening and thus may need to recall them). Aaah, some of you smart heads will not agree on watching it twice, but sorry, I am a normal person and have a normal brain.

Back to slipstream; The characters are random, the movie doesn't let you get attached to the characters, there are tons of them, and it really doesn't want to. The events don't make sense and guess what... the movie doesn't want you to either. What the movie really wants, is for you to get the overall picture... !!!SPOILERS! and what is that overall picture? He is seeing a dream. Wow so original! my ass.

Why the hell would I see 1.5 hours of random stuff just to understand that its a dream (and thats why random and senseless things are happening) ? At least do something creative in those 1.5 hours. Some senseless things are entertaining (action, high school rip-offs, special effects, super-powers), but no, this movie contained pure random garbage! !SPOILERS!!!

The worst part is the way the movies gets rated after this. Stay was awesome! and its a 7 on imdb I guess (which is fine with me, 7's not bad, there may be glitches in various aspects which only the mighty respectful movie experts can understand), but SlipStream (since made by Anthony Hopkins) is 8! Good work people, keep recommending garbage! I am really starting to think I should see Hindi movies, they are getting better.

To the fans: Anthony Hopkins is a good guy, he (is not Hannibal Lector and thus) wont kill you if you rate his movie bad. He probably will work hard and will thank you later for being honest. Be a fan but never put the fanship before your judgment.

Review: Felicity 2008, IIIT Hyderabad

2008-02-11T10:27:00.000+05:30

Felicity is the cultural annual festival of IIIT hyderabad. Threads, the technical festival, runs along with it. This year's celebration was fantastic backed up by quite sincere hard work. I was not there in most places, but whatever I saw I enjoyed. I wish to review it, there will be some honest opinions... good and bad, please dont hate me :)

Day 1: Though events were on full heat in other areas, e.g. Kalakshetra, Zombie Zone, etc etc. Day 1 had a dry stage for the most of it. Indian Ocean's performance was fun but running a little boring. Didn't attend War of DJs, because of boredom, I hope it was good.

Day 2: Seeing that along with Indian Ocean on day1, Sledge is also coming along on day 2, the current 3rd years proved that they have taken felicity to a next level. You got Sledge and AWESOME bands from all over Hyderabad for a rock competition. OMG!!! Fking awesome.

IIIT Band: A nice start, Female vocalist did well (for Cranberries' song), she could have sung more songs, some Evanasense may be? Male singers need to work hard (Insomnia used to choose songs with less vocal input so that the good Guitar talent shines, pretty clever). Blood Brother's was quite nicely sung, good work. Our Malaysian FESs did good job too, nice.

Mosh Pit issues: I dont really know what happened when moshing started over (I am guilty that I started it) while Sledge's performance, but I guess the organizers took the matter a bit too serious. Dont get me wrong, but the guys were doing the moshing in a controlled way, in the middle, a circular pit, exactly the way it should be done. It was violent, yes, but thats the way it is (I was not a part of it later coz those dude were too big to mosh with, I was just in the perimeter). No one was getting hurt in the surrounding, just visually scared I guess. Anyway, alls well that ends well. The rock night was amazing.

Day 3: The western dances were nice as always. Best part was that most things were not that late as I expected seeing all previous felicities. Contribution from college CBIT, Vasvi and Osmania University was nil which is not good (notified by Parry), they have been an important crowd previously, dont know why they didn't show up this time. ICFAI and NIFT people as always were a good part in the celebration.

Day 3 nite: Mr. and Miss felicity was enjoying, the audience was great (hehe, I was a part of it of cors). The participants on the male side were weak I would say, confidence seemed less from their side although final judging was perfect. The female's were much more better in terms of right attitude and confidence. The results of Miss felicity seemed odd, which doesn't matter though, since for the audience the good organization was more important.

Om Shanti Om: The closing dance by the famous faces was nicely done. It was a highly intelligent work done by the Choreographer. The way people were emerging on stage matched the way its in the movie. The similarity excites the crowd a lot. Nice work.

Overall this year's celebration was wonderful and faithfully well executed. It was clearly visible that the organization was good. Decorating the campus was a clever idea, truly, it brought out people living under rocks. Some newspaper coverage would have been nice. Food and stuff was ok, there was nothing wrong, costs were not proposterous. Website design, a killer video and forum's idea was good.

Nicely done ug3. Bravo.

Gamespot's Best of 2007 (Game Awards)

2007-12-28T02:38:00.000+05:30

I am listing the Gamespot's awards here in one page for quick reference since there are just too many pages to go through on their site. As Gamespot is one of the best gaming websites and 2007 was a crazy year full of games, these awards matter a lot. Click here for original details about these awards. Here goes the list:

Genre Awards:
Best Action Adventure Game: Assassin's Creed
Best Adventure Game: Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure
Best Shooter: Crysis
Best Fighting Game: Virtua Fighter 5 Online
Best Platformer: Super Mario Galaxy
Best Driving Game: Forza Motorsport 2
Best Puzzle Game: Portal
Best Rhythm/Music Game: Rock Band
Best Role-playing Game: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3
Best Sports Game: NHL 08
Best Strategy Game: World in Conflict

Platform Awards:
Best Nintendo DS Game: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Best PSP Game: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
Best PlayStation 2 Game: God of War II
Best Xbox 360 Game: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Best PlayStation 3 Game: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Best Wii Game: Super Mario Galaxy
Best PC Game: Crysis

Game of the Year Nominees:
BioShock
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Crysis
Forza Motorsport 2
God of War II
Halo 3
Rock Band
Super Mario Galaxy
The Orange Box
World in Conflict
Winner: SUPER MARIO GALAXY

Special Achievement
Best Original Music: Mass Effect
Most Surprisingly Good Game: Medal of Honor Heroes 2 (Wii)
Best Licensed Music: Guitar Hero III
Best Story: Bioshock
Best Sound Design: Rock Band
Best Graphics, Technical: Crysis
Best Voice Acting: Mass Effect
Best Graphics, Artistic: Super Mario Galaxy
Best Use of a Creative License: Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened
Best New Character(s): Orange Box
Funniest Game: Orange Box
Biggest News: December 2: Vivendi merges with Activision in $18.9B deal
Best Multiplayer Game: Rock Band
Best Expansion Pack: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
Best Original Game Mechanic: Portal
Best Downloadable Console Game: Pac-Man Championship Edition
Most Improved Sequel: Medal of Honor Heroes 2 (Wii)
Best New Gaming Hardware: Rock Band Instrument Set
Most Innovative Game: World in Conflict
Best Downloadable Content: Rock Band
Best Use of Control Scheme: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Best Atmosphere: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Dubious Honors:
Most Despicable Use of In-Game Advertising: Need for Speed ProStreet
Worst Trend: Lousy Wii Ports
Most Disappointing Game: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08
Flat-Out Worst Game: Hour of Victory
Worst Game Everyone Played: Spider-Man 3
Best Game No One Played: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
Most Disappointing Delay: Grand Theft Auto IV

Gamespot videos for these:

Let the pic say it

2007-12-26T13:14:00.001+05:30

The wrath of Digital age
(Taken from Visesh's room)

42 inch HDTV in CVIT-3

2007-12-05T02:11:00.000+05:30

These images are from pati: Click here for full album

As the title says it all, I just list my favourite pics here:

First just to see its size, on the right side in the pick below it's a 19 inch monitor, on the left side its 'my precious'

Pati enjoying some good quake time with the big screen.

Then 300 HD, Should I choose my next words carefully? Oh I have chosen them well, This is Spar... ahem.. cvit!!!!

A little Crysis happened in between all this as the system it is attached to is a 2 X 8600GTS in SLI:

What to do when stuck between lines?

2007-11-30T10:57:00.000+05:30

This happens quite a lot of times when you get stuck in your code and no matter what you do, the stupid code will behave stubbornly. Not just coding, this includes other technical problems we face everyday as well, related to our projects or our personal g33kin. Somethings which have always worked for me to come out and move forward are these:

Relax, don't think about it, try next day: This is really simple and is risky, although has worked for me a lot of times. If you are coding late at night thinking that if I complete this today it will be good, but you seem to be just stuck in somewhere; Just leave it right there, and come back in the morning and start the work from where you left, I bet it will work instantly in the morning. I can't really say what's the reason behind this but probably it's because now the job is for a fresh and relieved mind.
Talk with a colleague about it: Even if you are doing something which is far from anything which your friends are doing, their minute suggestions or corrections can reveal massive problems in your code. You can show the part of your code (even if it contains 10 header files, and 2000 lines code in each) to a friend assuring him that rest is all OK. The magic here is you may be ignoring something very small since you are into something big, but that friend of yours will think about it from scratch and can reveal silly mistakes.
Talk with your professor: This also sounds odd because, you know that your prof is not coding with you and thus how can he solve your 'seg fault' problem? Also, isn't it lame to go to the prof with debugging problems.. won't he think that I don't even know this? The truth here is your prof is much much more experienced than you (even if they coded in fortran in their age and you are into c++) and when you talk with him/her about your stuck-in-code problem, you will notice that he will always have something to say about it. The suggestions given, even if are vague, when you work upon them, can really make you move forward. Their massive experience with various issues keeps them cool with whatever problem you have. And seriously, stop thinking about what your prof thinks about you, its totally unnecessary.
Recode: Well last but not least, this is only recommended if you are writing something small. You will notice that the code you have written may be only 200-300 lines but probably you have spent 1 week debugging it. Just move it somewhere else and code those 200-300 bastard lines again. Your extra care while writing it this time will make sure that the problem has not even taken birth. When the new code works, delete the old code and also you can take a printout of the old code and burn it singing some traditional hymn, you will feel good.

