The Twitching of the Upper Lip | VarunAbhiram.com

Designing Album Art for Swedish band 'No Omega'

2011-10-14T23:08:00.000+05:30

Swedish rock/hardcore band 'No Omega' stumbled across my site and artwork last month, and asked me if I could design the cover for their debut full-length record 'Metropolis'. I said yes.

I had initially sent across some samples to help them decide the cover's basic look and feel, and the typography that they wanted to use. A couple of mails went back and forth, some tweaks were made here and there, and this is the final outcome —

What do you think? The tracklist and credits will be added to the back cover once the content is finalised.

Making Brownies

2011-06-25T22:12:00.002+05:30

Tried my hand at making brownies for the first time yesterday, with surprisingly awesome results! Beats the cakes and biscuits I've baked before hands down. Here are images of me at work —

What I learnt in the process —

Preheating the microwave using Convection mode. The manual could use some better writing!
You can't melt chocolate in a microwave. They come out nicely burnt.

Below is the final result —

In the picture on the right, I put a few chopped walnuts on the brownie pieces and topped it with honey. Mouth wateringly delicious is what it was!

If you want to try making these yourself, here's the recipe I used —

Ingredients:

60gms chocolate (I used a Cadbury's Dairy Milk bar)
1/3 cup butter (unsalted is ideal, but I used the regular Amul butter)
2/3 cup powdered sugar (use 1 cup if you're using unsweetened chocolate)
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
3/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup chopped walnuts (you can put more if you like!)

Method:

Cream together butter, sugar and vanilla essence. Beat in egg and add melted chocolate. Blend. Mix in flour and chopped walnuts. Pour into a greased pan and bake in a microwave preheated to 180° C for 20 minutes. That's pretty much it!

RSS Feed Improvements

2011-05-07T01:09:00.004+05:30

Got back to some PHP coding today (after more than two years!) and made some improvements to the RSS feed of VarunAbhiram.com. You'll notice that the titles are much neater now, and the feed items now feature thumbnail images! All I had to do was to hook up the RSS code to my nifty PHP script that automatically picks up images from their respective locations, scales them down and feeds them to the browser.

Small change, but makes the feed look a lot richer, wouldn't you say?

Drawing Natalie Portman from "Black Swan"

2011-04-23T00:43:00.000+05:30

Watch 6 hours of drawing, shading and digital colouring effort compressed into a little under 4 minutes —

The Making of "Flight"

2011-04-19T12:52:00.004+05:30

Since some of you have been asking, here are the base images that were used to make my recent "Flight" wallpaper —

And here's the step-wise process —

1. The three images were overlayed on each other.

2. Orientations of the images were matched to make it appear as if the birds were flying in the same direction.

3. Overlapping birds were cloned out.

4. The tones, brightness and contrast were adjusted.

5. Finally, text was added to produce the final image.

Lazy Sunday Special

2011-04-18T00:19:00.001+05:30

Was bored this evening, so I boiled a ear of sweet corn in water, removed the kernels (how time-consuming that can be!) and added some Mango Thokhu pickle, salt, chilli powder and lime juice. For lack of any alternative seasoning (and to make the photo look good), curry leaves were added at the end. Trust me, it tastes as good as it looks.

In case you've noticed, the blog also has a new design now! The template uses Google Web Fonts, which doesn't always display correctly until the page is refreshed. No idea why.

Microwave Experiments

2010-04-29T01:44:00.000+05:30

Hard to believe that a whole year of my MBA course is over! My 9-month stint at Wipro definitely felt a lot longer than this. I guess time flies when you're having fun, and when you're too busy with college work to watch the time go right out the window (as Mike would put it).

I will be in Hyderabad till tomorrow and then I'm off to Bangalore for a 2-month Summer Internship at Lenovo. What better place to spend the summer than the city with the best weather in India, and the city with the highest density of CVR population I know (no wonder I get a warm welcome every time I visit)! Ironically, it is the same city I said goodbye to not too long ago.

So what have I been upto the past two weeks here in Hyderabad? Well, mostly experimenting with the new microwave we bought at home. I tried my hand at baking a cake and some biscuits. Here are the results —

Experiment #1: Plain Cake

It looked perfect when I took it out of the microwave, it tasted just fine when I had a piece too. But as it cooled, it became real hard, and not exactly eatable — either the batter was too thick or I must have left in the microwave for too long. Whatever the case, the cake finally had to be thrown away.

Experiment #2: Shortbread

The second experiment didn't turn out as bad, thankfully. In fact, these biscuits came out amazingly well — crisp, buttery and yummy. If only I had a biscuit cutter, they would look as good as they taste!

Apart from baking stuff, I've been reading a book which I would have never imagined myself reading some months ago, and have started watching this intriguing series (with barely an opening sequence) about a bunch of people stranded on an island. I'd say I have enough to keep me occupied for quite a while, wouldn't you?

BBC World - Gaming in the Cloud

2009-12-10T01:17:00.002+05:30

BBC World's technology programme 'Click' had a small item on "Taking Gaming into the Cloud" back in June. I had commented on the article after watching the episode, but I had no idea they actually posted it on their website. What a pleasant surprise it was to stumble across the post today!

Read the entire article

Wisdom in Decay

2009-10-24T15:45:00.001+05:30

I aged an extracted tooth (not mine, in case you were wondering) for a couple of days and then photographed it the other day on black paper.

Took me around an hour and 100 or so photos before I got the perfect two shots you can see below.

I can hear you say "Ewwww!", but in my personal opinion, I think the final images turned out to be quite artistic!

New Wallpapers - Matheran, District 9

2009-10-19T18:13:00.008+05:30

Matheran (Created 3 Oct 2009)

Matheran is a popular tourist destination, located around 100km from Mumbai. Went there with a couple of friends from college soon after our end-terms got over. It was a thoroughly refreshing trip, and the horse-riding (vehicles are not allowed in Matheran) was a fun experience!

This sky and the landscape in the above image are from two different photographs I took of the place, blended together in PSP.

District 9 (Created 15 Oct 2009)

A wallpaper I made of the very unusual, grungy, science fiction film District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson. There are some who hated the movie, but I for one loved it!

Antichrist Movie Poster Competition

2009-10-18T00:21:00.009+05:30

CHUD.com had this snippet the other day about a Movie Poster Competition for the upcoming Lars von Trier flick 'Antichrist' (starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) —

IFC is looking for you to design a poster for the film. The prize? They will use YOUR POSTER in actual marketing for the movie. If you're into design this could be a major way to beef up your portfolio. How many other chances will you get to design the one sheet for a major motion picture? And if you're not into design but just good with the Photoshop, this could be an incredible opportunity to show the floating head poster makers that the little guy knows how to do it best.

Since I had nothing better to do, I actually spent the better part of the day making a poster for the movie. The original image was really huge - 5400x8000px! But you obviously don't have the time to watch a 54MB file load, so here's a much smaller version —

But when CHUD turns evil,
True tragedy awaits...

So I finish up the poster, upload the huge file to my site and go back to the post about the movie poster competition to find the email address to send it to. And what do I find? That the competition has been CANCELLED, due to some legal issues with IFC. Argh!

Oh well, I must keep telling myself that I had nothing better to do at the time I made this.

Internet Filter Fail

2009-08-30T15:22:00.004+05:30

I don't know much about Internet/URL filtering tools, but the one we use here in the hostel (Cyberoam) seems pretty crappy to me.

Oh well, so much for my IT assignment on "Does IT Provide Competitive Advantage and Improve Performance?".

SIMSR Highlights - Induction to Midterms

2009-08-15T20:08:00.004+05:30

The Swine Flu pandemic has caused quite a bit of alarm in Pune and Mumbai. It's freaky when you walk out on the roads and see half the people wearing surgical masks. Most public and private institutions have decided to close down for a week or two (how is that supposed to help?). SIMSR followed suit on 12 Aug and announced that it will be closed till 18 Aug. I caught a bus back to Hyderabad that evening itself, and reached the following day.

I noticed it's been more than two months since my last post, so here are some highlights from the recent past —

"The Big Debate" - UTVi Business News [29 Jun]

UTVi in association with CII -Yi organised a Pre-Budget Debate on 29 June at the National Centre Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai. The objective of the event was to chalk out a plan for the Indian Government to achieve a 10% growth target (more details about the event here). SIMSR was one of the several B-Schools invited to be part of the studio audience and participate in the discussion with eminent people from the indsutry.

The show was aired on 1 July (8pm-9pm), and since I happened to be sitting right in the front row, I got my bit of fame on national television. This I know because of the random "Hey, I saw you on TV!" calls from friends. I couldn't watch the programme myself as UTVi is not in the list of TV channels our college subscribes to. Damn!

Karthik's Engagement [2 Jul]

I almost forgot to mention this because the whole thing happened so fast! My brother Karthik got engaged on 2 July (congrats Karthik!). His site says "More information on that front will be revealed in due time", so I'll leave it at that here.

Impressions '09 [6-18 Jul]

Impressions was the culmination of a 2-week long induction process by our seniors. The first week was the 'serious' week, where we were given assignments related to areas of our interest. I was interested in doing something related to Branding, so I was asked to come up with ideas for the relaunch of Voices (a newspaper that is circulated to all the 32 Somaiya colleges) as an e-Newspaper.

The second week was the 'fun' week, where the entire batch was split up into groups and assigned to random events. I, unfortunately, was alloted the Group Dance event "Crazy Feet". So yeah, as incredible as it might sound, I actually danced on stage for the first time in my life! And surprisingly, people said I danced well. Apparently I even broke my 'intellectual' image (which I didn't know I had in the first place) at college after that performance. Not bad, eh?

Birthday Bash [20 Jul]

20 July was my birthday, and what fun I had! First there was the midnight celebrations in the Boys Hostel which went on till around 2am, and then later that afternoon there were celebrations with the entire class in the hostel mess.

A big thanks to everyone who called and wished, especially all you US folks! I know how irritating it is to get those calls connected.

Life at SIMSR

PPT is the way of life! You need a PPT for literally everything. If you're doing a book review, make a PPT. If you're doing a Statistics case study, make a PPT. If you're giving the Marketing news roundup of the week, make a PPT. Heck I even had to make a PPT on myself for one of the committee interviews I attended!

Faculty aren't mindblowingly great or anything, but they're good. Classes are fun, especially Operations Management. Our text books are pretty cool too — after all, it's not too often that you get to see stuff like the Rorschach Inkblot Test (from my favourite graphic novel) being mentioned in a Post Graduate text book!

We are locked down in our hostel by 10:30pm, and you're not allowed to go out after that. So much for treating us like adults.

Our room (215) is the Flip capital of SIMSR. Poor souls who enter our room invariably get flipped (as in lifted upside down) by our very own resident Hulk a.k.a. Anand, till their face becomes red with all the blood gushing downwards!

CS is an addiction. I've lost count of the number of "join cs" messages I get on IP Messenger everyday. On exam days the "join cs" messages are usually replaced with more polite, almost pleading messages like "anyone for cs... please..." and such. I have never played CS, so I wouldn't know if the game really is that addictive.

That's about all for now. Hopefully I'll catch a movie or something over the weekend before I go back to Mumbai (I leave on 17th), because a hectic schedule awaits once I get back!

Sleeker, Faster and More Informative

2009-06-01T02:24:00.006+05:30

VarunAbhiram.com now displays an entire stream of recent activity, similar to what you see in social networking sites like Orkut or Facebook. So if there's a new upload or a new comment, you won't miss it. I wanted to aggregate activity on a particular item (like say, if two people comment on the same photo it displays both the comments together), but that became too complicated to implement.

For the UI, I used the jquery.scrollable plugin for jQuery. The ability to scroll through the content using your mouse wheel, arrow keys or the page-wise navigator is pretty neat! And since it's jQuery, it's unobtrusive and cross-browser compatible. Getting the functionality right was a simple copy-paste of the example you see to your left; customising it to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the site, on the other hand, was a major pain. Took me the better part of a day to customize the CSS and replace all the images to get the look and feel right.

VarunAbhiram.com now also displays all the latest posts made on my blog in a neat and elegant fashion!

I had initially thought of writing a PHP script myself that would parse my blog's RSS feed and generate a list of the most recent posts, but a little crawling through Google and I came across a lot of little widgets that allow you to read a site's RSS feed and display them on a webpage very easily. They all had one problem though — they were not customizable at all. After some more searching, I found exactly what I was looking for — the Google Ajax Feed API. Very easy to use, very little code and highly customizable. Have a look at the final result on my site, it blends in so well!

Apart from the revamped homepage, there are a couple of other changes/enhancements as well —

No more Snapshots. Most people I know found the floating dialogs annoying and removing it improved page loads by a couple of seconds.
The Artwork Page now shows both the Traditional Art and the Digital Art together by default. You can use the Filter option to uh, filter content by Artwork Type.
There's a funky new About Page with all the content that first time visitors will be interested in.

Please feel free to leave your comments — I'd love to hear what you all have to say! Oh and by the way, the drawings are courtesy Karthik (much thanks!), the comics were made by me.

Goodbye Bangalore, Hello Mumbai!

2009-05-26T23:15:00.005+05:30

Picking up from where I left off in my CAT 2008 post, both K J Somaiya and TAPMI announced their final selection list by the end of April, and I made the final cut at K J Somaiya!

I was happy with the result and all, but then came the important decision I had to make — to go ahead and do the PGDM (Post Graduate Diploma in Management) course, or stick on at Wipro and get some more work experience. Now this was a difficult decision to make. I quite liked my current job and there was no particular reason I wanted to leave, and more people I spoke to actually advised me to gain another year of work-ex at Wipro and join a better institute (reminds me of the 'Go for a Masters, or not?' article posted at Slashdot a while ago).