Just my experience which I thought I should share.

Harry Pussy Potter and The Buttocks of Fury

2007-10-22T13:27:00.000+05:30

It is the beginning of another year at the 'Teabag-wards School of Butt-crack Magic'. Harry Potter just got ready for his trip to school when a Bus came down his alley and picks him up. Everyone in the bus starts murmuring, "Hey, It's Harry Pussy Potter!". The conductor gives tickets to Harry along with a smile saying, "It's an honor to have you on our Bus, Mr. Pussy Potter". Harry, always annoyed from childhood about this name, requests him with his British accent, "Excuse me, I really enjoy your admiration for me, but I don't feel good when my middle name is always included when pronouncing me". The conductor sighs, "Mr. Potter, No one can change what happened 20 or whatever years ago! Everyone knows that 'you know who/poo' attacked you and he got his arse kicked hard. Your two gay fathers did gave their lives to protect you but not completely as you got circumcised for good. Since then, your middle name had been more the verdict than whatever your original faggot name is". Having no reply to such an intelligent explanation, Potter goes back to his empty seat and enjoys the ride with his head resting on the window.

The cold air blazing through his hair stopped flowing when the bus halts to pick up Ron. Pussy Potter as usual gets excited to see him since he is the only cool friend he ever had. His two twin brothers, hide the pot they were smoking from. They all started to talk about what they did in their God forsaken holidays.

A girl jumps beside their seats and starts saying stupid shit in highly pathetic British accent which is always irrelevant to story's plot. You got it right, Miss Hormones Grinder, though smoking hot, annoys both the guys with constant bullshit of plot's twists and turns.

On arriving to Teabag-wards, everyone's excited. Harry always feels the school as his home because everyone in his field of view is as gay as him. They summon up in the big hall where Prof. Dumbleballs announces that the 'Ministry of non-existent Magic' have given the honor of hosting the championship of 'Buttocks of Fury' to Teabag-wards. He goes towards a Goblet looking shape under a cloth which when he removes, turns out to be a big ass which is constantly farting fire. The CG model of the Butts is pixellated, low polygon and ugly normal mapped; Seems like the Bungie guys modeled it (who made the HALO video games). Since after creating hype, anyone can feed constipated shit to audience, the people in the big-hall become anxious and excited about the Championship.

Prof. Dumbleballs summons all students and asks the interested people, to write their name on a piece of paper and squeeze it in the butt-cheek, if they want to compete in the championship. He warns that only 23 year old or above hot chicks are allowed. Interrupting, the 'Ministry of non-existing-magic' personal makes a sound clearing his throat... Prof says, "Ohkay alright, boys are also allowed, but only 23 or old". He says that after sometime they will see which are the lucky ones the great buttock has chosen.

Meanwhile after some classes, Dr. Moody, a teacher, calls upon all the girls to a special class. He clearly stated only girls, but still Miss Hormones was thrown out. She looked devastated and clears out to Ron and Potter that for Moody's class her hooters were too small for the magic they are playing inside. What magic that could be? Ron and Potter get confused as it didn't seem a proper explanation.

Night falls over the sky, all aspiring candidates assemble near the buttock, guarded by Dumbleballs. The buttock farts loud and a shit wrapped paper comes out, some guys name is written over it, they are called upon one by one. Just when everyone thought the ceremony is over, the final fart of the Buttock rumbles and another paper comes out with the name "Harry Pussy Potter" on it. Prof Dumbleballs is angry as he knows Potter is not as old as he can participate in this competition and that once chosen by the Buttock, no one dares to back out. Prof asks for Potter 2 times, without any reply he screams, "Harry butt-hole Pussy Potter!!!!". Terror lies in every heart, Potter tremors as he moves towards the prof. People start murmuring that Harry is such a pussy. Frustrated Dumbleballs returns to his office and declares the ceremony is over and everyone return to their dorms. He also said, Moody will be taking care of girls' dorms tonight.

In the office, the man from 'Ministry of non-existing magic' says the tournament should be closed this year, there is no chance that young child is playing this game. Dumbleballs, who knows a lot of magic (which doesn't exists) makes the officer realize that the Buttock is no normal ass, he explains, "It has squeezed inside all those who didn't listen to its words in the past. We can let that stupid Potter get squeezed, but the Buttock is an asshole, it squeezes everyone responsible in the matter. Until now the Buttock has squeezed inside millions of people, who are converted into 'World of Warcraft fans' inside, can you think of anything terrible happening to you?". The officer is a stubborn bitch, he says he will commit a suicide before he is made a fan of Warcraft. To which Dumbleballs says, "Ohkay, forget about everything, Will you let the competition run, if I would suck your balls?". Officer agrees as instantly as it seemed that that's the exact return he wanted.

So will Pussy Potter fight the tournament? Did he himself squeezed his name in the Buttocks? Will Ron get laid? Who else's balls will Dumble suck? Why isn't Hormones Grinder invited in Moody's class? Stay tuned for Part II.

Geforce 8600 and Quadro 5600

2007-10-11T21:17:00.000+05:30

New systems arrived for CVIT for which cards were lying around for a while. 2 x Nvidia 8600 GTS and a giant Quadro FX 5600 (Dont confuse this 5600 with the primitive Geforce FX5600). Check the pic below to compare its size with other ones.

The ATI X1800XT shown above in the middle is of same size as Nvidia 7950GX2, so 8800GTX was winning until now in the size.
Which we compared with Pati's hand previously
But now the FX5600 is reaching his elbow! FX5600 wins and hopefully will stay clear from any competitor for good amount of time.

To fit 5600 in a computer, we literally had to break apart some part of the cabinet. Those parts of the cabinet didn't contain any screws or anything so we had to hammer them out.

And the 2 cute 8600 cards are put into SLI. The computers holding these cards are ultra high end containing Intel E6750 Core 2 Duo, and 2GB ram. w00t

Genuine Windows Vista

2007-10-08T12:51:00.001+05:30

IIIT's Legal Volume Edition (Remember the legal XP we use?) from MSDN Subscription of Vista is Windows Vista Business N edition. Being legal you will get Windows Genuine Advantage (Whatever that means). Just install, boot and activate your windows entering the key provided.
The Business edition of Vista scraps out some number of softwares (which are all included in Ultimate edition) which are:

Windows Media Player 11
Windows Media Center
Windows DVD Maker
Windows Games: chess, poker, blah, blah
some more may be...

Use media player 11 setup for xp and it will download some 100mb patch for it and you will be good to go if you are a windows media player 11 fan (I am btw) else you can always use winamp and vlc/mplayer.

Now why am I talking about Vista suddenly? Answer: DirectX 10 Games. And if IIIT has a legal copy for its students, why not use that, right? (get the DVD from server room or ISO from me)

After installing all drivers and crap you should notice that, Vista doesn't (can't) come with newly updated DirectX 10 so get it from M$'s site here.

If you have a Nvidia 8XXX series card or AMD's HD 2XXX series card, you would surely like to check out if you are up and about for DirectX 10 games, so get the Lost Planet Dx10 Demo (you can get that from me).

I checked it out on a Nvidia 8600GTS and here are some screenshots
The game has nice motion blur and depth of field, nice post processing effects.The game is superbly heavy; Though 8600 is not a good card, above screenshots are for medium settings only.

Note that if you have a DX9 card and if you try to run the above game in vista, it will crash. However this is specifically for this demo only. Upcoming games for Vista (Crysis, Hellgate London, Gears for War etc.) should run on Vista with DX9 and DX10 cards both.

Clive Barker's Jericho Demo [Screenshots]

2007-09-29T23:52:00.001+05:30

I was not expecting this game to feature such beautiful graphics. It feels like every other game you are going to see these days will have vibrant environments.

Not only that, the concept of the game is also good. Jericho is a squad of a number of players who stick together most of the time. Because of this you can switch to play as anyone of them at any point. These members have unique abilities which you can exploit to slash the enemies.

One of the capability which impressed me most is that you can direct the sniper bullet on a path which can take out at-most 3 enemies. If you can get 3 head-shots, you kill all 3 of them.