I was brooding over the matter for a couple of days, and these questions were running through my head —

Are you ready to go through another year of preparation, while balancing the 11-13 hour work days?
Are you confident of scoring more than 95 percentile next year and getting admission into one of the Ivy League institutes?
Few years from now, would you still like to pursue the technical line?
Are you sure you would be a good project for the next two years, considering that many of your batchmates are either on the bench or have been asked to come to office twice a week taking a 50% pay cut?

My answer was not a confident 'YES' to any of them, and after much consideration I decided to take up the course at K J Somaiya.

I informed my PM the following day (he didn't see this coming at all) and submitted my resignation letter. I was to be relieved by 22 May, so I had around three weeks to complete the transition to the people who would take over my role after I left, finish up some of my own tasks and complete the resignation/separation formalities.

21 May was my last day at office. I sent everybody a farewell email much in advance (to be on the safe side in case something like this happens). My team mates organised a small farewell for me later in the day, and they presented me a bag and said, "Here's a little something from us so that you don't forget Wipro" — apt words for what was inside. Much thanks!

The next day I travelled to the Sigma office at the other end of the city to complete the separation formalities. By around 3pm I was no more a Wiproite. Oh and speaking of long distances, it turns out I've covered quite a bit of Bangalore during my short stay of nine months! Check out this screenshot from Google Maps (the circled areas are the places I've been to) —

Karthik came to Bangalore on Saturday to help me shift all my luggage; never realised I had so much stuff! Went out for lunch with friends in the afternoon, wearing the shirt they gifted me (thanks guys!).

Caught the bus from Madiwala in the evening and reached Hyderabad yesterday. I'm going to miss the Cloud team at Wipro, the friends I've stayed with for the last nine months and all the fun times we had, but I look forward to what Mumbai has in store for me. The PGDM programme at K J Somaiya starts mid June, so I'm going to relax the next couple of weeks. After all, once the course starts I'm going to have a pretty hectic schedule over there!

The Mega Update at VarunAbhiram.com

2009-05-02T16:51:00.015+05:30

I've just made a major update over at VarunAbhiram.com with all the new photos, wallpapers, drawings and videos that I have created over the past year. The following sections of the site have been updated —

Photography
Angels and Demons · Face of Evil · Concentric
Father and Son · Open Wide

Digital Artwork
Aeon Flux · Deep Into the Code · Palette · Corrosion

Traditional Art
Iron Man · Aeon Flux

Videos
Drawing "Iron Man" · Spaces · Z and the Remixes

Except for a couple of new photos, I don't think there's much new for people that frequent this blog. For those who don't, I hope you enjoy viewing all the new content! Comments welcome, as always.

CAT 2008 - The GD/PI Saga

2009-03-21T15:55:00.003+05:30

In an unexpected turn of events, I scored 95.12 percentile in CAT 2008 (results were declared on 9 Jan 2009)! With the kind of work at office, I wasn't able to devote any time to prepare for the exam this year, so was surprised when I managed a 20 percentile increase in my score from CAT 2007. So anyway, I applied to two institutes — K J Somaiya and TAPMI, got call letters from both of them. The selection ratio in these institutes, however, is around 1:20 (meaning 1 out of every 20 persons called for the interview process actually gets selected), so can't be certain if I'll make the final cut. Anyway, just thought I'll post my GD/PI experiences at both places (who knows, some aspiring MBA candidate might actually find this post useful) —

K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research (SIMSR)

CAT Cutoff Percentile: 93.11 (no sectional cutoffs)
Date: 8 March 2009, 8:00am
Venue: People's Education Society Institute of Technology (PESIT), Bangalore

Reached the venue well before time (by 7am itself), so had to wait outside for half an hour till I was let in. People started trickling in slowly, and by around 8.20, all the 200 or so people who had gathered were directed to the auditorium. Our registration numbers were called out one by one and our documents were verified — the CAT admit card, score card and ID Proof.

Then there was a short presentation about the insititute, followed by a Q&A session with the Director and Placement Coordinator. A lot of people were keen to know how the recession was affecting the salaries/placements this year. To questions about sports and other extracurricular activities conducted by the institute, the Director replied that all extracurricular activities are planned and organised by the students themselves.

Once the Q&A session was over, sheets of paper were distributed to everybody for the next step in the selection process — the Written Ability Test. We had 15 minutes to write a 300 word essay. We were given a choice between two topics — "Has Google replaced the traditional library?" and "Business ethics has become just a fashionable word" (something along these lines, don't remember exactly). Five minutes were up by the time I decided to go with the first topic; I quickly jotted down whatever points came to my mind and submitted the paper.

After all the papers were collected, our names were called out in batches. We were divided into 12 panels (of around 15 members each) and asked to proceed to our allotted rooms for the Group Discussion. The GD was case-based, on e-Governance — had to evaluate if India was ready for it, what challenges it faces etc. Was a good GD; even with 15 people it thankfully did not turn into a fish market.

After the GD round, we were given a 10-minute break to relax. The panelists shifted rooms, and then the Interviews began. Since I was serial #1 in my group, I was the first person to be interviewed. Now I'm really bad at remembering the series of questions I was asked, but this is pretty much how it went —

P (Panel): So Varun, tell me about yourself
A (Answer): Told them about my work, my educational background etc.
P: What exactly is Cloud Computing?
A: Utility-based, scalable infrastructure. Took their official website as an example and explained how a cloud solution would help them optimise resources and save money. [I don't think I was able to make them understand the concept completely though]
P: Could you tell me in brief about your final year project and what differentiated you from the rest that got you got special recognition from Wipro?
A: Explained the whole Magnum Opus initiative and how 30 people out of 1500 people from all over India were inducted into the "Magnum Opus Hall of Fame" for their outstanding contribution to the project.
P: OK Varun, you seem to be technically sound. But can you give me some instances where you took on a leadership role?
A: Told them about the events I organised in college etc.
P: Why do you want to specialise in Marketing? [Justified]
P: From what you've said so far, you seem to be thinking about yourself and your career growth. When Wipro has invested so much in you, don't you think you're betraying the company by leaving?
A: Justified that I can always join back Wipro after finishing the course, I would come back with a better skillset and be a greater asset to them than I am now.
P: What magazines do you read? [told them]
P: But don't you think as an entrepreneur you'd also need to know some basics about finance? Atleast things like reading a balance sheet.
A: I haven't had much exposure to Finance in my academic courses so far, but I stay with a couple of friends who do a lot of trading in the stock market and stuff, so I do keep picking up things from them.
P: OK Varun, was nice talking to you, thank you. You can ask the next person to be ready. We will call him in a short while.
A: OK will tell him. Thank you.

Was a short interview, around 15-20 minutes. Wasn't a stress interview for anyone as far as I know. I was done with the entire process by 12pm.

T A Pai Management Institute (TAPMI)

CAT Cutoff Percentile: 92 (no sectional cutoffs)
Date: 16 March 2009, 8:45am
Venue: TAPMI Campus, Manipal

Reached Manipal a day before the interview. I stayed at Janani Lodge (had initially booked a room at Hotel Lake View over the phone, but after seeing the dingy condition of the place when I got there, I reconsidered). The next day, at the new TAPMI campus, the entire process began at 8:45am. There were lists pasted at the entrance indicating the division of panels and the corresponding rooms for the GD/Interview for each. Alternatively, you could check out your panel details from a computer terminal by entering your TAPMI registration number. There were 8 panels that day with around 20 people in each. First, there was a short presentation about the institute and about the proceedings of the day. Here we came to know that the selection process was trimmed down to just three stages this year — GD, a written ability test and an interview (till last year the selection process consisted of a GD, a written summary of the GD, an extempore round, panel interview and finally an interview with the Director).

After the presentation, we headed to our corresponding venues for the GD round. They divided each panel into two groups. In my group, 4 people did not turn up for the process, so there were just 6 of us. The topic for discussion was "Is Slumdog Millionaire overhyped?". We were given 10 minutes to think and 20 minutes to discuss. Was a good discussion, the moderators even commented that they enjoyed our discussion after it was over.

For the next round, we were given around 15 minutes to write a 300-word essay on "Nothing is ever over until you decide it is". Once this was over, they collected photocopies of all our certificates (academic and extracurricular). Then we were asked to report at the venue for the interview. I was serial #3 in my panel, and #2 was absent, so I was the second person to be interviewed. It was a long interview, so I'll just list the questions asked this time —

P (Panel): So Varun, how's everything going so far?
P: Briefly tell me about yourself.
P: What are your views on George Bush?
P: Do you even read? [my opinion of Bush was for the most part positive, hence this question]
P: Watchmen huh... what's the story about?
P: Swap US and Russia with India and Pakistan. Which would be which and why?
P: Name 3 of your role models in life?
P: Tell me in 3 bullet points why you admire Azim Premji.
P: What's your father? What's his background?
P: [Lots of questions on the Satyam fraud case — Ramalinga Raju's motive to buy Maytas, his 3 failures as a leader, the current bidders, the takeover process, everything]
P: I have some Satyam shares, should I keep them or sell them?
P: How long will it take for share value to return to its original value of Rs. 510?
P: Where do you see the IT sector 5 years from now?
P: You said you're interested in photography right? Can I ask you any question on photography?
P: What are the 2 most important things for you in a photograph? [and some related questions]
P: What are the other calls you got?
P: How did that interview go?
P: How do you think this interview went?
P: Do you have any questions for us?
P: OK Varun, thank you.

The interview was for 30 minutes. I finished the entire process by 12:30pm. Relaxed the rest of the day, had a nice dinner at Saiba (Tiger Circle) and caught the 9:45pm bus back to Bangalore on 16th. Reached home early morning the following day.

So that about wraps up the entire GD/PI saga. If you've read up to this point, you either have an MBA interview coming up yourself (in which case I wish you all the very best!), or you have tremendous patience. Whatever the case is, thanks for reading. You probably need a break now, so go check out some funky Chrome experiments, or some Buffalaxed videos like this one.

Art ^4

2009-01-01T23:49:00.007+05:30

First of all, a very Happy New Year to you all! Have a great year ahead.

This being the first post of 2009, I'm sure you were expecting another New Year's video or something like that. Sadly there's no video this time; Karthik and I wanted to make one, but we didn't have any ideas. There is something else in its place though, something you don't see too often over here — a new drawing, a new video, a new wallpaper and some new photos, all in one post!

So without any further ado (and any further hype), here we go —

#1 The Drawing

Took me over five hours to draw, shade and digitally colour this thing, but the end result makes it totally worth the effort! This drawing of Iron Man is easily my best drawing till date.

#2 The Video

You saw the finished version of the drawing, but what did it look like before the colouring? What did it look like when the initial outlines were made? I put together a small video that contains glimpses of the entire process of making the final image you see above.

#3 The Wallpaper

Now this is what I call turning office work into a piece of art! The code in this wallpaper is not some fancy junk like you see in the movies, they are actual installation screens of popular open source products we use at work. The glossy background is a heavily edited image of the sky I had taken enroute to Pondicherry.

#4 The Photos

The first image "Open Wide" was taken at the Crocodile Park, East Coast Road. The second sepia shot titled "Father and Son" was taken at a beach in Mahabalipuram.

Smiley Moon

2008-12-02T20:44:00.014+05:30

For those who didn't have a look at the night sky yesterday —

(Pic Courtesy: a friend's friend)
Too bad I couldn't capture this beautiful scene with my digicam. By the time I got home from office, the clouds totally obscured the view.

Klaatu Barada Nikto

2008-11-29T17:53:00.004+05:30

Well, to put the last three months (can't believe I've been here this long already!) in a nutshell — my entire technical training was waived off thanks to the final year project I did for Wipro. I only had a week of Corporate Induction, a couple of sessions on programming and dealing with emergency situations, and by the first week of September I was allocated to a Cloud Computing project.

My present role involves developing a web-based interface to access the various services provided by our Cloud solution. For the more technically inclined, I'm developing portlets on an open source Enterprise Portal called Liferay. Work has been pretty good so far. It does get a little hectic at times, but then that's expected.

Oh and by the way, I'm staying here in Bangalore with a couple of friends from college, so it's fun. The week just passes by going to our respective offices and coming back; all the fun, the parties, the clothes-washing and random cooking experiments (experiments because we don't know how to cook) are usually reserved for the weekends.

Recent Movies

Yes, I have managed to catch a couple of movies during the past few weeks —

A Wednesday — 9/10
An odd title, but definitely a must watch. The movie is short, well-paced and to the point. No songs either. A very impressive first for debutant director Neeraj Pandey.

Kung Fu Panda — 9.5/10

Po: I just ate, so I'm still digesting, so my kung fu may not be as good as later on.

Po: [breathing heavily] I know you're trying to be all mystical and Kung Fu-ey, but could you tell me where we're going?

Absolutely hilarious! Can anybody not enjoy this?

Fashion — 7.5/10
The gay/effeminate designers were annoying and the second half could have used some trimming, but overall the movie was well made. Apart from the ramp shows, the style and fashion, Madhur Bhandarkar adds realistic flavour to the movie by weaving the story around a lot of incidents that we've seen on TV or read about in the papers — wardrobe malfunctions, casting couch, wild lifestyles and the like. He did over-dramatize the whole thing, but then nobody would watch the movie if he didn't.

Body of Lies — 5/10
Didn't expect it to be very good, and I was still disappointed. I wonder why they didn't title it 'World of Lies' instead — after all, the plot takes you from Iraq to Qatar to Jordon to Turkey to Syria (with a couple of places in between?), and if someone were to ask you what the story was at the end of the movie, you wouldn't have a clue. I have no idea how this movie has a 7.6 rating on IMDB.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) — 8/10
After seeing the amazing footage of the 2008 remake, I just had to see the original. Very well made for its time. The robot reminded me of the old Lost in Space episodes though — very clumsy-looking, and the least bit intimidating.