About graphics, first of all the characters are modeled really well.

It features a really nice 'Depth of Field' visual which causes blurring of non focused objects. See the screen-shot below to get the picture. No performance hit in real-time whatsoever.

Increased the brightness of this manually, here also you can see blurring of all the unfocused background.

Fantastic lighting and shadows along with depth of field makes the game looks fantastic.

The wonderful visuals are running really good on my 7950gx2 which is an example of elegant game engine design. (Bungie may want to learn something here)

By the way, Clive Barker is a famous author and movie director. His novels are famous and if you remember the Movie "HellRaiser", that's his directed. If you remember the old horror game "Undying" (which I still have btw) was his step into gaming industry.

India Kicked Balls [Sketch]

2007-09-25T12:53:00.000+05:30

Heres a salute in my way to India -

Also I would apologize team India for my previous sketch on their return from world cup. These awesome guys have brought back a cricket fan straight after the match fixing crap. India kicked in the nuts of Australia you guys! Can you believe this? And to make it even better, became the world champions in 20-20 cricket!

NBH Mess is good

2007-09-21T18:28:00.000+05:30

Disclaimer: I dont like wasting food, it is a terribe thing to waste food. But I believe that it is something which will happen how much ever you try. I mean it can really come between you, your convenience and your diet, but food will still end up getting wasted.

OBH Ground floor mess has reached new levels of sucking. It sometimes feels like whichever mess is felt worst is deliberately assigned to OBH ground floor always. Specially for this mess, it seems people actually worked hard to get a bad mess to ground floor.

OBH First floor mess is good. I like the fact that so many people eat there and never complain. I really like the breakfast of OBH FF, I try to do that everyday. But whatever the case may be, the meal's taste is just not my type.

So the only mess left is NBH. Not that I am stuck with it, it actually came out to be really nice. The food is good but the thing I also like about NBH Mess is how easily you can waste food there.

I will tell you how:

When you go to place your dish on the container on the ground floor mess, anyone can be seen from anywhere how much you are wasting. First floor mess is even worse, you hand over your plate to a person washing them.

But NBH mess, you find no guilt at all. You just go to the cleaning place, just drop your left overs like everyone is busy doing. Either no one is noticing or no one wants to notice coz its a little disgudting job, moreover it's like everybody's job. Whether you take all your food as a left over to the basin or not, it doesn't matter.

One more reason can be that, you have to wash your own dish, so you already get a feeling that you are being responsible at something, and it gives you the freedom of doing something little irresponsible (wasting food).

When I talked to my friends about this, I felt a little ironic as they said the whole concept of washing your own dishes was so that people do not waste food. But I really dont believe them, I mean intelligent minds behind our institute cannot make such backfiring decisions. Seriously is it true?

Got BioShocked, wtf?

2007-09-19T13:08:00.000+05:30

Would you kindly read this even if ur not playing/going-to-play Bioshock, or if u dont play games. For Bioshockers, spoilers ahead. (Post is written in a way such that a non-gamer can understand as well)

So basically u r given a choice of either rescuing or killing innocent little girls at some moments in the game. If u rescue, you get less points but if u kill them u get more points. Getting more points is important to win the game (as you can eliminate a sinister boss) which is a good deed overall. However you can still manage to win the game with less points.

I rescued all the little girls except one. For the one I killed I was just a little greedy for points and I wanted to see what is the animation shown while killing her. But I felt guilty and I rescued all the others.

Somewhere in the middle of the game you visit the little girls' santuary, they are all like, 'stay away from that bad man', 'Dont talk to him' etc. I was like, come on girls! I killed just one but I did rescued some of you, little courtesy?

Apart from this, in the much later part of the game you have to protect them as they lead you to the villain. If a girl gets killed another can come to lead you, but as the game projects, if you are unable to protect even one of them, its a sin.

I mean, they are little powerless girls and I am just one person. At once 10 to 20 of deadly enemies come to attack me (and her), how can I manage to protect her? If they attack only me, its fine, but not them please, they are innocent. I tried my best but I couldn't protect 2 of them, one of them finally leads me to the villain.

So at the end, when I kill the final boss, the game shows a video, shows me that I am even a bigger villain than the one I killed. I was shown that I only killed that evil so that I could unleash more evil on humanity. I was thrashed! I mean wtf???!!!111

I killed only one and was unable to protect 2 of them. What about the other 15 or so girls I rescued? Why was I given the bad ending?

Frustrated, I went to the game folder, found which are the movie files which are played at the end of the game and saw the good ending anyway. Fk u bioshock developers. Why was I made bad in the end? Seriously wtf?

The good ending shows that you take all the little girls with you, let them go to school, college, they find boy friends, get married, have their own family, kids, blah. Finally when I am old and dying a natural death, they are all aside my death bed pacifying me while I depart.

Above's a really good ending and I was expecting it. But no! I played the whole game, craving such good graphics of Bioshock, awesome gameplay, riveting sound, nice environments and atmosphere, and in the end what did you give me, huh?

DRM, lol, Funny

2007-08-27T11:59:00.000+05:30

Whether you are a gamer or not, you must read this, its really funny. First, read these dialogs from the BioShock demo in the opening of the game.

I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question.
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican, it belongs to god.
No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone.

I rejected those answers.

Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...Rapture! I built a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be boundby petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

Now to get you to the speed, the purchasers of the game are having trouble with the hardcore activation process and copy protection scheme (DRM). Securom's software is doing all the copy protection problem and 2K games are the owners of the game.

Now check this out. Its just a comment on a blog from one of the harassed-off-the-DRM person.

Is a man not entitled to the game he buys?

NO, says the man at SecuRom. It belongs to 2K.
NO, says the man at 2K. It belongs to us.
NO, says the man at Microsoft. It belongs to our license purchasers.

I rejected those answers.

Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...piracy! Where the gamer would not be censored, where the PC owner would not be bound by petty encryption, where the buyer would not be constrained by corporate greed. And with the downloading of your torrents, piracy could become your salvation.

lol! this is so funny. You can see the person's comment here as well.

JanSport Big Student!

2007-08-22T10:30:00.000+05:30

JanSport Big Student is a bag pack with variety of colors, patterns and style. The capacity is as good as it can carry most of your stuff. The JanSport ® Big Student is available in 14 different colors and patterns. Its two large main compartments, front utility pocket with audio electronics organizer and a cell phone pocket makes it highly convenient. Wait for my review on this bag pack.

JanSport is giving everyone a chance to win this pack and a much needed Fall Break trip with their Big Student Fall Break Sweepstakes . Grand prize is a trip for 4 to the Grand Canyon , including flight, lodging, entrance fees, ground transportation and meal costs. Runners up can bag a prize too with JanSport's Big Student Pack Giveaway —giving away one Big Student pack a day through September 19th.

Now, how to enter: JanSport has partnered with Facebook.com to launch their Big Student Pack. To find out more about this awesome pack and enter to win the Big Student Fall Break Sweepstakes, log onto www.jansport.com/bigstudent, then click the Facebook logo and log in or sign up for Facebook and join the JanSport: Go Big group —it's that simple!

BioShock PC Demo

2007-08-21T20:54:00.000+05:30

I was fearing the demo won't run on my system when I saw the minimum specs asked for a 2.4 Ghz as I have a only 2.1 GHz processor. In graphics power I have more than what the game recommends though, the Nvidia 7950GX2.

So I just launched the demo, the game put full graphics by default but reduced my resolution to 1024x768. It was running good and more than playable.

However, I couldn't cope with such a bad resolution, so I just ran the game again with 1600x1200. Anti-aliasing was not there as a feature, so I just let that go. There was DX10 features thingy turned off as I was playing in XP. The game was still playable, not much sluggish.

The demo got over in some minutes as it had just a level or probably less than that. Took some screenshots. Click them to see in full resolution.

This is the starting of the game (set in 1960) where your plane crashes over mid Atlantic and you have to swim to the only land, which is the entrance to Rapture, an underwater city. The design of water etc. is done really well.

As you enter the underwater city, you get attacked by some unforeseen enemies. So have to pick up something as a defense. Visuals are beautiful and the city looks wonderful. The graphics probably accompanies volumetric lighting, can be seen near the windows.

You are contacted on radio by a person stuck in this city and wants to protect its family. Asks for your help and also promises to help you get out of Rapture. You can see the vibrant choice of colors the game displays.

As you proceed you get something called plasmids. Plasmids are capable of changing your genetic code and give you powers. You can see my left arm is on fire, it can shoot fire at enemies to stun them, and then they can be killed easily. Another power which I got was lighting.

Apart from these turrets are installed at various locations. These are hackable, i.e. you will have to approach it, disable it, and turn it on and play a small 2D game to hack it and use as your ally.

The Demo as ends, features a video, displaying all possible ways you can kill your enemies. Mostly the types of plasmids that you get and hackable items etc.. The game is seriously going to be really good.