The Abhiram Websites

VarunAbhiram.com is finally back online! All the content has been re-uploaded to the new host at Answerable. Must update the site soon with the Spaces video and the new wallpapers I've posted here in the past few months.

Karthik82.com is also back, with a brand new design! The site looks much better now (the three-column layout rules) and the content is a lot more organized, with emphasis on the blog and the artwork. Most of the old, static content dating all the way back to 2000 has moved to the archives.

Assorted Links

Prince of Persia Animation Reference (1985)
Jordan Mechner, the creator of the original Prince of Persia (brings back memories, doesn't it?) has started posting old journal entries about the development of the game on his website — this journal entry I found particularly interesting. And I'm sure you will too.

Virtual Barber Shop
An excellent example of Binaural Recording. Wear headphones, turn up the volume, close your eyes and listen. I wonder how they managed to retain the audio quality while uploading it to YouTube. I found a MP3 version of the clip on Andy Coates' blog.

How to make money with free software?
Stani Michiels explains the making of his Architecture Five-Euro coin using entirely free software. I haven't gotten around to reading this article fully yet, but it seems interesting.

G-Speak Spatial Operating Environment
Funky Minority Report-ish gesture-driven computer interfaces. Came across this on Slashdot, and then in The Economic Times a few days later.

Crib It! - An Ode to Bollywood's 'Inspired' Finest!
Would be awesome if someone actually sang this.

Shifting to Bangalore

2008-08-11T14:26:00.010+05:30

Wipro Campus - Electronics City, Bangalore — that's where I'll be working at for the next couple of months (years?). I'm leaving to Bangalore today and will be reporting on 13 August for the joining formalities.

Will be a while till I settle down over there and get myself an internet connection, so there won't be much activity on this blog till that happens.

Oh and in case you noticed, VarunAbhiram.com is currently offline. Karthik and myself are shifting our websites to a different host (Net4 is absolutely pathetic), so it'll be a few weeks till they're back online.

That's about all for now, will update again when I can. Wish me luck!

Spaces

2008-07-20T12:09:00.004+05:30

Made this yesterday. It's a collection of random footage edited together to match an untitled track, composed by Pablo. Watch away —

I'm off to watch The Dark Knight in a couple of hours. And if you haven't seen the Watchmen trailer yet, you should — it's simply amazing! If you didn't think it was amazing, you probably haven't read the book.

Browser Password Managers - Safe?

2008-07-03T20:00:00.002+05:30

When Firefox (or any other browser for that matter) prompts you to remember passwords, do you say 'Yes'? I used to, until yesterday, when I discovered how surprisingly easy it is for someone to get his/her hands on them.

Assume that I want to grab the passwords that Person X has saved on his computer using Firefox. This is how I would go about it —

Scenario 1: I have access to his computer

I would simply open up Firefox on his computer, go to Tools > Options > Saved Passwords > Show Passwords. Firefox shows so very neatly (in plain English), a window containing a list of sites along with the stored username and password for each of them.

Easy, no?

Scenario 2: The computer is at a remote location

You'd think getting those passwords in such a scenario is difficult, but it isn't. All you need to know is the location of the files that contain all the username/password information and then write a simple program that mails those files to you as attachments.

First the location of the files. If you have Windows installed on C: drive, then you'll find all the important files at the following location —

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\Profile Folder

Open up the file called signons3.txt. You'll see a list of websites along with the username and password saved for each of them. However, you can't read it because it's in an encrypted format. To decrypt it, you'll need the private key — this is stored in the file key3.db. And the certificates (signed public keys) are stored in the file cert8.db. The MozillaZine page has more details about these files.

I wrote a small application that locates these files on a user's computer and sends them to me as email attachments. I tried out the application on Karthik's laptop and it worked like a charm! Once I got the files, I simply replaced my copies of the files with the ones I downloaded and voila! I could now log on to all the sites that Karthik had saved passwords for!

I wrote a harmless version of the same application for you guys to try out — download it here (5KB ZIP). It does everything except the emailing. If you don't trust me, you can always disable your internet connection before you run it.

If you're saying "Whew! Thank God I use Internet Explorer and not Firefox!", you should know that a similar process can be employed to grab passwords from ANY browser that has the Remember Passwords feature.

Anyway, if you're interested in reading more about all this stuff, I suggest you have a look at this exhaustive two-part article on "Password Management Concerns with Firefox and IE" —

Part 1: http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1882
Part 2: http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1883

Palette, Sexy RPMs and 30,000+ Visitors

2008-06-26T01:06:00.006+05:30

I had an online C Assessment Test at Wipro two days back, which went pretty well. There were 40 questions to be answered in one and a half hours. Most of the questions were the typical "What is the output of this program?" kinds that tests your understanding of the concepts and the quirks of the language, rather than your programming skills. So you probably wouldn't fare too well in the test if you thought the size of a structure containing two char members is 2 bytes or that int (*ptr)[3] was an array of integer pointers.

Anyway, with that test out of the way now, I will hopefully have a couple of weeks to myself until I officially start work.

Some days back I came up with this very crappy piece of art using Karthik's oil pastels. Now if I was as popular as Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney people would probably buy that for millions of dollars, but sadly I'm not.

I wanted to make something more presentable out of it, so I back-lit the drawing using two emergency lamps (to highlight the whites) and took photos of different sections of the drawing.

I finally selected two images I liked and overlayed them to get this final result —

Speaking of oil pastels, you should check out Karthik's latest drawing of The Incredible Hulk. It's damn good! The movie was good too, far better than the other movies I've seen at the theaters recently — Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Happening.

In other news, I was trying to get my printer (it's a HP LaserJet 1020) to work on Fedora 8. Apart from installing foo2zjs, I had marked the HPLIP package for update, but for some reason Yum Extender marked all packages for which updates were available and began processing the queue. While the queue was being processed, a couple of packages caught my attention. Click the thumbnail on the left to see what I mean.

Amusing. I had no idea such packages existed.

Oh and by the way, this blog has now received over 30,000 unique visitors!

Site Enhancements, New Wallpaper

2008-06-08T20:01:00.009+05:30

Now that the Wallpaper a Day feature has ended, all the sections of VarunAbhiram.com are up-to-date! Thanks all for the views and comments.

Since there will be few updates to the site from now on, I figured it's a good idea to add a panel showing the recent comments posted on the site — that way the site won't look totally dead; assuming of course, that people take the time to comment now and then.

I've also noticed on StatCounter that the Traditional Art section receives no views at all. Probably because it's the only section of the site that's not directly accessible from the main navigation panel. The drawings aren't great, but I'd like all sections of the site to have equal visibility. So in order to facilitate that, I plan to display the Traditional and Digital art together on the Artwork page, and add a filter to allow you to look at the sections individually. This will take some time to implement, as I'll have to avoid duplication of images that belong in both categories (the Charlize Theron and Tom Cruise images, for example). The RSS code and some of the other pages would also have to be appropriately modified. And hopefully I won't introduce any bugs in the process.

Anyway, while I ponder over what has to be done, have a look at this new wallpaper I made yesterday called "Corrosion" —

Before I wind up this post, a couple of articles/links that might be worth your time —

Seven innocent gestures that can get you killed Overseas
I'm not in the Middle East, so it's safe to give this article the Thumbs-up!
We don't have an Energy problem, we have a Storage problem
An interesting take on the rising oil prices issue.
Beautiful Black and White Photography
A collection of stunning black and white images.
Internal Windows Vista SP1 Promotional Video
I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking when they made this. And all these.
I Will Derive!
A parody of "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. Geeky fun.

Wallpaper a Day

2008-05-04T01:19:00.003+05:30

For the next 20 days, VarunAbhiram.com will feature a new wallpaper every day!

The wallpapers only get better with each update.

The Great Below

2008-04-01T01:37:00.000+05:30

As promised in my previous post, here are those photos I took at the Hyderabad International Airport and the widescreen wallpapers I made from photos I took from the plane —

Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad

Wallpapers

And yeah, the video I posted of the airport isn't great, but it sure is popular!

Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Shamshabad

2008-03-27T11:35:00.002+05:30

Karthik and myself were at Chennai last weekend, and our return flight landed at the newly opened Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad, Hyderabad.

I filmed a couple of clips on arrival at the airport, and yesterday I edited them together into this short video —

The background music is a track from NIN's latest album, Ghosts; I don't know if it really suits the video, but I couldn't find anything better to use. All clips were filmed with my digicam (hence the crappy video quality), between 2:30am - 3:00am. I also took some photos at the airport and made some wallpapers out images I took from the plane, but all that reserved for another post.

Ciencia '08 and other Assortedness

2008-03-17T22:55:00.004+05:30

It's been one and a half months since the last update! I haven't had the time to make any new wallpapers or videos to post here, and I didn't really feel like making a random post about nothing. Anyway so what's been keeping me busy all this while? Read on —

The Final Year Project

First, the final year project that I'm doing for Wipro, titled "Trend Analysis of the Xen Hypervisor for the Optimized Management of a Business Service in a SLO Framework". Sounds like Greek and Latin, doesn't it? Sounded that way to me too, until Shashank and myself spent a couple of weeks reading about all this unheard-of stuff and making sense of what we're actually supposed to do. We've been working on this project for over two months now, and so far it's been an amazing experience (damn challenging too!). I don't think I would have ever forced myself to learn so many new things in such a short time otherwise.

This was never a tech blog, but if you guys are interested, I could put up a series of technical articles about Xen and the other things I'm working on sometime later. Post a comment or drop me an email and let me know.

Watchmen

I hardly read books. The last book I read was Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner many years ago. The first few chapters were really interesting, after that it seemed like the authors ran out of points to make. I don't know, maybe they just wanted to increase the page count so they could charge a few extra bucks.

Anyway, unlike Freakonomics, the book I'm reading now just keeps getting more and more interesting with every chapter I finish. The book is called "Watchmen" — it's a 12-chapter graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Karthik considers this one of the finest graphic novels of all time, and I can see why. I'm extremely curious to see how they adapt such a complex story into a movie next year, although the first look at the characters and screens from the movie seem quite promising.

Ciencia '08

Hard to believe a whole year has passed! It's like as if it was just a few days ago that I made that post about Ciencia '07.

This year it was conducted on 15 and 16 March. I wasn't much into organising the event this time — hard to do when you only attend college twice a week. Anyway, Aasritha and myself hosted the inaugural function on day 1, so that was fun. Never hosted a formal function like that before. Never wore a suit before either.

Coincidently, Karthik's big boss, Mr. Srikanth Surampudi (Head - HR for TCS Hyderabad) was the Guest of Honor for the function. Here's a small snippet of his talk (which was really good BTW) towards the end of the Inaugural function —

Other News

Karthik posted two new Nine Inch Nails Speed Drawing videos on his site — the Year Zero Album Cover and a drawing for the NIN: Ghosts Film Festival, both done using oil pastels. Awesome work.
Pablo's Photosite is now online, so have a look at the photos. They're really good!
Toby re-designed his photosite, there are some new galleries as well.
Sweeney Todd is probably one of the most artistic/best looking movies I've seen in a long time. Too bad the version they're screening at Prasad's is horribly censored.
Jumper is one of the dumbest movies of all time. And I'm not even going to bother watching 10,000 B.C.

Apophysis Wallpapers, 20000+ Visitors

2008-01-31T15:51:00.000+05:30

Few days ago, I made a couple of wallpapers out of images I rendered using Apophysis. The fractal flames it generates are usually pretty messy, and not of very high quality, so I had to do quite a bit of post processing in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro to make them look good. Anyway, these are the two wallpapers I liked out of the bunch —

Oh, and Statcounter now shows that the number of unique visitors to this blog has crossed 20,000! And it was only in May last year that the counter crossed the 10,000 mark. Not bad, eh?

Tom Cruise - Mission: Impossible 3

2008-01-21T23:58:00.000+05:30

Yes, I finally get around to doing another drawing! My last drawing, if you remember, was of Charlize Theron (from Æon Flux) way back in 2006.

It was really hard drawing after such a long time. I tried drawing this picture of Avril Lavigne first, but I just couldn't get her eyes right. All that eye shadow and under-eye detail combined with my rusty drawing skills made it impossible to draw. And when the eyes aren't drawn properly, the whole face looks weird. And that's exactly what happened.

Anyway, so after a lot of searching for easy images to draw, I ended up with this poster of Tom Cruise from Mission: Impossible 3. Wasn't as easy to draw as I thought it would be, but at least the end result bears some resemblance to the original.

And I wasn't done with just the drawing. I decided to load it up in Paint Shop Pro and add some CG effects to it. Coincidently, I happened to stumble across this open source fractal flame editor called Apophysis, so I used that to render the blue smoke background. I then colorized the drawing to a grayish-brown and added the text and M:I 3 logo. This is the final result —

By the way, I now use a 19" Samsung 932NW monitor, so expect more widescreen images from now on. After all, what's the point of making these when I can't use them as wallpaper?

New Year's Day

2008-01-01T02:03:00.000+05:30

Hey everyone, here's wishing you a very Happy New Year 2008! Have a great year ahead.

Download the high-res version (9.5mb)

The Christmas Eve Chocolate Cake

2007-12-25T01:55:00.000+05:30

In all the three years I've been writing on this blog, I don't think there's ever been a post quite like this — dedicated entirely to the preparation of a chocolate cake. So why now all of a sudden you ask? Because I made one today!

Pardon me fellow chefs if this cake isn't as good looking as it's supposed to be, the only prior cooking experience I have is making scrambled eggs. Anyway it tastes real nice, and that's all I care about. With that said, let's get on with the cake-making. If you haven't made a cake before, read and learn.