Upcoming Games lists

2007-08-15T12:44:00.000+05:30

This is a list of all games which will be released before the end of 2007. No wonder 2007 Q4 (quater 4) will be a busy for gamers. It's all going to be frantic for the warriors, w00t.

Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Lost Odyssey, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Warhawk, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, Half-Life 2: The Orange Box, NBA Live 08, NBA 2K8, Conan, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, EA Playground, Clive Barker's Jericho, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Need for Speed ProStreet, Assassin's Creed, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (PC), Gears of War (PC), The Simpsons Game, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Virtua Fighter 5, TimeShift, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, World in Conflict, Beowulf, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008, Army of Two, Brothers In Arms Hell's Highway, Rayman Raving Rabbids 2, SimCity Societies, Rock Band, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, Universe at War: Earth Assault, SOCOM: Confrontation, God of War: Chains of Olympus, Devil May Cry 4, Unreal Tournament 3 (PC and PS3), Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, NIGHTS, Crysis

A list of upcoming First Person games is forth, this list is independent from above btw.

BioShock
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Clive Barker's Jericho
Condemned 2: Bloodshot
Crysis
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
F.E.A.R. 2 (working title)
Half-Life 2: Episode Three
Half-Life 2: The Orange Box (Episode Two)
Halo 3 X360
Hellgate: London
Rage
TimeShift

Gargoyle compiled a fantastic list as well:

About 20 Movie Titles have been confirmed which are based on Computer Games in upcoming 3 years, Titles include:
Alice
Area 51
Castlevania
Citizen Siege
Cold Fear
Condemned
Driver
FarCry
Fear Effect
Gears of War
God Of War
Halo
Hitman
In the name of the King : Dungeon Siege Tale
Metal Gear Solid
Onimusha
Postal
Prince Of Persia
Splinter Cell
Spy Hunter
The Suffering
The Unforgettable

Small briefs about the games I really looking forward to in the near future in chronological order:

BioShock (First Person Shooter, horror, sci-fi)
The game's plot is about restoring some disaster in an under-sea city built by a scientist. The gameplay will involve using anything the environment offers as a weapon (whatever that means). Also, it will have different ways to fool enemies, control them to fight among themselves and stuff. Its going to be a little strategic in nature. The reason this game is hyped so much that its developed by people which made System Shock 2, and that game kicked asses. This game is about to be released on 24th august already.

Halo3 (First Person Shooter)
Though HALO series' graphics have been sucking hardcore from the begining with the pathetic performance on hardware adding to the frustration, the developers 'Bungie' got away with it by putting a good plot and excellent gameplay. The whole series is a good exempler to the thot that a game should have good gameplay to be called good. Graphics matter very little. To be released only on 360 on Sept 25. Will somehow have to manage access to an xbox 360, May be will try for an internship in M$ for this :-S

Half Life 2 Episode 2 (First Person Shooter)
I dont need to tell the plot, everyone knows. The series follows as HL, HL2, HL2-ep1, and now HL2-ep2. The game has a riveting plot with many questions unawnsered. The best part of HL games, is the gameplay. The game emerged as the best game ever made when a wonderful story was interleaved with it. To know the story properly you may visit saga website. Set to be released on Oct 9. Also called the Orange/Black box.

Need For Speed ProStreet (Driving)
You can also call it NFS-11. This game is going to be in daylight as oppose to last game, carbon. Also a good part about the gameplay is the feel of extreme speed; If you have seen the gameplay sample videos, you will know. The graphics engine will involve a very good and realistic model of smoke. Set to release at the usual Need for Speed quater 4th: Oct 30. Its coming pretty early this time btw.

Crysis (First Person Shooter)
Crysis is the most hyped game I have ever heard in my life. Why shouldn't it be? If you look at the screenshots, they are vivid and stunning. Its going to be a graphics master piece. The plot goes very simple as some aliens are planning an invasion on earth but futuristic marines have to make the invaders retreat. This game's marketing includes the mention of Crytek, who developed FarCry as well. This is set to release on Nov 16.

Condemned 2 (First Person Action)
I am going to play this game only because I want to know what happens to the main character from Condemned. This is not a really good game however has an important element of only meelee weapons usage. To be released between Jan to April 2008.

Spore (Strategy, MMO)
This is a totally different game I am going to try. Spore is all about evolution. You have to evolve from an amoeba into an intelligent species capable of travelling through space between planets, may be invading them or making them your ally. You can be a darth vader as well in this whole setting with some rebellion finally tearing you down by destroying your death star. Set to release somewhere between april and july 2008.

Fear 2 (First Person Shooter)
FEAR's gameplay was one of the best I have ever played. Slowing down time (factually, you increase your response time) and then killing enemies is fun. However you have to manage your response time energy to fight with many enemies. The response time can be also be used to dodge rockets/bullets. Dont know, as much is not releaved on how the next will be in the series.

Dreamfall Chapters (Adventure)
The Longest Journey with its sequel Dreamfall involved one of the best stories I have heard in my life, carrying a lot of emotions as well which you never get to see in video games. Dreamfall Chapters will be released as 3 episodes following the cliff hanger ending of Dreamfall.

Rage (First Person Shooter + Driving)
ID Software finally thought of keeping Doom, Quake, Wolf aside and thought of something totally new. Rage will show a post apcalyptic world trying to recover from wounds it gave to itself (wars). Graphics will feature 'Mega-texture' technology which is not a big deal technically but will deliver very vibrant graphics. It will mostly produce variety to the landscapes but I really think it will get ignored by gamers. But ID software games have always kicked ass and this will as well.

Half Life 2 Episode 3 (First Person Shooter)
After Episode 2, this is going to be next episode. I dont really like this episodic nature, as they are taking as much time as creating a whole game to release an episode, when its meant to come in short period of times. release date to be announced, I think it will come in 2009 or later.

Technology at its rise

2007-07-11T17:45:00.000+05:30

Follows independent articles about: NPR, Dreamfall, Neo1973

NPR Based Entertainment:

I was really glad to see the young NPR (non-photo realistic rendering) in action in some of the new movies. The movies I was really impressed with were these:

A Scanner Darkly
'A Scanner darkly' features a wonderful conversion of real video into hand drawn rendering. Colors are selected really well and final output is polished with extra animations like hairs, clothes etc. (Well when actually I think that thats how the movie may have been done, theres a great possibility that thousands of artists were hired to manually do each frame. Just a thought)

Renaissance
This movie is a simple animation movie but with its lighting model as toon shading. Adding ease, it features toon shading between only 2 colors, black and white. Its not as easy as it sounds though, since they have done this with as much adaptivity as that the whole scene has good visibility, not too black, nor too white.

Earlier NPR has surely been used, but only as a helping hand. Eg. Most Disney hand drawn Animation movies featured rich environment. When main characters were drawn by really talented artists, most of the elements in the environment were computer generated, and were made with NPR algorithms so that they get merged with artists' figures and dont blob out as artificially rendered objects.

Possibly Linkin Park's Video "Breaking the Habit" from album Meteora, features similar NPR animations.

Apart from these, MTV's Spiderman features some wonderful work of NPR over computer graphics. MTV's Spiderman looks totally hand-drawn and half of the times you will confuse it with Justice League or something. Though I still think their character animation is not that good and it repeatedly gives the feel that its computer generated.

Games run ahead of movie industry by the way. So of course games also have started featuring NPR animations where necessary. Eg. Teenage Mutant Ninga Turtles emerged as a cartoon in the 90s and the game needed to give the feel. Teenage Mutant Ninga Turtles (XBOX) serves.

I would really like to know more such creations based on NPR. Please comment if you know more such movies/games/shows.

DreamFall
I have been playing this game called "Dreamfall, the longest journey", its fantasy adventure game which I first thought will be as gay as Harry Potter or something. But while playing the first 10 minutes I was totally engulfed in it and turned out to be wonderful.

What I like most in Dreamfall is the main character. Her name is "Zoe", she is beautiful and really hot. But she talks too much and is really weak. Half of the time when I am playing as her, I die easily and I am flaming at the enemy like "Dammit, she is a girl, how can you hit her?"
April is another character, she is 10 yrs older, not that good looking, but she is tough and its comfortable to fight as her. She talks less as well.

The games main focus is story telling, not much game play. There are just too many characters to interact and too many dialogs. In such a setting, the use of half life 2 engine is the best since it masters in showing facial expressions and smooth character animations. Though this would be just an addition, but HL2 engine would have served Dreamfall much better.

Neo1973
What Iphone offers versus what is its cost I think it is worthed and is a really good deal in front of Nokia N99 or whatever crap is going to come out. Apart from this, there is an internal news that iphone in India will arrive one year later and will cost 20K... fair enough i think.

However my concern is neither iphone nor nokia. I am looking forward to Neo1973. This is an open source phone over a Linux kernel. It (will) feature most of the things which iphone offers + 3G internet connection instead of edge which gives it an edge over iphone. But i believe the best part is that it is open source. There will be complete freedom to choose your service provider and accessories. With tones of softwares and drivers available for that phone it will be possible to connect it to monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, wireless network and what not. It will be like a complete computer in your pocket. Where Iphone will be like a Macbook in which you will be stuck with apple only hardware & software, Neo1973 will be like an x86 arch machine on which you can install whatever OS you want. Eagerly waiting for Neo1973.

Fedora 7, Compiz, Nvidia

2007-06-20T16:31:00.001+05:30

I play games on linux (q3, q4, doom3 etc.) with the nvidia drivers fine tuned with 'nvidia-settings' for anti-aliasing, v-sync, texture sharpening, digital vibrancy etc.. As I installed Fedora 7 some days back, I started using the wonderful desktop effects (compiz) as well.

Problem is that all this doesn't coincide with each other. Quake3 (or any other 3d-application) cannot run together with compiz desktop. Moreover Nvidia high quality settings may slow down compiz.

For this what I need is that compiz should stop when I run a 3d application. I also need nvidia high quality settings loaded only/exclusively for the application and not for the desktop.

Settings this up is very simple. Write a script "stopcompizfor.sh" which stops compiz, runs the application, and when it finishes, starts compiz again. (Note below is only for gnome)

#!/bin/sh
app=$@
if test -z "$app"
then
echo "usage: stopcompizfor <3d-application>"
exit
else
compizpid=`ps -C compiz -o pid=`
if test -z "$compizpid"
then
echo "Compiz not running anyway, continuing normally."
$app
else
echo "Disabling Desktop Effects for [ $app ]"
killall -9 compiz
killall -9 gtk-window-decorator
metacity --replace &
$app
echo "Starting Desktop Effects"
killall -9 metacity
gtk-window-decorator --replace &
compiz --replace gconf &
fi
fi

Kaur posted some changes to the dark blue part for KDE and Beryl, thanks :)

killall -9 beryl
killall -9 emerald
kwin --replace &
$app
echo "Starting Desktop Effects"
killall -9 kwin
beryl --replace &
emerald --replace &

Start 'nvidia-settings' and fine tune the settings upto your choice, this will create a file ~/.nvidia-settings-rc, save it in some other location. Run 'nvidia-settings' again and restore normal settings. Now, write a script "nvhqfor.sh" (nvidia high quality for) which loads the high quality settings, runs the application, and when it finishes, loads the default settings again.

#!/bin/sh
app=$@
if test -z "$app"
then
echo "usage: nvhqfor <3d-application>"
exit
else
echo "Loading NVIDIA High Quality Settings"
nvidia-settings --load-config-only
--config=/home/user/.nv-high-quality-settings
$app
echo "Restoring NVIDIA Default settings"
nvidia-settings --load-config-only
##--config=/home/user/.nv-low-quality-settings
fi

Now its all set, to run quake3 with compiz automatically stopped all I have to do is,

stopcompizfor quake3

and it runs like charm, if I wish to run quake3 with high quality settings, then I run,

stopcompizfor nvhqfor quake3
or
nvhqfor stopcompizfor quake3

not only this, I am a graphics programmer, and compiz effects (live thumbnail and expose) are helpful while programming. So my scripts are helpful there as well,
stopcompizfor ./renderer configs/puget-sound.cfg

w00t!

Fedora 7 reviewed, it's l33t

2007-06-11T12:45:00.000+05:30

I have been using Fedora Core 4 and recently I installed Fedora 7, and I must say that Linux has come a really long way. I am not writing this as a Linux fanboy/g33k; I use what is useful, convenient, and what does the work... F7 seems perfect! I wrote this post because F7 is very new, help does exist on the web, but "you won't feel lucky" while searching on Google.

First of all the best part is the install size, you can safely turn down the packages you don't want to install. I installed a total of only 2.8GB while including all important packages like X11, vi, gnome, open office, Gimp, tetex, gstreamer, various servers, most programming stuff blah blah etc (I didn't include KDE, stupid Linux games, firewalls, printer stuff etc).

Access good quality of screenshot from local network here

In terms of features, what I liked most is that F7 includes ntfs-3g (enables read/WRITE support on NTFS drives), Firefox-2.0, pidgin, compiz, BitTorrent Client (though not useful for us), Remote Desktop (fancy name for VNC), rhythmbox (was available earlier as well); i.e. you don't have to painstakingly install them from third party sources.

But some softwares you DO have to install from third party locations they being commercial softwares or non-GPL followers. These softwares are:
1. nvidia/ati drivers
2. third party yum repositories
3. xmms and its mp3 support / mp3 support for rhythmbox.
4. mplayer / vlc
5. flash plugin for Firefox & other extensions
6. realplayer (if you need it) (may be necessary for South Park fans)

Before I get to detail, first start you network and setup proxy. Put your ip-address through setup or system-config-network. This will enable pinging your local network and Firefox to work. Put DNS so that pidgin can work. Put these line in /root/.bashrc,

export http_proxy=192.168.36.204:8080
export ftp_proxy=192.168.36.204:8080
This will enable wget and yum to harness the internet.

1. Get the nvidia drivers from nvidia.com and install it in init 3 mode. However this wont help, it will give errors. To fix this you must see Kulbir Saini posts here. Thanks Kulbir.

2. You should install yum repositories other than default fedora ones otherwise you wont get third party stuff. You should at least install livna repository. Setup your yum properly. Its explained really well here in short. Once IIIT-H's repository starts featuring F7, it will be even better.

3. mp3 problem: I have been using xmms, but since in windows I use Media Player 11 media library, I chose Rhythmbox as it features a decent media library management. I Read from here & here and just did,

yum -y install libmad libid3tag
gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad
gstreamer-plugins-mp3
I left it for the whole night, it installed well without the Linux's bad habit of crying in everything.

4. yum -y install mplayer

It installed without problems, but mplayer didn't run as it failed to load some libraries. This may depend on the package you discarded while installing F7, for me I was getting "shared library 404" error for aalib, xvidcore, fibidi etc. Just yum install these small libraries and mplayer is good to go.

5. flash for Firefox, get it from adobe's website. Extensions which you may need are Mouse gestures, Video Downloader, Delicious Bookmarks and DownThemAll (quite similar to flashget)

6. Just get the real player 10 gold rpm from real's website.

SMB, ftp, http etc. work as usual, no issues, they always worked good in Linux. It seemed as if SMB is faster than netbios (windows file sharing). Seems opposite, because netbios possibly uses DMA (thus should be faster), and SMB (i think) is an emulation. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Now one thing remains for graphics card people. That is compiz.

1. You can access it from "Desktop Effects" feature from the menu. IF you enable it your window decorations may disappear. This page explains really well what to do to solve this.

2. Desktop effects are through compiz and not beryl. You have to install beryl if you really want to, but I think compiz is good enough.

3. one thing about compiz is that you should not run 3D applications with a compiz desktop, it will run slow and jerky. This is something similar which happens in Windows Vista, though Vista takes care of it by putting the desktop in non-3d mode leaving the 3d hardware for the application. In F7 you should manually turn off "desktop effects" to run the 3d apps properly.

4. Emerald theme manager, which is theme manager of compiz, is not installed by default. This means you will be able to install only Metacity themes (normal gnome themes). To get the emerald thingy working you must install beryl. The theme on my screen shot is Metacity theme "Vista Look".

Other than above what I liked, are these things:

1. my drives are soft linked with various ids in /dev/disk/. For eg. they were linked with my drive labels I kept in windows. if I used label "LocalDisk1" for C:, then I can mount it directly through /dev/disk/by-label/LocalDisk1. Quite intuitive.

2. Rhythmbox is accepting all special keys of my multimedia keyboard. Without focusing rhythmbox I can go to next/previous song, mute, play/pause/stop music. I use these keys in windows to the fullest, now will in Linux as well.

3. Sound driver is amazing! You don't have to worry about your xmms/rhythmbox locking the driver for other softwares. All softwares sound are running simultaneously. Sound driver used is ALSA which worked like charm on first shot.

4. I was just browsing through menus and got my glance on "Remote Desktop". It is originally VNC. Best part was that I did some few clicks on the simple GUI and my VNC server was setup for my SAME LOCAL DESKTOP. It is totally similar to "Remote Desktop" feature of windows. You must be thinking VNC was always there, but earlier it had to be something other than system:0 desktop and it had to be setup manually which I don't like to do usually.

Earlier is used to be like this:
Mike: Hey man, do you know fedora released its new version!
John: Hmm, what? I heard they released yesterday fedora4 or was it 5?
Mike: No man this one is 6.
John: yeah whatever, I bet during your installation, another version will come out.

But Fedora 7 is some real good work, and is not yet another fedora release. Bravo! wonderful, fedora people, my applause!

Why Meaningless Hatred?