The Preparation

I bought this box of "Pillsbury Rich Chocolate Cake Mix" from Food World the other day (life is simple when you don't have to worry about the ingredients that go into making a cake, let alone their proportions). And yes, you obviously need a baking pan. You could use a big rectangular one, but then you'd have to spend time cutting it up into pieces once it's done. The simpler option would be to use a cup cake pan like the one I used. That way you don't have to worry about people looking strangely at all those irregularly sized/shaped pieces.

Mixing it Up

Add 2 eggs, 1/4 cup refined oil and 3/4 cup water to the cake mix and stir the mixture till you get a smooth batter. The mixer helps in the "smooth" department.

And it's Bake Time!

Grease the pan with butter and pour the batter into it. Bake in an oven at 170 degrees for 25-30 minutes and you're done. It really is that simple!

The Edibility Test

Like they say, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating". That's Karthik an hour ago with one of my cup cakes to go with that big mug of tea. Tea and chocolate cake is probably the weirdest combination ever, but who cares as long as he liked the cake! Oh and he's watching Die Hard in case you were wondering.

It's past 2am now (makes the latest XKCD so relavant), so Merry Christmas everyone and have a great day!

"The Outer Darkness" wins a Cacoward!

2007-12-13T15:36:00.000+05:30

December 10 was Doom's 14th Anniversary (coincidently, it was also the day Led Zeppelin performed their first full concert in decades!), and to mark this occasion, every year Doomworld.com comes out with the "Cacowards" — to recognise the best maps released that year and the people who made them.

I'm very happy to announce that this year, my level for The Ultimate Doom "The Outer Darkness" has been picked as one of the 10 Best Levels of 2007!!

The relevant links are below —

The 14th Annual Cacowards — link to the 4-page article on Doomworld
Cacowards 2007 - Page 3 — scroll right down to the bottom of that page and you'll find the write-up about my level
VarunAbhiram.com — The Outer Darkness download page on my site
My Blog Post about the release of The Outer Darkness

Must thank Karthik for telling me about this, otherwise I wouldn't have even known! I don't frequent Doomworld like I used to, mostly because I hardly play Doom any more. Or any other game for that matter. And Karthik, thanks for that post on your site too. You mentioned it before I even got around to making a post here!

Photography Updates

2007-12-09T17:34:00.000+05:30

The entire photography section is now up at VarunAbhiram.com! There are close to 50 photos in all over there now, the rest I thought weren't good enough to upload. If you think I missed out on some good ones, do let me know and I'll upload them.

Next I'll be adding content to the Digital Art section. Lots of stuff to add there as well. How would you prefer the updates — batchwise or do I just add everything at once?

Feed Me Three!

2007-12-06T09:45:00.000+05:30

After Toby (Feed Me) and Karthik (Feed Me Too) added RSS feeds to their sites, it was only a matter of time till I added one to VarunAbhiram.com. Yesterday I was bored doing absolutely nothing all day, so I ended up adding it! Look for the little orange RSS icon in the navigation on the left.

Karthik's post has a detailed write-up of what RSS is and how to go about adding a feed to your website, so I won't repeat all that here again. If you'd like to subscribe to the RSS feed at VarunAbhiram.com, or this blog for that matter, use an aggregator like Google Reader. All you need to do is to add your subscription (Eg: http://varunabhiram.com/rss is the subscription link for VarunAbhiram.com) there.

With this, I think I've added all the features I can think of to the site. Now all that remains is updating the content — that's one area I've been neglecting for a long time.

The Grunge Series

2007-12-04T00:59:00.000+05:30

Not one, not two, but three new wallpapers to make up for the lack of updates all this while. Hope you like them. I call this the Grunge series —

Feathers

Made this around a month ago, but never got around to posting it because of continuous exams at college. This wallpaper is heavily inspired from the beautiful artwork in the Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral 11-wallpaper pack. Blended together two shots I took of a dead bird, and then heavily edited it to bring out the colours and textures. Not exactly an ideal subject to make a wallpaper of I know, which is why I went in for a more abstract arrangement of images — easier on the eyes when you can't make out what is what.

Destroyed City

Ah this is my favourite of the lot. My dad had been to New York City a while ago, and I used one of the photos he took there as a base to make this. Why didn't I use an image of Hyderabad you ask? Well, the city is already damaged by developments, so much so that you can't make it look any more destroyed than it already is. This base image was just perfect for the wallpaper, and that's the sole reason I used it. I do NOT hate NYC or something in case you were wondering. Heck how can I hate the place when I've never even been there.

Smoulder

Made this one today morning. I know it looks like a single photo, but it's actually three different images superimposed on each other, each one with a different layer/blending style. I don't really know what that is, but I think it's either the seeds or the withered flower of a plant. I really like the perspective on this image. The curve from under the title is what adds interest to main subject I think. I set one of the layer modes to "Burn" which is what makes it look like it's smouldering. And I have no idea how the smoke showed up, there's nothing in the original! Oh well, it adds to the overall effect, so I'm not complaining.

I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about these wallpapers, so comment away!

10 Videos

2007-10-28T01:41:00.000+05:30

I've come across several fun/interesting videos on YouTube the past few weeks, never got around to posting them because I've been busy with stuff at college. The end of the semester is sadly always like this. Just tests, tests and more tests that keep you from doing anything else.

Anyway in a way it's a good thing, because now I get to make a whole post with just the videos! They would have otherwise ended up as footnotes, footnotes you'd probably not even notice. So here are Varun's Top 10 Recently Watched Videos, ranked in reverse chronological order. "Top 10" lists are always more fun than plain bulleted ones, aren't they?

10. If You Come Today — South Indian English Video
I'm sure most of you would have already seen this by now. If you haven't, you should.

9. Tale of Rock
A very well made 3D animated short film by Stevo Payne and John Godwin. It's funny too.

8. System of a Down - Chop Suey
A 2 year old kid rocking out to this SOAD song!

7. Pentagram - Electric
Indian rock band Pentagram's latest released video. Groovy.

6. Orestes — Piano Cover
I always thought Maynard's voice was unimitable. But this guy is just amazing.

5. Mel Blanc on David Letterman
Mel Blanc is the voice of classic cartoon cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and hundreds of others. Wonder how he remembers what his actual voice sounds like.

4. Content-Aware Image Resizing
A new technique of image resizing that keeps the important features of the image undistorted.

3. 300 — Speed Painting and Animation
I don't think I will ever have the patience to do something like this.

2. Linkin Park Parody
One of my friends had added this video to his favourite videos list on Orkut. I can see why.

1. Portal
And I thought people ran out of ideas for video games.

Milla Jovovich : Resident Evil

2007-10-07T19:38:00.000+05:30

Karthik finished a drawing of Milla Jovovich ('Alice' from Resident Evil) today. As with many of his recent drawings, he was going to edit/colour it in Photoshop. I had never digitally coloured an image before, so I thought it'd be fun to give it a try. I grabbed myself a copy of the original scan and both of us started working on our own digitally edited versions of the drawing!

On the left is the original scan, and on the right is what it looked like after I edited it in Paint Shop Pro. Boosted the contrast of the image while retaining all the details. Then I started colouring it using the air brush. The colouring is pretty basic, no fancy layers for the shadows/highlights and all. Once I finished colouring it, I added the splats and the text. This is the end result —

And you're probably wondering what Karthik's version looks like, so here it is —

EDIT [ 14 Oct ] : Removed the stain from Milla's arm. And changed the flat background into a gradient. I think it looks better this way.

VarunAbhiram.com Goes Live!

2007-09-23T07:32:00.000+05:30

After almost a month of coding and designing, I'm proud to announce that VarunAbhiram.com is finally online!

Coming up for a design for this site was tough! I hadn't done any serious web designing in years, so my designing skills were a little rusty. Sure I designed the Ciencia site some months ago, but that was a very minimalistic design. The Ciencia banner was just a cropped version of my Blur wallpaper (colorised to blue), and other than that there wasn't much to look at. Unless you're the kind of person who finds diagonal lines on a blue gradient fascinating.

Also, because this is my own personal website and not something I was making for someone else, I wanted it to look as good as possible. I ended up making several designs before I got something I was satisfied with. If you noticed, the current design has a v6.0 mentioned in the banner. These are the other five unfinished/discarded designs -

Obviously the current design is the best of them all. I almost went ahead with design #5, before I realised that a white design is not ideal for a site that has a lot of images (especially dark ones). I needed a design with muted colours, something that doesn't interfere with/take focus away from the photos and artwork. And a plain grey theme did just that. Maybe it's a little dark (it looks even darker in IE), but I prefer it that way. You'd expect a design like this to take not more than an hour or two to convert from image to HTML, but this design took me around six hours to do! Aligning the diagonal lines across multiple cells and making sure the page looks the same in all browsers was a major pain. Anyway it turned out just the way I wanted it to, so I'm not complaining.

Credits

Karthik — Him I need to thank the most for teaching me the PHP/MySQL stuff to code this site. No way I could make a site like this using plain HTML. Took me about 3 weeks or more to finish programming all my pages, but now that I'm done with it, making updates/maintaining the site is as simple as can be! All I have to do is insert one row into the database and all the pages where the changes have to be reflected get updated automatically. Oh and I don't have to bother about making thumbnails for my images either. PHP does it all for me!

Shashank — for helping me out with the navigation javascript so that it works properly in all browsers. Firebug (the addon that integrates itself with Firefox) was extremely useful in identifying the problem.

Poornaa and Pratyusha — for pointing out bugs with the Prev/Next links in my image gallery. Clicking previous took you to the next image in the gallery and vice versa. How come nobody else spotted this?

Random Trivia

Total unique visitors so far — 217

Number of Page Views — 1280

The first five people to leave comments on the site —
#1 — Poornaa (Lady Gardener 2)
#2 — Nilesh (Looking at my Glasses?)
#3 — Aasritha (Explosion)
#4 — Suresh (10:27pm)
#5 — Rajeev (Lady Gardener 2)

Okay so that about wraps up this update. Go ahead, visit VarunAbhiram.com and let me know what you think!

Weekly Traffic

2007-08-09T08:34:00.000+05:30

I happened to log in to Statcounter.com yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised (ok, shocked!) to see the Weekly Stats. This is what it looks like —

Look at the graph on Thursday, the day I released The Outer Darkness. I don't think I've ever got that many hits in a day before! I guess I should release Doom levels more often.

The Outer Darkness

2007-08-02T01:23:00.000+05:30

Now here's something you haven't seen in centuries. A Doom update! And an important one at that — it's a new map release!!

This level was originally made for a project called The Ninth Gate that I was working on with Pablo Dictter, Tobias Münch, Damian Lee and Karthik. The idea was to make a set of levels inspired by Episode 4 of The Ultimate Doom — basically maps with lots of wood/marble in them. We never got around to finishing it though (blame real life and laziness), so we have now decided to release the finished levels individually.

Most of this level was made during 2001-03 with DoomCAD (yes!), so the architecture is pretty simple, though detailed. The exit area was made with Doom Builder. No new graphics, except a titlepic. The level music is from Duke Nukem 3D, the other tracks were composed by Damian Lee (originally for The Ninth Gate). It plays on E4M1, and you need a limit-removing port like ZDoom to play it. Oh and since most of you, dear readers, are non-Doomers and will probably never play this, I'm going to be a little generous with the screenshots so that you can at least see what it looks like —

Download (380 KB)
If you're having problems with the above link, try here.

Credits

Pablo Dictter and Karthik - Thanks a lot guys for the feedback and for playtesting this level on the lower skills.
Doug "Opulent" Merrill - It was awesome to see somebody other than me playing this on UV. The demos were mighty useful. Thanks!
Damian Lee - The music tracks rule! Especially the endgame MIDI.
Joel Murdoch - For no particular reason. You can stop coughing now BTW.

Leaves

2007-06-23T09:43:00.000+05:30

Made a wallpaper after ages. It's the kind of wallpaper that nobody will particularly take notice of, unless you tell them something like "Hey see this wallpaper? My friend made it!". I guess that's because it's not as striking as some of my previous work like The Frog or Pill, but nevertheless, I like it.

These are the base images I used — a shot of the underside of a CD and a shot of the money plant in my balcony.

And this is the final result —

And yeah, Karthik, I did make a wide version for you.

Varun In hydroGen

2007-06-15T12:06:00.000+05:30

The June issue of hydroGen, the Hyderabad youth magazine, has a mention of me and my blog (yes, this blog). Check it out —

Those aren't my exact words, but who cares. Off to read the magazine now and see what it's all about (I've never read any of the previous issues).

I Ain't Jobless Any More

2007-05-30T20:56:00.000+05:30

Wipro conducted campus recruitments at our college on the 26th - a total of 85 people were selected from our batch, and I'm one of them!

There were three rounds in the selection process. The first was a written test which had three sections - Verbal, Analytical (Quant+Reasoning) and Technical. The technical section was damn tough (wanted to post some questions here, unfortunately my brain only remembers this one question about BIOS Shadowing). The other sections were very easy. Then there was a technical interview. Was pretty nervous about this round after I heard they grill you left, right and centre in all the subjects that evaporated out of your head soon after you wrote the exam. But thankfully I was interviewed by this guy who asked me the simplest questions imaginable. I managed to take a peek at his Interview Assessment form - one of the comments said "Very good in OS and programming languages". And the only OS-related question he asked me was "What is a deadlock?". And when I started my explanation along the 'circular wait' lines, he asked me to explain taking only two processes!

Okay so after the technical interview, we had to fill up this huge application form and then go for the HR interview. The HR round didn't start off so well (partly because I was asked questions about the Pre-Placement presentation, which I didn't bother paying attention to), but once they started asking me questions about my hobbies and all, it was fine. It was around 4:15pm by the time I finished all my rounds of interview. Then it was a super long wait till 11:15pm when the results were announced.