2007-05-25T16:07:00.000+05:30

Have you seen Hindi movies? of course you have, most of them show Rich people as evil. Why is that so? You see, directors exploit the fact that most of the Indians are middle/poor class people, and that they hate rich people. We have heard things such as these, "These rich people are drunkard", "They dont get sleep at night", "They are always in tension about their money", "Their kids are usually spoilt". 90% of above is NOT TRUE! Is this hatred valid? Does this hatred make sense? Well ok, rich people suck in some matters, but poor people suck in somethings too. We all suck one way or the other.

Why did you laugh at Amitabh Bachchan when he had money crunch?
Why do you call that good looking girl a slut ugly bitch... because she is not with you?
Why do you feel good when Ambani brothers fight with each other?
Why does Eminem raps this in "Sing for the moment"
To havin' a fortune, no more kissin' ass
But then these critics crucify you, journalists try to burn you
Fans turn on you, attorney's all gonna turn it to
To get their hands on every dime you have
They want you to lose your mind every time you mad
So they can try to make you out to look like a loose canon
?

Have you seen English movies? Handful of Hollywood movies show scientists as normal and good people. The reason is something totally similar to what is in India. You see Americans are not really well educated. When most 20 year Indians know what calculus is, it is a real big deal in America. Only PHDs are supposed to know such things. And you all know its usually the educated, who makes money and fame. When no one is poor there, they don't hate the rich, but they hate the educated and famous ones. And again the Hollywood directors exploit this meaningless hatred. Nerds are shown unsocial in school, Geeks are shown fat stinky freaks, big corporates are shown money grabbing selfish people, scientists are shown doing crazy things not good for humanity blah blah blah.

In the movie Renaissance (spoilers start here) the police officer kills a researcher so that her inhuman research doesn't get published and remains buried (spoilers end). The directors should get their facts corrected that in research if one fails there will be more than 4 other teams around the world working on the exact same thing and they will take no time to get it out in a conference.

How many times have you said that that girl got a 9 CGPA because of unfair means. Well how the fuck did she cleared AIEEE with a good rank asswhipe?

Why does Linux Community hate Microsoft so much?
Because Microsoft made money out of shitty DOS and their shitty Windows 95? is that the reason? How shitty is your Linux compared to dos and windows 95? Well, you linux guys want people to use the shitty "./configure; make; make install" softwares you make? You just hate Microsoft because it is rich. Admit it!

Why critics started saying stupid things about Google that they don't keep your privacy? You critics were all fine with Google couple of years back, but when suddenly it started becoming a giant, you came up with exaggerating microscopic things like privacy. I mean come on, you are just a person in one corner of the world, know one gives a shit about your stupid privacy. What will you lose if Google sniffs a little data of yours?

Next time hatred comes to your mind, be a man enough to admit that the other person is at a higher ground and you should NOT hate him just because of that. Admit it, clean the hate OR make sure you hate him only if he has really done some injustice with you.

It is not the rich man's fault that he worked hard when he was young and made money. The nerd never hurt you when he studied all the time and made a lot of money later. You are living with accessories and comfort because of science and its you who make bad movies about scientists. It is not the smart guy's fault that the girl fell for him and not for you. Admit it and stay away from hatred.

A Minused Fine Art

2007-05-15T22:30:00.000+05:30

Well Ohkay, I don't draw fingers that well, but come on, no one did.
(Click on it to see in full resolution.
For quick intranet access, use this link)

Welcome to team India

2007-05-02T14:26:00.000+05:30

Click to see the sketch in full resolution:

The madness of 300

2007-03-24T22:37:00.000+05:30

You are a madman! madman! Persian or Greek, no one threatens a messenger! This is blasphemy! This is madness!
madness? THIS IS SPARTA!!

Those were the dialogs in the trailer of 300 (Movie by WB) when I saw it along with other trailers: Pans Labyrinth, Harry gay Potter's next movie and Spiderman 3. Seeing the stunning visuals, I thought that this is in my must watch list.

Then came the second trailer, which kicked all trailers out! I was like, I got to see this movie dude! Not only me, everyone became crazy about it.

As it got released, some early reviews came that the movie is not that good. I told depressed people just one sentence, "The Matrix also got bad reviews in the begining"

(if reader is not from IIIT-H, leave the blue sentences)

Anyway, one day suddenly an astonishing news came that it will be shown on Movie Club. People freaked out on the 'board' completely (people posted so many messages that old messages were out of log). All messages were asking for the movie to be shared. But according to policy, it wasn't shared until shown in da club.

Finally 300 was shown and the hall was full. As full, that many people stood and watched the whole 2 hour movie.

After this, people on 'board' again flushed out the previous requests messages with all kinds of 300 dialogs, whichever you have heard in trailor as well as in the movie (if seen). Some saying the persian dialogs and some replying with leonadis's boasts.

Movie got finally shared, and then the rage happened. You wont believe me but the movie was shared by 40 users! That is a record of any file getting shared by so many users (please correct me if I am wrong).

Going towards my room that night, I heard 300 dialogs roaring loud out of 2000W speakers from many rooms.

I arrived, cleaned my room (Yes! I cleaned a semesters junk just to see the movie properly), and watched it.

Next morning I woke up and while going to mess for breakfast, I heard the same loud dialogs again from some room, I was really happy that I am not the only person super mad for this movie.

The movie (as seen in trailers) had gaudy scenes. Each and every frame of the movie seemed as if was polished in photoshop or something. The graphics animations (yes there were some) were amazing. Dialogs were inspiring and moving? It is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, though I didn't find anything violent in it.

IMDB says that the movie is 'loosely' based on Frank Miller's Comic '300'. But if you read the comics, the movie is an exact copy of it. Each scene goes with each comic strip, all dialogs word to word. Though some parts were moved before and later, some portion added etc. but otherwise the movie is the comics, no difference. Check a comparison out here

Get the comics from this page.

The music in 300 trailers is not in the OSTs. It is
Nine Inch Nails - Just Like You Imagined

Apart from that, 300 fans should also read the real encounter here

Also read the IMDB trivia, first fact says "The film was shot in 60 days" Interesting, isn't it? Read here

I am going to see the movie in IMAX next week and I don't know how many times I am going to see it. E.g. I never knew I would play the whole of Half Life 2 seven times.

PS: Govt. should stop paying crickers and in return of that should stop collecting taxes from our fathers
PS2: I am going to use Cricker as a swear from now on
PS3: 300 kicked ASS

In OBH (Explicit Lyrics)

2007-03-04T17:30:00.000+05:30

Check this song out! No offense to anyone, rap is meant to be obscene!

ORB - In OBH (explicit).mp3

Lyrics of the song:

go go go go go go
hey shawty, its ur birthday
give us a party like, its ur birthday
v gonna give u bumps like, its ur birthday
and truly v dont ---- if its ur birthday

[chorus 2x]
you can find me in obh
which is full of boys
u geeks i got that X, if u into taking frags
ppl are watching ----, they dont like to watch the drags
come over here man, fun if u wanna hav

[verse1]
when i came here, the ug2 ragged me really bad
told me to whipe my smile and my ---, i hated them for that
its not my prob, but they were ----- even bad
though as the days went on it became a game
But homie stop it, illegal bull----'s up
then i saw ppl in the rooms, like playboi rolling quake up
when i move, u mistake me for a dude or geek
even got an F in bio informatics
in arts, games, cg, they said "orb u rock"
delhi gang wanna ---- with everyone of buds
but lets leave that and watch other other college-mates
uber dudes showed up as juniors are mandate
some escaped man, they ragged at that time,
and they dint get accused and they are still on the grind
however chicks are really less, which is a big trade off
thats why my lyrics say that man guys are jerkin off
wokay!

[chorus 2x]

my codes, my show brought me the dough
that bought me all my fancy skills
my player, my card, my style, i m cool
so nigga make sure, keep cgpa good

[verse2]
coz u should love it, it even gets u money,
faculties never mad, its good that everyone makes it
v can download movies games and lead a happy life
but that ------ sysadmin is trying 2 stop that back rite?
plus mess, got that ------- food hav 2 eat digestive pills
then pay fake electic bills
if the roofs are on fire, let these ------------ burn
if u talking about fees homie, it went titan
but dont get mad, good times are better and cheer up
if problems come, let them come, let them pile up
lets go with a paaint of KingFisher
u know where v ----- be

[chorus 2x]

[talking]
[laughing]
dont try 2 act like u never been to obh -----
v r in obh all the time, -----, all the time high -----
in orb's "by me"

If OS were humans

2007-02-27T16:31:00.000+05:30

Meet Mr. Windows. No one has ever been able to understand Mr. Windows. He can be a real headache sometimes as he gets brain washed by bad people all the time and starts doing other things (Less security and frequent virus attacks). He himself complains to us about his frequent misbehaviour and takes drugs and steroids to keep himself from bad people (Windows updates, Service Packs). He is a little unfaithful as well, God knows what goes in his mind while he is doing your work (Registry, DRM, etc.).