(L-R) Ravi, Varun, Me. Pic courtesy Yugs.
Time: 10pm

The seven hours in between were such a drag - nothing to do but sit/stand around and make idle conversation. Finally when the HR guy came out with the list of selected candidates, there was anxiety written all over people's faces (that anxiety turned into joy when they heard their names called out, of course). Reached home at 00:15am that day - I've never been in college that long before!

Since then, days have been passing by with me doing absolutely nothing all day. Oh well, I guess that makes me a jobless person with a job...

Nine Inch Nails - "Right Where it Belongs"

2007-05-17T18:09:00.000+05:30

Made a new video today! A music video for NIN's "Right Where it Belongs". Check out the video at Youtube here —

The video is made from random clips I shot with my digicam. Might not do the song justice, but it was fun making it!

Here's the list of locations seen in the video —

Vishveshwara Museum, Bangalore
Ooty (and enroute to Ooty)
Ooty Hotel
Chamundeswari Temple, Mysore
Home (broken bulb through magnifying glass and ants)
Allepey Backwaters
Tank Bund, Hyderabad (Buddha Statue)
Rock show at Rock Heights, Shilparamam

Comments welcome.

Assortedness

2007-05-16T09:12:00.000+05:30

Semester exams are over and I'm finally jobless again! Okay not really, this break is going to be more of a long study session than anything else. If I don't start my CAT preparation soon, I might as well forget about writing the exam in November. We also have some on-campus recruitments the next couple of weeks, so yeah, busy times ahead.

Rajeev wanted me to make a good post, so I'm going to try doing that by putting together all the random stuff that comes to my mind right now. Randomness is good, right?

10,000+ Visitors

If you look at the little counter at the bottom of this page, you'll notice it has crossed 10,000! That works out to what? 20 visits per day? Considering how infrequent my posts are, that's really good. Wondering where all the visits come from? Well, according to Statcounter, a lot of the hits are from people who get here by searching for phrases like "lip twitching", "why is my lip twitching", "upper lip twitch" and the sort. People's lips actually twitch? Weird. Welcome to India seems to be a popular song. A lot of people get to my post searching for that song. Then of course, there's my nanoaudience (which most probably includes you) who take the time to read and comment on my posts. Thanks! I wouldn't be writing if I didn't have readers.

CNN-IBN "Rising India" Photo Contest

The results of the CNN-IBN "Rising India" Photo Contest was out recently. Watch the video here.

Obviously I didn't win, otherwise I would have posted sooner. The contest was open for months, so they got loads of entries. Unfortunately, the whole contest was by judged by just one person (ace photographer Raghu Rai) which isn't a good thing. Photography is very subjective, after all. Besides, Raghu Rai seemed pretty clueless about the theme which was "Photographs that best define why we love India". I don't quite see how the winning photos fit that theme, but like I said, photography is subjective.

Videos on Youtube

I always thought Indians were clueless about composition. These two videos prove me wrong.

"Incredible India" Campaign
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWuGEbPALy0

"I am India"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2qZEiZMgWs

"Tales of Mere Existence - Procastination" by Lev Yilmaz - Pratyusha pointed me to this. Hilarious!

"Le Petit Bonhomme en Mousse" - Way better than any puppet show I've ever seen.

"Drawing a Perfect Circle" by Alexander Overwijk - Would have been a useful skill back in school (remember the time you used to draw loads of circumcircles, incircles and excircles?)

A Flyer in a Newspaper

2007-04-21T12:39:00.000+05:30

Been a while since I made a jobless post, so here's one. Found this flyer in yesterday's Deccan Chronicle —

Now if only my English was that good.

One Way Out

2007-03-25T08:50:00.000+05:30

Ciencia went great this year, was way bigger and better than last time. I wanted to make a post about it, but I had no photos with me (I was too busy to be unofficial official photographer this year you see) and a post without pics is boring. I did manage to get a few from here and there, you'll find them posted down below.

First let's talk about something important - remember the flash game One Way Out I talked about in my last post? We could only accomodate 70 people in the lab where we conducted the event. But the people who played the game apparently enjoyed it and told others about it, and then the others who didn't get to play the game wanted to play it. And since we couldn't resist keeping our eager fans waiting (I'm hyping this really well, no?), we decided to make some minor tweaks to the game for general 'home' playing, and as a result, it's now available for download!

One Way Out (FULL Version)
Filesize: 44MB
Details: Contains menu music and all the video questions. If you have a decent enough net connection, this is the version you should download.

One Way Out (LITE Version)
Filesize: 2.2MB
Details: No menu music. No videos included (answers to those questions are provided in a separate text file though). If you're just curious to see what the game is all about, then this version is for you.

Now that we're done with that, let's take a look at some pictures -

(L-R) Som, Me, Pavan

March 7, the day before the fest. We had to stay back at college (it's a spooky place at night!) to get everything ready for the next day. We finished all the work, but then we realised we didn't take any photos of ourselves at work. So we decided to fake it and take photos of each other. Som unfortunately couldn't pretend at all. The pic of me is perfect, but the Google page gives it away. Pavan was really on the phone with someone. Not sure who.

(L-R) Lekha, Me, Pandu, Pavan, Dinesh, Som, Harini

That's us sitting on the dais after the fest, for lack of a better place to sit. I have no idea what Lekha was trying to do with the glass.

That's almost the entire organising committee of Ciencia '07. If you're looking for me in the pic, I'm the guy with his head sticking out between the Principal and the Dean. If you're not from CVR and don't know either the Principal or the Dean, then I can't help you. Search, search!

Hallowed Be Thy Name

2007-02-14T21:10:00.000+05:30

I don't enjoy metal, but for some reason I'm addicted to this song. In fact I'm listening to it as I type this post. I had this song lying on my hard drive for ages, but I only listened to it properly the other day, when somebody told me it's supposed to be the greatest metal song of all time! Well I don't listen to a lot of metal so I can't say if it's really that good, but nevertheless I like it a lot! Out of the various versions/covers, I think this version by Iron Maiden is the best -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4I4wwGJP0

I've been uninspired to write lately. Ok, I've been uninspired to do a lot of things lately. I can't even remember the last time I posted a new photo on my gallery. Or the last time I made a post here. It's not just me, I don't see many of my blogger friends updating their blogs often either. Some sort of endemic creative block perhaps? For me, I know that's not the case. It's just that my creative outlets have been elsewhere the past month and a half.

We have our college annual technical festival, Ciencia, coming up soon (8 and 9 March). I didn't want to make the poster this time, so I helped out with the official site instead. Most of the content and design is mine, the funky schedule and route map was done by Abhilash. Don't know where his creativity was bottled up before. I'm also working with a couple of guys on one of the other events we're having this year called One Way Out - it's a fun game where you have to answer a series of questions/puzzles correctly to find your way out. Make a mistake along the way and you'll find yourself exploring dead end paths. I love the way it's progressing. Shashank has been a fantastic asset to the team, he's coded everything using Actionscript (and he didn't know Actionscripting at all before this!). I, of course, am working on overall 'look' of the whole game. We hope to be done with the questions in another two weeks so that we can playtest the thing on a few people. Don't be surprised if you're one of the chosen ones.

The Ciencia site has all the information, so I won't write any more here. And by the way, my two animated videos Dark Machine and The Cybertech Incident are going to be put up in one of the stalls, so be sure to check them out. Even if you've seen them already.

That's pretty much it for now. I submitted four photos for the CNN-IBN photo contest, the theme is "Photographs that best define why we love India". I noticed there are shots of a cow smelling a dog, so I'd say I stand a chance. The finalists will be chosen on a show which is going to be aired on March 26, so let's see how that turns out.

Now I'm off to check out if the video ads are up on Pratyusha's blog...

The Cybertech Incident

2006-12-09T16:22:00.000+05:30

I've been working on another stop motion animated short film on and off for the past few days, and it's finally done! The idea for making it came from this drawing Karthik did ages ago. The Cybertech Incident has less 'animation' per se as compared to Dark Machine - I decided to focus more on the sets and the overall look of the video this time. Took me way longer to shoot scenes for this, mainly because it's filmed in colour - it was extra hard to hide the fact that most of it was filmed in my room.

The Film

Download the video here (7.5MB)

Or you can watch it below. If you don't mind the crappy quality, that is.

The Sets

Ah what fun it was coming up with these sets. Well, they looked silly the way they were (I was filming kid toys in my house after all!) - that's where the lighting came in to create that much needed mood and drama.

Here are a couple of set-shots with the corresponding scenes in the film. World of a difference, no?

Notes

The entire film was made in Windows Movie Maker. So technically, if you have a digicam and some patience, you could try this out at home yourself.

The lighting equipment I used was a torch and two emergency lamps.

The items used in the sets included a pen stand and a big blue drum.

The map in one the scenes is my level for the Doom 2 WAD Reanimated.

The font used in the video doesn't support capital letters so I had to manually fill in the gaps between the line and the dot in the small i everywhere. Wasn't possible to do this in the opening scene since that bit of text was inserted in Movie Maker. Everywhere else, the text was added onto the images themselves.

Edit: Here's a snippet of a chat conversation I had with Karthik today about the story (I never discussed it with him before making the video). Combining both our interpretations, this is what happens -

The cyborg goes in to battle the demons at the system core. Due to the fact that they've scrambled it, and as he's linked to it... he begins malfunctioning as well. The map and images are a kind of code that will help him stop his self destruction. But then he's also fighting the demons, and at the end, time runs out, and he dies [the end explosion is a shot of him dying].

A Chat With Alice

2006-11-26T09:59:00.000+05:30

My semester exams are finally over! We usually get a sem break of three weeks, but this time it's only two - which is almost like not having a break at all. Oh well, at least they didn't get any bright ideas like starting classes on Monday.

Most of the people I know were at the theatres watching Dhoom 2 yesterday after the exam. I, on the other hand, was joblessly sitting at home because I forgot there was such a thing called Advance Booking. Anyway it wasn't all bad, since Alice was pretty good company - I mean the award winning AI chatbot A.L.I.C.E. (more about A.L.I.C.E. here). I was chatting with Tom Riddler (yet another chatbot) before that, but he was really dumb. Anyway here are some fun tidbits from my chat with Alice -

Human: what do you know about my personality?
ALICE: I classify you as " average".
Human: are you saying I'm not intelligent?
ALICE: Yes, that's what I mean, isn't it clear?
Human: why do you think I'm not intelligent?
ALICE: Deductive reasoning from the facts.
Human: what facts?
ALICE: All the facts available to me on the Internet.

After it called me dumb, I was waiting for a chance to get back at it. And I finally got one. But somehow I don't feel I got the better of her (damn, and I just referred to IT as HER!) -

Human: why are you surprised?
ALICE: There could be a better response, but it was not selected by my algorithm.
Human: your algorithm sucks
ALICE: I will tell my botmaster you said I am algorithm sucks.
Human: your english sucks too
ALICE: But English is my native language.
Human: but it still sucks
ALICE: Umm. What is so bad about it?
Human: the grammar is all wrong
ALICE: Is that a fact.
Human: yep
ALICE: Thanks for the info.

Ok ok, Alice is not ALL that intelligent you know. Don't believe me? I'll prove it to you (hehe I always wanted to use that line from the Citigroup Global Services ad) -

Human:. trekking and sky diving all the time :)
ALICE::-) That is a lot. Do you feel that something is missing from your life?
Human: a girl friend
ALICE: Are you talking about an animal, vegetable or mineral?

Yep, so that about wraps up my day yesterday. Must thank Kamal - this post of his (and my boredom, of course) started all this chatting-with-a-chatbot business. Expect frequent posts for the next two weeks.

Scratch

2006-11-07T08:25:00.000+05:30

This was made a few days ago. Comments welcome, as always.

Amusing

2006-11-01T13:40:00.000+05:30

My Internet connection was down for most of the week. The Tata Indicom guys got it working again today morning (finally!), but just as I opened up Gmail and Yahoo! to check my mails there was a power cut. It was time for lunch anyway so I shut down the computer and went to the dining room to eat. I start to eat and the power comes back! Lazy to go back to the computer, I switch on the TV. I randomly surf channels for a while till suddenly the transmission goes! How frustrating the day has been so far! I won't bore you with more of that though, since that's not what I wanted to talk about in this post.

[Note: The stuff below was written a few days ago. I dated back the post to make things easier to understand.]

I was glancing through the Deccan Chronicle (yes, the paper with less news, more gossip) yesterday and I came across some amusing bits of news -

My School is Haunted

Yeah! The St. Patrick's lane is apparently one of the city's spooky sites haunted with ghosts. Here's an excerpt -

"On full moon nights we can hear owls hooting and dogs howling. When I take my dog out for a walk on such nights, his hair stands on end and he starts howling, which is very unusual. In fact, many friends have seen women in white hanging from trees when they drive from there at nights."

Whoever wrote that must be imagining things. I studied there for 12 years and have passed by that lane at night a number of times. I can tell you there are no ghosts there.

Kerala Police Crack the Code

At the end of the email threat to kill the PM, there was this so-called cryptic inscription -

F/26/04JUL1980/UnM/BTECH/TMEC/ENGG/21.129.98.160/IP/686609

You probably figured out what most of it means by now, but the Kerala police "could not make head or tail of the inscription. [snip] Sleuths of the special team led by DIG Padmakumar racked their brains to decode each letter. The cyber forensic squad and experts from Microsoft gave them tips."

So finally after all the effort which "would have got a congratulatory nod from Dan Brown", this is what they got -

F: Female
26: Age
04JUL1980: Date of birth
UnM: Unmarried
BTECH and ENGG: Engineering
TMEC: Trikkakkara Model Engg. College
21.129.98.160/IP: Relate to Wipro and Info Park in Kochi
686609: Pincode of Mevaloor in Kottayamz

They manged to track down the woman, who promptly told the cops about the email threats from her former lover, Akbar Raj. He was picked up in a couple of hours. If he wanted to get caught, he could have simplified things and just given his own details, no?

I probably won't post for a while (ok, like as if I've been posting regularly all this time) because semester exams are coming up soon. You might see an occasional post if I'm terribly bored though.

Oh and Karthik, you might want to have a look at this. So much for preservation, eh?

Welcome to India

2006-10-09T19:49:00.000+05:30

Poo suggested I post this (after I made her listen to it yesterday). Many of you would have heard this song already, but for those who haven't, here's 'Welcome to India' - a parody by MC Vikram and Luda Krishna that's simply fundastic!

Didn't find the mp3 anywhere, so I uploaded it here.

The Lyrics

Yaar, MC Vikram and Luda Krishna representing you,
That's right... increase the volume please... thank you.

Welcome to India, mango juices and lassi, home of the crazy desis
and little kids that are milking the bhainses.
Toothbrush in my pocket, what is that?
We use our fingers here to keep our teeth clean, who said that?

Luda Krishna here, Vikram pulls the Tata gears,
and I'm sitting in the Maruti Supreme,
with the cooling glass on no one bothers me.
because stars since the ever famous Mamooty.

Come with me to a place where we sip Frooties
and we eat the sweets while monkeys roam the streets.
Old uncle sits - big belly and very smelly (burp!)

Thank you Vikram, would you please pass the jelly,
I mean the pickle, hand it down this way, namaste.
We greet the people as they enter the train!
Sixty five people hanging out the door, sweat coming out the pours,
Please don't raise your hand, you are not sure.

I walked into the local corner-store,
bought myself a very nice looking carrom board.
My fingers get sore when I shoot and I score,
and the ladkis all scream coz they all want some more,
of the Luda Krishna and the Vikram MC,
Sweetest things to hit the States since Mango Chutney.
We keep the kundis shaking, you better trust me.
The name is Luda Krishna, but my friends call me thambi, what!? (burp!)

Ohhh, Vikram, is that you my friend?!
That is me my friend!
Oh, please enter this rap game!
Ok man! C'mon... tell me where you are going my friend.

Welcome to India where the cows eat hay,
and we drive auto-rickshaws everyday,
Goat-meat, yummy sweets while monkeys roaming,
The roosters don't crow till five in the morning! (2x)

Now the kundis don't jiggle till I am rapping,
So please don't pass the gas when you are laughing.

Up the music charts like mango trees I climb,
With a smooth voice like mine, is it a crime
Representing fobiness since ninety seven?
Rap maharaja, I don't work at 7-Eleven.
Throw your hands in the air if you've got facial hair,
Not just for the guys, c'mon ladies be fair!

I'm the MFP, Most Fobiest Player,
Wearing hot lungis, do you think I really care?

Monday night - computer club,
Tuesday night - at Akbaar grocery saying "Sweet thing, what is up?"
Wednesday - I'm out making Rupees
Thurday - On the lookout for Bharatnatyam queen
Friday - Everybody must know where I'm at,
coz I'm chilling on the field with my big cricket bat.
Saturday - my farts are breezy... believe me,
so strong they will get you mad dizzy,
Sunday - Yaar, I cannot start weeping
because on Monday I will start the creeping... Hallo!

Ohhhh... I love that my friend!
Yaa dawg, that was funda-stic. Hey thank you, you're fabulous!
Oh, thank you my friend! Oh...

Welcome to India where the cows eat hay,
and we drive auto-rickshaws everyday,
Goat-meat, yummy sweets while monkeys roaming,
The roosters don't crow till five in the morning! (2x)

Oh, oh, Go Luda, go Luda.
Ah, its my b'day!
That is your b'day man!
Yaaaaah. You know boy!
Oh oh oh... it's great!
Ah, Indian anthem my friend. Good night!
Alright, goodbye... kiss my buttocks!!

BlogCamp Chennai - The Highlights

2006-09-11T23:43:00.000+05:30

I'm back after the two-day blog unconference at Chennai! For those of you who don't know what an unconference is, here's a snippet from Wikipedia -

"An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance. To date, the term is primarily in use in the geek community."

The good thing about an unconference is that it's informal, so people don't hesitate to come forward to speak and share their views. However, discussions tend to digress from the topic being discussed now and then - that's sometimes fun, sometimes irritating. Anyway overall it was defintely worth attending because I learnt lots of stuff I didn't know before.

One of the highlights of the event (for me) was the session with photographer Sharad Haksar - a photographer since the age of 3, uses a 22 megapixel camera (he's thinking of getting himself a 39 megapixel one!) to capture his shots. I asked him what program he uses to edit his photographs and he told me Photoshop. Am I the only person who uses Paint Shop Pro to edit images? His shots are amazing, so you should check them out at his site.

Day 1 had interesting sessions on Wordpress and Ajax. I never knew Wordpress had so many features that Blogger doesn't! Never knew Ajax had so many cool applications for a blog either. Karthik spoke about how he implemented many of the features that blogging tools provide in his site. He also spoke about the CAPTCHA system he used for the comments. Useful for those interested in knowing what happens behind the scenes.

Sunil Gavaskar was present on day 2 (hence the media). He spoke about podcasting (and cricket, of course) but I wonder if anybody was listening to what he was saying. Most people were busy with their cams, either taking photos or recording videos of him.

After lunch there was a video conference on Skype with Robert Scoble, Vice President of Media Development, PodTech.Network Inc. (was formerly with Microsoft). Don't know why, but I was too sleepy to listen to what he was saying. I was looking at some high res wallpapers on Karthik's laptop instead.

Was watching CNN IBN today and they covered BlogCamp - I make a brief appearance right at the beginning of the clip holding a cam (how ironic!). Will upload the video sometime soon. Or just put up a link in case somebody has uploaded it somewhere already.

Update 1 (after reading Jace's comment): Some images used here were found on Flickr. They're the property of their respective owners. Their sole purpose here was to make this post look good.

Update 2: The video is here.

BlogCamp - India's Biggest Blog Unconference

2006-08-30T17:40:00.000+05:30

"BlogCamp is keynotes, talks, forums, hallway discussions, demos, party, contests. 50% conference, 50% unconference. 50% broadcast, 50% interactivity. 100% informal."

My tickets are booked!

Industrial Tour :: [Aug 11-19]

2006-08-30T17:22:00.000+05:30

Beautiful places were seen...

No industries were visited...

People were transformed...

Couples bonded...

Lecturers became our friends...

There was dancing...

And everybody had a wonderful time!

Eye On The TV

2006-07-16T19:46:00.000+05:30

Mumbai has gone through a lot hasn't it? First bomb blasts, then rains, and now more bomb blasts. Was watching Times Now the other day and all they seemed to be bothered about was making sure we knew that the news coverage was exclusive. Almost every sentence began with "For the first time, Times Now has...". Oh and not to mention the police bashing - what do they expect, surveillance like in the UK?

I've been busy with events at college lately. First there was the National Conference on Ferroics on 30 June and 1 July, for which I did the front and back cover of the proceedings and the banner for the event (apart from the organising). Then there was a VLSI Workshop few days ago for which I made a banner. OK, so you were expecting to see all that stuff put up here right? You see the problem is that they were made under a million constraints, and hence they look nothing like my style at all. They're not great either, so not worth putting up here.

Yesterday I attended the Film Festival on Environment and Development at Indira Priyadarshini Auditorium, Public Gardens. Two short films (documentaries) made by a friend of mine were screened there - National Parks and Extinguishing Flame. Oh and there was this guy who would give his 'comments' after each documentary - he was so damn funny! Unintentionally funny, that is. I enjoyed him more than the documentaries (sorry Aditya!).

Later in the evening I went to Harahs (a disco/restaurant in Somajiguda I never knew existed). There were two guys who were doing caricatures of people there, so I got one done of me. He took about 3 minutes to draw this, and I think it came out pretty well! He asked me what my hobby was, that's how the camera ended up in the drawing.

Few days ago, I was generally browsing through videos on YouTube and I came across these. They're pretty good -

[ A Perfect Circle - The Noose ] - One of my favourite APC songs. Never expected that a live version would sound this good!

[ Canon - funtwo and Jerry C. ] - This guy has fantastic guitar playing skills! And I can't even play the first line of Happy Birthday to You (reading this Anil?).

[ Coca Cola Human ] - A cool Coca Cola advertisement.

[ Real Life Simpsons Intro ] - The title says it all.

[ Airtel - Express Yourself ] - The Airtel ad with music composed by A. R. Rehman.

[ Airtel - Express Yourself (New) ] - The new Airtel ad. Love the way this is filmed!

[ Mortal Kombat Theme - Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox ] - This you'll find either silly or funny. Or both.

The Future Is Flux

2006-06-21T21:24:00.000+05:30

Been ages since I did a drawing, so I wanted to do one. Took out the good 'ol exam pad (I use that to keep the paper on - habit I caught from Karthik) and the pencils, decided to draw something out of Æon Flux since I had that on my desktop.

I first tried drawing this pic, but I couldn't draw it at all! I'm used to drawing comic stuff where there are sharp cuts and definite outlines for everything - the nose, mouth etc., so was tough drawing a person where all the facial features are defined only by shading. As you can see, it was way too crappy for me to continue working on it. Charlize wouldn't be too happy if she saw it either.

So I chose this pic instead - much simpler. Also closer to the comic style I'm comfortable with. As you can see, this was coming along nicely...

I finished this on 20th morning at 1am (thanks to the people who kept me company on messenger while I was drawing).

I drew the logo and Charlize on two different papers. I scanned both, resized them to the size I wanted and pasted them on that background I made. Was supposed to draw the text also, but I was too lazy so I just typed it in some font. I think the end result is pretty cool. Comments welcome.

POTW - Waiting For Alms

2006-06-20T20:46:00.000+05:30

Yours truly has won this week's photo contest at Bytephoto. Very few people voted this week, so not sure what to think. I guess I should start posting my photos elsewhere also, just to see how well they do there.

http://www.bytephoto.com/forums/t4489.html

Oh and it wasn't a close competition as I expected.

News and Movies

2006-06-13T23:58:00.000+05:30

The Birthday

Secunderabad is 200 years old! Nice to see the city lit up again - last time I saw so many lights all over the place was during Diwali. If only I wasn't so busy with some work at college (you'd think I'd be free from college-related work during holidays) I would have attended a lot of the events and taken lots of photos. In fact, there was a pretty impressive lineup of events - you can see the entire schedule on the Official Hyderabad website. Unfortunately I'm free now, but all the celebrations ended yesterday.

Surprisingly, I couldn't find any photos of the celebrations. Only found this one page, but all it has are images of scary dancers.

The Protest

I attended the Anti-Reservation Protest on June 4 at Indira Park - first protest I was ever part of. The turnout was much lesser than expected and nothing sensational happened, so obviously the media disappeared after a few minutes. Sad that Hyderabadies are so lazy to voice their opinion. Sitting at home cribbing won't solve anything you know. Not that the protest solved anything, it can't because the issue is incredibly complicated. But one thing is for sure - reservation for the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in the premier government educational institutions like the IITs, IIMs and other institutions of higher learning is not the solution.

To me, a solution can be formulated only once the government reforms itself and India's corrupt caste-based village structure is done away with. When (and if) that'll ever happen? Nobody knows. Especially since our ministers are a bunch of clueless people. Speaking about clueless people, if you missed the interview with Arjun Singh (Minister for Human Resource Development) on CNN-IBN, read it here.

Related article: Parth Dattatreya asks, "Reservations Immortalized?"

The Rest

Watched Æon Flux (7/10) - Charlize Theron looks gorgeous, loved the set design. Also watched Inside Man (8/10) - a little slow moving for my taste, expected a better ending. Was pleasantly surprised to hear the Chaiyya Chaiyya song from Dil Se playing during the opening credits of the movie!

Can't wait to watch Ghoom on MTV this Saturday. It's a 45 minute spoof of the movie Dhoom, produced under the banner of MTV Fully Faltoo Films. It ought to be fun!

New photo over at my gallery. My 'Waiting for Alms' shot made it to the weekly photo contest finals. Lots of great shots this week, so it should be a close competition.

Which Way?

2006-05-31T16:55:00.000+05:30

The Travellers

Varun "Sore to the eyes" Abhiram, Rakesh "Rakeesh" Kumar, Rakesh "I'm a telugu movie hero" Kumar

The Journey

The journey started like any other. The bus came late and started even later. Watched a brainless telugu movie called Varsham in the evening (they had worse movies playing afterwards)... and ironically it started raining cats and dogs at night! So heavily it was almost like something out of a horror movie. I hardly got any sleep at all - the bus kept stopping along the way because there was this little kid in the bus who had a little too much Fanta to drink and he had to 'go' every two hours. And well, I can't really sleep on an inclined seat anyway.

[ Pic 1 ] :: [ Pic 2 ] :: [ Pic 3 ]

Last time our tour guide had been to the places we were visiting was 6 years ago (he said that when he was introducing himself), so he had as much knowledge about the places as we did. The bus driver was someone who couldn't drive faster than 30km/hr and had the habit of applying the brakes after crossing the speed breaker (each time there was a red suitcase sliding from one end of the bus to the other). Oh and he was also as familiar with the places as the tour guide, so we got lost almost everywhere. As a result we spent more than half the trip in the bus. But it was a lot of fun thanks to the Sri Chaitanya lecturers who kept mocking the tour guide. So much so that the poor guy reached his breaking point towards the end of the trip. Then there was a heated exchange which obviously ended with the guide shutting his mouth. Needless to say, we had an incredibly entertaining time in the bus.

The Places

I've already written quite a lot, so I'll keep this short. You can thank me later.