However, whatever people say, people always have to go to him to get things done, since he has the maximum contacts in this world (All applications, all PC games are available on windows). If you have to get your things done quickly, contact Mr. Windows. He is an expert in that and thats what really matters right?

Mr. Linux has some real attitude problems, you have to explain to him each and everything and convince him really hard to get things done (Everything needs to be configured). Sometimes people convince him for over a month for a work of a few hours. Also there are just millions of species of him (population of distros). However he doesnt get brain washed and is very honest about what is going on in his mind (No Virus attacks, secure, clean). Best part, he doesnt ask for money! (Free Software) Also, he is working hard in increasing his contacts these days (Lot of softwares are coming for linux).

So basically, if you can learn and live with his attitude (if you are a g33k), you can make him do anything (literally anything): you will lead a worry-less life. Good for freedom lovers.

Miss Macintosh is usually known for her loveliness (Good GUI). She is blonde, beautiful and people work less and flirt with her more (mingle with GUI all the time). Her followers have always been saying that she will become most popular, but that 'will' is there for 20 years. Her appreciators say, she is secure... I will tell you the truth, she is so lame that brain washers dont bother. Dont know if she is honest, well actually noone cares. On top of all these, she asks for money and an environment to work (Only on apple hardware).

So, if you wish to burn some money and have to have a good show-piece in your office, hire Miss Macintosh.

Movie Mania

2007-02-10T21:19:00.000+05:30

I have been seeing quite a lot of movie lately leading me to come up with the idea below, check it out!

Shader Model 4.0 examples

2007-01-31T22:16:00.000+05:30

Seeing the very little help available online, we just shared some example codes for Shader Model 4.0 with OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL version 1.20. These examples are working on Nvidia 8800 GTX with Linux, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

They mostly are for the following 3 new features:
Geometry Shader, Transform Feedback, Layered Rendering
we will add more features example later

The codes are kept at this following location:
http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/index.php?page=resources

First you must setup your system to be fit with running GLSL 1.20 codes. Following are the step by step process of doing so:

1. First install the proper version of nvidia drivers for the operating system you are working on: Linux: 97.46, Windows XP: 97.92, Windows Vista: 100.54 (or later of course)
Get all above from this location http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

2. You are done with installation but still some main features are hindered (GL_EXT_gpu_shader4, GL_EXT_geometry_shader4, GL_EXT_bindable_uniform). For opening them download nvemulate, run it, and enable 'no emulation' with 'G80 features' turned on (you should be administrator when you do this). Get it from this place http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvemulate.html
For linux people, just insert this line in your xorg.conf/XFree86.conf file
Option "RegistryDwords" "8F773984=7"

3. Windows users should download and install GLee 5.21 (or later) from http://elf-stone.com/glee.php (No one does the APIENTRY crap these days). You have to add GLee.cpp in your project and add glee.lib while linking.

4. Now run glxinfo on xterm (linux), Run wglinfo.exe on cmd.exe, get wglinfo from http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~wimmer/wglinfo/ (windows)
See if you can see GL_EXT_geometry_shader4 in the clutter of text. If you can, you system is ready to compile and run SM4 codes.

5. Now just unzip the files, do make (if Linux) or create a project, add the files in your project and compile and link (if windows). You are ready to play with shader model 4.0 features. See the screenshot within zip files, to verify you are getting correct outputs.

By the way, Shader Model 4.0 is also called the Direct X 10 Architecture

Primitive/Latest Coins

2007-01-08T00:55:00.000+05:30

I was wandering around one of our excavation sites when suddenly a wall broke down and I found 2 coins. The specialty of these coins was that it was written 2005 BC on them. More surprisingly, it contained the letters: INDIA. I read some books in the museum and found that around 2000 years before Christ, there was a country named 'India' as the dominant of that time. Please see the photo below, the photo is blurred to preserve my ownership to them.
(Above written text is shibenism)

I was wandering around in Pati's room when suddenly our ordered Biryani came in and I received 2 coins as change. The specialty of these coins was that it was written 2005 on them. More surprisingly, it contained a plus kind of sign closely resembling our OBH hostel. I read some web pages and found absolutely nothing about that plus sign. Please see the photo above, the photo is blurred because I don't have a good camera in my phone.
(Above written text is humanism)

Lets rip on population

2006-12-30T11:41:00.000+05:30

How can India use it's basic resource: Population

Indian population is very high, it's just so high that wherever you go you can see people and people and nothing else. Being part of that population makes me feel that I suck as well, since I am also contributing to it. But how about converting this curse into a gift, by converting population into resources?
Some ideas for this:

1. Indian population is 10^9 right now, height of each human being is 1.5 meters (lets assume), implying that a human ladder of length 1.5*10^9 meters can be created. Distance from the moon is only 3.6*10^8 meters meaning the ladder can reach moon. Astronauts can climb this ladder, or in fact human-ladder can keep pulling the astronaut up, by their hands one by one. Note that humans are used and not metallic resources nor engines nor any transportation mean; Work done with a cheaper resource: population.

India can send an astronaut to moon right now! As a matter of fact India can challenge NASA that seeing the growing population rate, the ladder can become as long as to reach mars up till 2010 only, before NASA's target i.e. 2014 !!! NASA sucks!

Now what about launching satellites? pulling up a heavy satellite can be tiring. Solution: We can create the satellite right at the end of ladder i.e. from were it has to start revolving, meaning only the parts of the satellite should be pulled up. But one problem! the manufacturing of satellite is to be done at top, meaning top person should be an engineer; No problem, seeing tones of engineering colleges in India, how about using engineers themselves to make the whole ladder? Engineers will be a good part of engineering work as well: pulling up the parts of a satellite! Much challenging and patriotic than what we do for Multi National Companies.

How about creating a natural satellite? Easy, ladder will pull up rocks. The last man will have fevicol with him, he will keep sticking these rocks to the previous ones and: viola, we have another moon for superstitious Indians.

2. If I have to speak to a person 100 km away, no need of tele-communication, nor wires, nor electricity! Just use population! Keep some people standing at a distance from which they can hear from the previous person, and you are done! you speak something to your mic (mic man), he will shout it to the other, then that person will shout to the other, and so on and finally the speaker (speaker man) will speak in the same tone as original. Problem is, that the speed of communication is speed of sound + human response time times no. of samples. But look how wonderful use of population!

3. Indian population can simply end some research fields namely: Object tracking, Machine learning, Natural Language processing. How?

Object tracking: Instead of writing stupid algorithms for cameras, use us Indians, there are just so many of us, that if you replace every camera with it, even then our population wont exhaust. India can export robust object trackers. This sounds like a paper in CVPR

Machine Learning: Why do you want to make a computer learn when a much easier learning system called a human is available in abundance in India?

NLP: I just don't see the point of using computers to translate languages, when there are ready made robust translators available to us in India: Indians! just accompany each human being with N Indians, where N is the number of languages in this world, each Indian knows one language and will translate it to the person when required.

4. You wont believe that India, which is not at all in gaming market, can overtake it in one shot! The idea is that instead of bots, use Indians.

A very good example is Age of Empires, where every villager, scout, knight, blah blah can be replaced by an Indian. There will be 10 Indians looking at the gamers keyboard, they will shout at the bot Indians what they have to do something according to the gamer. The whole scene can be recorded by a crappy camera and brought to gamers monitor. EA games, Ubisoft, will die but will never produce graphics more real than this.

Another example is augmented reality quake in which bots will be Indians. One problem though, quake maps are sometimes very awkward, ugly, scary, weired. wait wait, I have solution... use Bihar & MP for the maps! For playing nightmare and noise making bots, play in Harayana. For playing with lame bots, play in Rajasthan.

5. MNCs like Java sun systems are famous for creating big big servers, but the thing they fail to provide is a 'Programming box'. What India can do is put us computer engineers graduating from the tones of colleges into boxes with a computer, a toilet, and someway of feeding tube. You can tell this box vocally what kind of program you want and give it 10 minutes, it will write a program for you! This box puts out oil waste in the morning and needs electricity and whatever food you want to give it. Fantastic way of using the brainy part of population.

6. Humopedia, A straight challenge to wikipedia, each Indian can be assigned to remember one whole page about something and as soon as a query is put on humopedia.org, the specified person can start talking about it. No need to store pages on costly servers

Lets make India the best using the population in the correct ways!