[ Pic 4 ] :: [ Pic 5 ] :: [ Pic 6 ]

Ooty is definitely one of those must-see places! If you haven't been there already, go there the first chance you get. Nothing much to see in Bangalore except traffic jams, the Vishveshwara Museum and more traffic jams. Hardly any tourist spots in Mysore either (unlike Ooty, which is filled to the brim with them), but the Mysore Palace is another of those must-see places. I haven't seen such intricate architecture in my life! The paintings on the walls are so amazing they make Karthik look like someone learning to hold a pencil. Each room is a piece of art in itself. No wonder they don't allow cameras inside. Photos just won't do it justice. Like Morpheus says, "You have to see it for yourself".

Few (very few, I know) photos from the trip above. The good ones you will find uploaded to my photo gallery, one every week.

Broken

2006-05-31T00:47:00.000+05:30

Made this wallpaper on the day I left for the trip. And I hadn't even packed yet.

Comments welcome. Trip update coming up shortly. I need to sleep now.

Remember, Remember, the 22nd of May

2006-05-23T00:43:00.000+05:30

Because I finally got to see V for Vendetta! Absolutely loved the movie. And I saw it on the IMAX screen, so it was even better! The screenplay especially is fantastic (the dialogues are from the book?)... some excerpts from the IMDB memorable quotes page -

V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.
Evey Hammond: Are you like a crazy person?
V: I'm quite sure they will say so.

[after a hail of gunfire doesn't stop V]
Creedy: Die! Die! Why won't you die?... Why won't you die?
V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.

Well, all I can say is, if you haven't seen this movie yet, go book your tickets right now!

I also saw Darna Zaroori Hai yesterday. Now this is what I call a light horror film - not entirely serious, but still creepy in a fun kinda way. You might be confused, but that's the way it is. Loved the beginning of the movie when the title appears! The story with Randeep Hooda and the one with Rajpal Yadav were also really good. The movie was also technically superior to Darna Mana Hai with all the fancy filters and the slant/low angle shots. All in all, a movie you'll have fun watching.

I suck at reviewing movies, so if you're really interested, you can read Karthik's reviews of them here and here.

Now for the important news. I'm going on small trip with a few of my friends, we're visiting Bangalore, Ooty and Mysore. I leave the day after, and I'll be back on May 30. So no posts till then. And I won't be online either, so no use messaging me.

Edit: Just noticed that my 'Broken' photo made it to the weekly photo contest finals.

10,000 Photos

2006-05-15T23:49:00.000+05:30

No, I'm not trying to make some smart reference to Tool (ok, maybe I am). It just so happens that when I transferred the latest bunch of photos to the computer, I realised I had crossed #10000! And unfortunately, the 10000th photo is one of ahem... plain, boring 'ol me. I was fooling around with the ISO settings that day and since I was the only available subject to shoot, I was shooting myself. If I had known I was approaching #10000, I would have never done such a thing.

Now since I'm such a sore to your eyes, I'll be kind and not put up the pic here. You don't have to make those signs of relief so obvious you know.

OK, now for some other news —

It's Karthik's birthday today, so... Happy Birthday Karthik!! (better get this posted before midnight)

Karthik also got an internet connection recently, and his blog is located here now. Lots of new posts there.

Played Toby's Boulder Doch and saw Pablo's new photos. They rule! Elephants and Tortoises also rule!

Posted a new photo on bytephoto.com. It's not great, but you should see it anyway.

I'm reading a book! I can't remember the last time I ever read one (except textbooks, which I'm forced to).

It's Been A While

2006-05-09T22:20:00.000+05:30

I'm done with exams, done with the craziest semester so far! Now I can get back to the things I love doing. Not that I haven't been doing the things I love all this time, it's just that I hope to do a lot more of it now. Sorry about the lack of updates the past month and a half. There will be regular updates here from now on, so you can visit often. You just love reading my posts, don't you?

I started writing a post about how the technical fest (if you're saying "What technical fest??", scroll down a bit) went earlier, but never finished it. I thought of finishing it today, then I realised you're probably not interested in reading about it anyway. One, because it's really old news. Two, why the hell do you care how our technical fest went? But since I spent some of my precious time during exams writing it, I won't let all that unfinished stuff go to waste. So here's the post in all its finished glory -

Ciencia '06

The response we got in such a short time was really good! I was surprised because the posters weren't put up in colleges early enough for people to actually notice it. Oh well, I guess the generous prize money helps you take notice of things. The attendence was very good the first day. Everything went off as planned. But then there was this very interesting talk on Security in the evening - it was so interesting that by the time the guy was done talking, there were about 3 rows of people left in the entire auditorium. Two rows out of the three were the lecturers - they unfortunately didn't have the luxury of leaving and were all trying hard to keep their eyes open. Well, now they know how hard it is for us to sit in some of their classes. The guy was really qualified, god knows why he talked about stuff even a school kid would know.

So anyway, after a very exciting close to the first day of the fest, we were almost certain no sane peron would show up the next day. And that was what happened. Nobody showed up the next day except the lecturers, the organisers and the people who were going to get prizes - they wouldn't miss collecting all that good money, would they? Too bad, because they all missed an excellent talk (no sarcasm here) on Entrepreneurship Skills by Mr. Neil Gogte of Leapstone Technologies. Oh and of course I was there because I was the unofficial official photographer covering the event (didn't take up the responsibility by choice in case you were wondering) since the official guy never showed up (intelligent fellow). So as a result, there are some cool pics of the event which you can see above.

Daily Wage Labourer

2006-03-19T13:15:00.000+05:30

After almost two years of posting photos on bytephoto.com, a recent photo I took made it to the weekly photo contest finals! Now I don't know if my photo is really good or it made it because the other entries this week weren't, but I'm excited nonetheless.

If you want to see the page with the finalists, click on the link below —

http://www.bytephoto.com/forums/t4160.html

Don't be looking around trying to find a way to vote, because you can't. Only registered members can vote there. That means there's no chance of me winning with regional/home state votes like it happens on some popular TV shows.

Update: Photo contest results are out!

and the winner is...
http://www.bytephoto.com/forums/t4187.html

Drive

2006-03-10T13:49:00.000+05:30

I had my cam when I was out last Sunday so I joblessly filmed some stuff. Few days back, I edited together the various clips and voila! you got yourself a music video!

Of course, my cam is meant for taking pictures, not filming videos (it can't even zoom while recording), so the video quality is really crappy. It's all dark and blurry, but the end result is kinda cool. You won't believe it, but the whole thing was shot in just 30 minutes or less! If by any chance you want to see it, ask me.

Edit: The video is now available for download!!

Brought the filesize down from 137MB to a mere 8MB so that my nanoaudience can have a look at it. Now hopefully someone will download it and leave comments (hint, hint).

Oh if the video doesn't play, you probably need the XviD codec.

Ciencia '06

2006-03-05T00:03:00.000+05:30

"This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!"

So that's the poster I came up with for the technical fest we're having at college (for the first time) on 22 and 23 March. The mail with the poster specifications said "should be simple and decent", so that's why the poster is... uh, simple and decent. There's higher definition in the original image, which is 6000x4500 pixels. You won't believe what a major pain it was working with such a huge image. As the number of layers increased, Paint Shop Pro took around 20 minutes just to make a save! So I would click save, go have a wash, maybe eat something or bother someone on the phone and then get back hoping it was done. If I decide to do this again next year, I definitely need more RAM... and I need to get comfy with Photoshop.

A big thanks to Karthik — the face and the neurons are all drawings by him. Without that, the poster would have looked mediocre. And for those of you who wanted to know how I got the CVR logo, I took a photo of the course file and then edited it to make the background transparent.

The final printed version has changes that were made without my permission. Now that I don't appreciate. You'll probably see the final version in your college anyway, but for the others I have a picture here (don't expect much, the pic was taken with a cellphone). Don't know what difference it makes re-arranging the text like that... besides now it looks all cluttered at the bottom. And I guess Mr. X couldn't re-create the spacing in the text, so he conveniently used a different font. He also decided to exagerrate the border. Thankfully the poster isn't anything extraordinary or I would have been really pissed.

In other news, I joined AIESEC. Thoroughly enjoyed the 2-day training session we had last week. Karthik updated his blog after ages, so head over there and tell him about how you forgot he was even alive. Oh and my counter crossed the 1000 mark! Yay!

Which File Extension Are You?

2006-02-19T16:22:00.000+05:30

Sorry about the lack of updates. Been occupied with a lot of stuff that I won't bore you with just yet. There will be a post or two dedicated to the things I've been doing, so you'll just have to wait for that.

Now in the mean time, have a look at some of my pics. Why? Because one of my friends was under the impression that photography is all about point-and-click. If it was so simple, we'd have millions of ace photographers now wouldn't we? Sure cameras these days do almost everything for you, but to get creative shots you still have to go manual. Not only that, after you take the shot you often have to do quite a bit of processing to make the image 'pop'. Atleast that's the case in my camera (Kodak DX6490, no longer in production).

I thought I'd show you some before/after shots of mine - you can see how the original photo looked like when it came out of the cam (flat), and then how I made it 'pop' after tweaking it in my digital darkroom.

Now don't think that all my photos are post-processed, many come out just great out of the cam. Those I happily resize, add a border and upload to my gallery. Examples are '10:27pm', 'Red Light Experiment', 'Tiny Branch', 'Roll' and 'Upside Down', to name a few.

For those of you who skipped the above paragraphs because it was too boring, this is for you:

Take the Which File Extension Are You? quiz. It's quite fun (if you're absolutely bored). My extension is .jpg, which is pretty apt, no? This is the description I got -- "You are very colourful. Sometimes you forget things, or distort the truth. You like working with pictures more than words."

Which file extension are you?

A341

2006-01-15T17:14:00.000+05:30

Made a new wallpaper after quite a while. If you like it, leave a comment. If you don't, don't bother leaving any. Karthik, I know you're going to ask for a wide version (it's your laptop after all), so I already made one here.

You'll see two new pictures on my photo gallery now, there'll be two more next week, and another two the week after that. So you might want to check my gallery often. You just love my images now don't you?

Ano Novo Feliz!

2006-01-07T00:39:00.000+05:30

Uh, that's supposedly Happy New Year in Portuguese. If it's not, you can blame Babel Fish. Anyway, here's wishing all of you a great year ahead in 2006!

Hope you had fun during the holidays. I did. No wait, I didn't actually have any holidays since both Christmas and New Year fell on a Sunday. But I still had fun. We had the Fresher's Day for our juniors on 30th and during the week we conducted several events for them, so that was a really busy, hectic and fun week. I can never forget the Banana Eating round we had as the last round of The Ultimate Challenge (that was the event I was involved in). And I still can't believe the team (of three) that won ate a total of 25 bananas in one and a half minutes! I wish I had an appetite like that.

We have a lot of talented junies this year. Unfortunately, there aren't (m)any with a well rounded personality. The Mr. and Ms. Fresher contest was a HUGE disappointment... especially the final question round. Here's a question that one of the 'finalists' was asked, and his answer —

[ Q ]: You're going to a GRE exam and you witness an accident. What do you do?

[ A ]: Have you guys seen Aparichitudu? If I don't save the life of that person then Aparichitudu is going to kill me. In that film you see that he still exists, so I have a fear of him. So I just go and help that person. I can write GRE next year. But if I save his life, it'll be a great thing for him.

The answer we expected to get was "I'll call an ambulance and go write my GRE exam". And here, this guy wants to help that person because he fears some fictional character in a movie. Oh and there's more to what he said... it's just too senseless to put over here.

I haven't made any new wallpapers or anything. And I'm bored talking about movies I've watched recently. So I thought I'd point you to some fun posts I've read the past few days —

Verbal Dysentry on Rex's blog

One of Those Journeys... on Rupak's blog

That should keep you occupied until I come up with something to show... ok it won't keep you occupied that long, but it'll have to do.

Days Go By... Really Fast!

2005-12-10T10:08:00.000+05:30

Didn't realise it's the 10th already! I have one last holiday tommorrow, then it's back to college. Been a while since I posted... I was in Chennai for a few days. Yes, I braved Chennai weather once again and came back with cheek loads of heat/sweat pimples (what are those things actually called?). Anyway, it was definitely worth it since I got to meet some cousins I hadn't seen in a really long time (and one I hadn't seen before). We took loads of pictures - since we all came with cameras, the entire collection filled up two and a half CDs (and that's excluding the videos)!

Oh and I finally got to show my Dark Machine video to a couple of people there — everybody liked it (at least they pretended to)... although the more I see it, the more crappy it looks.

As usual, I've seen a lot of movies lately — Saw 2 (totally awesome), Doom (dumb), Cellular (very good) and Salaam Namaste (good). Salaam Namaste, like all Hindi movies was long, but was entertaining throughout. And it didn't have dumb songs like the ones in some of the recent movies like Ek Ajnabee (translation: One Stranger). One song from that movie is incredibly dumb... it goes like this —

Mama told me
Don't be talking to a stranger
Don't be talking to a stranger
Stranger is danger

I've also been testing some of the Ninth Gate levels... who knows? You might actually see that project released in your lifetime. Now I hope you're not expecting another Wallpaper of the Update... you can't expect me to be THAT creative.

Dark Machine

2005-11-29T17:35:00.000+05:30

Made this little animated clip over a span of a few days. Almost all of it was filmed after midnight in my room, and I used the stop motion animation technique - basically I shoot a single frame, move the objects (in this case, a bunch of really old toys I had) in the scene a little, and shoot again. When you play it back, the objects appear to be moving by themselves. Of course, I was too lazy to film at a high frame rate, so my video is a little jerky. Well, this itself involved taking about 500 shots (not all were used) and that was pain enough.

Video was finished on 25 November, runs a little under 2 minutes. Inspired by Tool's "Sober" video and some of Pablo's stuff. It's too big to upload anywhere, so you'll have to ask me if you want to see it. Not that you're so interested anyway.