(Offense meant! Indian population can take it, offense meant to me myself as well being a part of it.
Thanks to Smr, Vidit, Paresh, Skp, Jagmohan, Visesh for discussing and adding innovation (read offense) to a few of the ideas. This was on Smr's LotD)

nvidia 8800 gtx

2006-12-25T00:15:00.000+05:30

CVIT just got the latest piece of hardware from nvidia. It can also be called g80 8800GTX. It has got the unified architecture (Shader Model 4.0 or Directx 10 Architecture), means that now there is no distinction between type of shaders, a single core (or more importantly a group) gets assigned the work of the one required. Thats not it, there are lot of other superb features of this new card (Eg. GL_EXT_geometry_shader4), which I cannot pen down here but I would really like to display some pics of it:
8800 is huge, longer than the bulky 7950
Since you may not know the size of these, compare it with a reynolds pen
I will now use the 7950 and will leave the 1800, btw, 1800 is same size as of 7950
8800 resides with Graphics Server 'Carmack'

Terrain Deformation Demo

2006-12-05T06:19:00.000+05:30

This is a terrain deformation video I made as a demo of the latest OpenGL 2.1 (SM3.0 though) extensions involving Frame Buffer Objects, Vertex Buffer Objects, Pixel Buffer Objects, Multiple Render Targets, and nvidia CG shaders. With the help of these extensions, I was able to push everything on the GPU. Thing to notice here is that the performance is amazing. Imagine how wonder it will be with SM4.0!

It's recommended that you download these versions

Download [WMV]
Download [MPG]

Or just stream it:

I had 2 render targets, one the terrain, other the texture of the terrain. According to deforming points, I change the terrain and the composite the texture with some other at that place. Take the terrain texture, convert it to a VBO (with the help of PBO extension), draw the VBO with changed terrain texture. Note: No stupid vertex texture is used.

Best part: I don't have to remember what happened when those explosions took place. My terrain can keep on changing without my knowledge!

Wii ? Xbox 360 ? PS3 ? PC ?

2006-12-02T16:09:00.000+05:30

It's a real confusion which console to take, first of all whether to ditch PC or not is a big question.

Why NOT PC gaming?

Seeing prices of graphics cards and associated hardware (RAM, CPU, MOB) building a PC for gaming is heavily costly; Don't forget your system is going to become mid level in 1 year for gaming. Either you be with your slow hardware and reduce game settings OR keep updating your system like Somu does all the time.

Now lets see if you have a PC worth 25K (believe me, which is more than enough for web browsing, office suites, email stuff, chatting, playing music, movies, screwing with TV tuning etc) and you have a gaming console which the most costly right now is PS3 (should be around 35K in India). Television you are going to have one anyway, so the total cost comes to some 60K (far less than a newly assembled system with all latest hardware). Also note that this PC is going to be your partner for atleast 5 years easily (since you are not playing games on it) and the next gen console is not coming out for another 4 years. When in the other case you have to keep updating your PC every 6 months to get the most out of games.

You must be saying that, since we are not updating our console's hardware (which anyway is not possible) the graphics are going to be reduced for newer and newer games; which is equivalent to reduced graphics in my not updated PC gaming system! Well said but: It is totally not equivalent, game developers work on a single hardware (the console) when developing for console and thus they can make it perfectly balanced between performance and appearance.

This is totally not possible for the PC version of the same game since they have to support all kinds of hardware and all combinations of those hardware. They provide you with various settings and leave it totally up to you to setup the settings according to your system. You never know whether you have selected the best settings, you probably will be reducing too much and not taking most out of your system. You have installed a 5GB game when you will be playing the game with only 700MB of the data.

Clearly the above is not so with consoles. They will make the game look good no matter what, one way or the other, since they are developing on one single hardware and it's guaranteed that the same hardware will be with everyone which is the console. Eg. Xbox (old one) was not so good for normal mapping, thus "half life 2" people totally scrapped out normal mapping and focused on improving graphics through other hacks.

If console, Which one?

A question whose answer even I am searching for. One thing for sure is that as soon as the console is released it should be bought so that it's their with you for the time its hip and happening and you keep getting latest games. BUT WHICH ONE DAMMIT!?

Nintendo Wii
This is the one I have on my mind, it has got the latest style of controllers; Or lets say a revolutionary console when other consoles have the same old-school controllers, clearly a cliche. Wii hasn't got that good of a hardware but it's controller is a needo! its a motion sensed controller by which you will be actually making the moves which your character will be making on the screen. Lets just see the points:

Advantages:
1. New style of controller
2. Less hardware, clearly cheap (should be around 13k in India)
3. Less hardware, less power consumption, less noise, less electric bill
4. New style of controller giving workouts to people, finally gamers will get to move around.
5. Going to get super famous because of its controller, and being cheap, means good and latest games guaranteed on Wii!

Disadvantages:
1. Less hardware, clearly not so good graphics
2. Supported only up to 720p HDTV (display resolution)
3. For doing other things than gaming, should have PC
4. Though provided more freedom with 2 controllers (nunchuck and pad) gaming engrossement can damage the controller since theres a stupid wire between the two controllers.

Microsoft Xbox 360

Don't forget xbox is Microsoft's, when M$ does something it does it good. Its nothing new just that it has good hardware. Otherwise it's a same old gaming console with same old controller. I quite think it should have been named Xbox 2.

Advantages:
1. Good hardware, good graphics
2. Supports 1080p HDTV (display resolution)
3. Media Center, maintain your music and multimedia on your console.
4. Already famous, good games already arriving

Disadvantages:
1. More hardware, more power consumption, more electric bill.
2. More hardware, costlier than Wii. (Its 20K in India)
3. For doing other things than gaming, multimedia etc. should have PC

Sony Playstation 3

Playstation 3 is a bulky system released by Sony with a lot of hardware packed up. Same problem that the controller is the same old PS2 style, nothing new.

Advantages:
1. Best hardware, best graphics
2. Supports 1080p HDTV (display resolution)
3. Blue ray disk drive, not available for so cheap anywhere except on PS3
4. Install Linux, run windows on VMware, (probably) no need of PC
5. Media Center, maintain your music and multimedia on your console.
6. Sony is a giant, will make it famous one way or other, games will arrive whether they like it or not

Disadvantages:
1. Very high power consumption, even more electric bill
2. Even more hardware, very costly (should be around 35K in India)

So is PS3 the best since its having most advantages?
Sounds true from above analysis. But look closely and see if the advantage/disadvantage is something which really matters?

Points to ponder upon

Graphics: PS3 wins but then you should know that for a good game, graphics is not the only thing, its the gameplay. A very good example is that Xbox360 live is giving away OLD school games like UMK3 (mortal kombat etc.) for 360 when they can be run on 0.001 times less powerful systems. Also, I have seen common people, never even noticing the graphical improvements which we (graphics people) keep boasting about. So end result, graphics, not so strong point to ponder upon.

Controller: When playing Xbox 360 or PS3, you will be playing the same old style controller. But when playing Wii, you wont even feel as if you are playing Video Game, it will be amazingly something totally different! Its totally a new thing! So controller: when difference is there, its a strong point to look for.

Multimedia: Even if you can maintain your multimedia on your console, for doing other things (office stuff, email business etc.) you gonna need a PC anyway; Whats the point of maintaining your multimedia on console then? so Multimedia/Media-Center: Not at all an important point!

Cost: I wont say anything. Its in front of you: For Indians, difference between 13K, 20K & 35K is huge!

HDTV support: Well yes, true, but honestly, it should be PC which is winner in this, since it even lets you play on 3Mpixels display forget about HDTV! But coming back to consoles, which common man is gonna afford HDTV in India? Still I suppose HDTV is a strong point since anyway later they are going to become cheap.

Electric Bill: Well, a console runs for hours since games run for hours! Does your pump run for that much time? your music system for that much time? I dont think so, but a console is gonna run for 12 hours straight most of the time, clearly making 'Electric Bill' is big issue.

Blue Ray Disc: Well, a blue ray disk drive is 1000$ right now, dont know whether it will come in India at all or not. A person if really needs Blue ray disk drive right now (I dont know for what), its a good point. For a normal man, I dont see the point of getting one right now.

Ability to run Operating systems: For a real techie it can be a good point, since he probably dont need to buy a system at all! He will save quite a lot of money! so this can be a good point. PS3 clearly wins at this issue 'but' only for geeks/techies.

Famous: Well all 3 going to be equally famous and games will supposedly will come for all 3. Point is, which is going to get more famous in India? I would say Wii! since it will be cheap! And fame clearly meaning more success for that product, clearly meaning better service in that country!

Seeing the above weight of various advantages, the consoles can be divided between 3 classes of people:
1. Wii: Good for normal common people who use simple PCs and who want to enjoy different style of games as well.
2. PS3: Good for rich Geeks, techies, they can play hacks on it etc. and best part they need not buy a PC at all. But play with old style controller!
3. Xbox360: Dont know to whom its good for particularly, may be for people who dont use PC but surely want to use a multimedia system. But play with old style controller!

As for me...
I consider myself a common man, and I am not that of a techie/Linux-Geek to will find hacking a PS3 worth; neither am I rich. So no PS3 for me.
Xbox 360 can be a good choice but again when Wii stands in front of it, something which is completely innovative and cheap, I suppose 360 fades away as well.

Thus its clear: Wii is for me!!!