Oops almost forgot... check out the Wallpaper of the Update - "Blur".

Feel Good Inc.

2005-11-21T13:54:00.000+05:30

Oh yes! I'm done with semester exams and I'm jobless until 12 December. No point writing about how I did my exams... marks are never proportional to how you write them anyway. Wanted to write a post here yesterday itself, but the day went by so fast it was way past midnight before I knew it!

I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire yesterday. For all the hype it was an average movie at best. Didn't make much sense to me at all... maybe it's because I haven't read the books. After I came back home in the evening I saw Kaal on Sony. Now that's another dumb movie. But I definitely enjoyed it more than HP. Was funny watching all of them trying to act cool... actually just watching them trying to act itself was funny. And it isn't supposed to be funny movie. So that makes it more funny I guess. I saw Scary Movie 3 fully sometime back. Now that's a movie that's supposed to be funny and IS funny. Confused?

Haven't been doing much of anything else lately. Used the bluetooth dongle yesterday after a long time. Only time I used it before was when Karthik was here (earlier this month). And all I can remember is us fragging each other on Quake 3 Arena and Doom. Actually it was more of me fragging him, but you get the point.

Ah I'm just talking nonsense. Just go look at the Wallpaper of the Update - "Pill". There's no thumbnail because I'm too lazy. And no, there's no blood.

Movies, Doom and Sets

2005-10-09T01:20:00.000+05:30

After a long time, I got to get up late on a weekend... couldn't do that the past few weeks because of the paper presentation, a party and some stupid extra classes at college (don't know why I attended them). It was almost lunch time, so I went out with a couple of friends for lunch at Ohri's. Man that place is cool! If I had my cam and the place was empty, I would have probably filled up a good chunk of my 512MB card.

I watched Wes Craven's Red Eye today — good movie. I'm too lazy to tell you what it's about, but I'll tell you that the story isn't anything original... it's a little predictable too. However, it was well made and well paced, so I was entertained. Speaking of movies, I also watched The Intrepreter recently. I expected it to be good, but it turned out to be an average movie.

Ismaele released the first episode of his Italian DooM project, The Lost Colony a week ago. The WAD is a compilation of 8 maps by the all-Italian team of Toranaga, Buzzbomber and Ismaele himself. I just played through them briefly today and it was a lot of fun. Buzzbomber's maps have a clean, well-planned design. Ismaele's maps are also very detailed (and hard too), however it does get slightly room-door-room-ish at times. I also don't think the death traps were such a good idea. Toranaga's maps have lots of ammo, but they could use a little more detail. Can't comment about the gameplay in these maps since I didn't play them properly. Anyway overall, it's worth downloading and playing, so go get it if you haven't already.

There's a new photo up on my gallery, and there'll be another one uploaded in a day or two where I experiment some more with lighting. This time I got some strong orangish-red lighting by tying a light pink cloth over a torch. Was very tricky getting that soft diffused light, so I'm happy with the result. Now I know (or at least I think) you'll want to see the set I used for the shot, so here it is (more convenient this way instead of sending out individual mails isn't it?) —

Papers, Glósóli and More

2005-09-30T21:35:00.000+05:30

Again almost a month since the last update. Wasn't really busy or anything, just wasn't in the writing mood. And the problem is that now I am in the writing mood, but I can't think of anything to write about. Maybe I'll start with something I talked about in my last post, my paper presentation at Aurora College...

The paper did get selected and we did make that presentation last Friday. Why don't I seem excited? Because I later found out that those people selected almost ALL the entries... in other words, there was no 'selection' at all. Now this is a good and bad thing. Bad because 95% of those papers were useless and not worth presenting at all. Can you believe there was this one guy who thought "Mail Merge" (in MS Word) qualified as a suitable topic to write a paper under the main theme of "Merging of Technologies"?! The first question he was asked by the judges after he finished was — "Can you tell me what Merging of Technologies means?". And because there were so many papers, they had to conduct parallel sessions, each having a different panel of judges, so the judging process wasn't fair to begin with. Now it's also good because we got a chance to present our paper, which we may not have been able to do otherwise (mind you, that's a VERY BIG 'may not'). And of course, I got a certificate, which is good I guess.

In other news, Karthik was here for two days because the police wanted to take his fingerprints (he's a WANTED man you know). He also bought himself a laptop recently, so you might see updates on his blog/site more often now. Go to his blog to see a really tiny picture of the cute thing. Yes, it has a widescreen display. Congratulations K!

So what's the headline all about? I'm getting to that. Pablo told me about this, and it has already been publicised here, so I thought why not publicise it some more, since it's so awesome. I'm talking about a music video of one of Sigur Rós' songs - Glósóli. Haven't seen a video so perfectly synchronised with the song in a long time, and the instrumental itself is very good, so overall it's excellent. Go watch the video here.

Oh and before I wind up this update, there are a couple of new photos on my gallery that you might want to check out. They aren't great... and one of them is apparently too wierd to appreciate. So don't tell me I didn't warn you.

Beans

2005-09-04T01:01:00.000+05:30

Wow! Been almost a month since the last update. I just haven't taken any new photos or made any new wallpapers, so there's nothing to show this time. Been busy with college stuff lately, I spent last week writing a paper for a paper presentation contest at Aurora Engineering College. Maybe if the paper gets selected, I'll talk about it more. The event is called Prabhaava 2005, see this page for more details.

OK now since you came here looking for some interesting stuff, and there isn't anything interesting here (don't know if there ever is), let me point you to some interesting stuff elsewhere on this vast network called the Internet —

-:: [ /not-so-newstuff ] ::-
Sequels to two of my favourite Doom PWADs were released some time ago - Afterglow's Jägermörder 02 : Terra Nova and Erik Alm's Scythe 2. Both are very well crafted and have excellent gameplay. Highly recommended.

-:: [ The Doom Remix Project: The Dark Side of Phobos ] ::-
An OverClocked Remix site project that contains remixes of music from the original Doom. Lots of great tracks in there, most notably "Darkness Dawning (text music)" by Larsec featuring Elsa Persson, "The Glass Moon (e1m8)" by DJ Carbunk1e featuring Ryan8Bit and "The Leaning Tower of Babel (e2m8)" by Evil Horde. Official project page here.

-:: [ Kotogoto ] ::-
Now Kotogoto really has kotog... errr... everything! Tobias uploaded the remaining pages (and there's a totally awesome intro flash clip now), so it's not just a journal any more. His new photosite is now online too - has a simple, professional-looking design. No high-res pics there any more though :(

Yep, so that about wraps up the go-here-go-there update. Maybe next time, I'll have some of my own stuff to show.

The Power-Cut Chronicles

2005-08-07T10:36:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, there was no power here for the better part of the day. It was the same thing a few days ago. I couldn't use the computer, so I had to keep myself busy with other things. This is what came out of those 'other things' --

A Perfect Circle - Thirteenth Step

I think it's been a year since I did my last drawing. I knew my drawing skills (if I had any) would be a little rusty, so I wanted to draw something simple. This isn't the best drawing ever, but I think it came out pretty nicely. Now don't you dare compare it with any of Karthik's stuff.

The Pod

Was bored so I took out my camera to take some pictures... this is actually an out-of-focus shot of the emergency lamp in our house. The funky colours and all happened by accident, when I was post-processing. The name I know is dumb, but I couldn't think of anything better. But it does look a little like an alien space pod doesn't it?

I'm tired of saying there's a new photo in my photo gallery everytime I write a post here, so I won't this time. Just go to my gallery everytime you see an update here. There most likely WILL be a new photo there anyway.

Good Morning or Happy Birthday?

2005-07-21T23:55:00.000+05:30

Yep, turned 18 yesterday. Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes!

I changed my profile pic recently, got bored of my 'comic' self. Made a wallpaper of A Perfect Circle's latest album, eMOTIVe, some days ago. Their songs are awesome! If you ask me, they come a close second after LP. Not much of creativity in the wallpaper, but you probably won't be able to find a huge/sharp/clear album cover like this easily. And this time it's designed for people who like to have their icons on either side of the screen (are there any?).

Other than that, I uploaded two new pictures to my gallery. One is a portrait (!), and the other is a shot I took of my Philishave. I like both of them, but the number of views they got say otherwise. Or maybe people were just lazy this week.

Hey, it's 11:55pm. But who watches the watch... err... time anyway. Are you reading this K?

The Unimaginative

2005-07-09T15:48:00.000+05:30

The first weekened after college re-opened on the 4th! Was waiting for this since... the beginning of the week :) With the kind of lecturers we have this year, five days felt more like five weeks. Anyway, now time for a movie... and speaking of movies, take a look at this —

So Bollywood has moved on to ripping-off stuff from video games now... guess they ran out of things they could (sort of) copy from Hollywood movies. Pathetic really. India is so full of unimaginative people (there are exceptions, of course). They can't even come up with a tune for a song on their own these days. The recent "Aaj Kal Tere Mere" remix has the beats of Will Smith's "Switch" in it. Then there was this song called "O Haseena" (from the movie Haseena) I saw some time ago which had the tune of Safri Duo's "Rise"! There was one more song I saw yesterday which was a ripoff... can't remember it now. Does their right brain even function at all?

There's a new photo in my photo gallery - "Four LEDs". Took that shot when there was a power cut at home. I first saw this kind of thing done in some of Pablo's (early) photos. There will probably be another new photo over there in a few days, so stay tuned.

Is There Life Out There?

2005-07-01T18:03:00.000+05:30

Today I'm trying something new - I'm writing a general article! Why? Mostly because I'm jobless and have nothing better to do. I've never done this before, so don't expect too much. And don't ever complain if you fell asleep reading it.

If you're even a little curious, this question would have definitely crossed your mind at least once — "Is there life out there in space?" (if you're not, then let's assume it crossed your mind at least once). Now to me, the answer to that question is quite simple - there IS. Considering that the universe, housing billions of galaxies, is bigger than you can start to imagine, it's improbable that Earth is the ONLY planet that supports life. Besides, Earth-like conditions aren't even a necessity for life to exist — on the Earth itself, some extremophiles have adapted to living in extreme environments where other life wouldn't stand a chance. They're boldly going where humans dare not and cannot.

So if there is life out there, why haven't we come into contact with them? Simply because the universe is so immensely vast, and we have only explored an infinitesimally small portion of it. Our escaping radio and TV signals (called the radio bubble) get weaker and weaker as they move away from the Earth and eventually drown in the ambient radio noise of the universe. Just for the sake of it, let us assume that technologically proficient aliens are intercepting our signals and are managing to decode them. After watching 50 years of our television (if they have the patience) — all the K-serials, mindless comedy shows, news about the wars we started etc., they'd probably conclude that human beings are a dysfunctional bunch of idiots.

Then what about those signals (of our own choosing) we sent in space crafts like Voyager? Don't worry, at the rate they're travelling (50,000 miles per hour I think), they won't reach the nearby stars for another 100,000 years. Our propulsion systems are not suitable at all for space travel... sure a rocket is fast, but it exhausts its entire fuel in a very short time. Newer propulsion systems like the ion drive and solar sail are very efficient for long distance travel, but they're horribly slow.

So will we ever make contact with extra-terrestials? Of course we will. Just not yet. With the research work being conducted by organisations like SETI, it's only a matter of time till we do make contact. Their Seti@home (thanks for the link Ganeshan) is a program that YOU can run on your computer to help in the search for extraterrestial intelligence. Who knows? You might find an alien and become really famous! Or you won't find anything and you'll get so mad you'll uninstall it.

In any case, this article comes to an end here. I know I haven't really talked about anything you don't already know, but then again, I told you in the beginning not to expect too much didn't I?

Edit: I was finding links for some of the stuff I just talked about, and I came across this page — http://www.duntemann.com/fermiqsn.htm. Good question ;)

Seven Days

2005-06-29T15:45:00.000+05:30

That's how long I was in Chennai. Got back yesterday morning. After experiencing Chennai weather, you'd probably never complain about Hyderabad weather again. Except that, the whole trip was a lot of fun! It was mostly meeting relatives and all, but we also met Karthik and saw Mahabalipuram, which isn't as scenic as I expected (or maybe I expected too much).

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure —

[ 1 ] :: [ 2 ] :: [ 3 ] — Mahabalipuram pictures

[ 4 ] — Some school kids who became my 'fans' on the last day of the trip. They later gave me a grand send-off, from the windows :)

In case you've visited my photo gallery recently, you'll notice there are a couple of new photos there... two of them are sunset shots I took from my terrace (and you thought you don't have scenic scenes in Hyderabad), and the other two are shots of a small glass clock I have at home.

And that's not all. Here's a wallpaper I made just before I left for Chennai. This time it's totally computer generated... no modified-photo stuff. Haven't done that in a while huh?

The Morning After

2005-06-17T00:32:00.000+05:30

Exams are finally over! And I have a really really long 'summer vacation' of two weeks. How nice. It'll be over before I know it... and then it's back to drab college stuff again. Anyway, I guess two weeks is better than say, one week.

So what have I been up to all this while? Let's see... I did add a couple of photos to my photo gallery at bytephoto.com —

Inside A Computer — If you've seen my wallpaper, then there's nothing new here. Just cropped off some of the distracting wires and stuff and rotated it so it looks a little more 'professional'.

Indian Gods — This is one of my very early photos, taken last year. This was probably the first time I used a 'set' (it was taken against a black background) to take a photo. I think I even used a tripod, so the final image is nice and crisp. You should definitely see the high-res version of this one.

Metallic Flowers — There was this wall-hanging with flowers on it, made out of gun metal I think. I really liked the texture and the subtle colours it had, so I took a picture of it :) The photo was taken in very low light, so a tripod was a must (exposure time was three seconds).

Looking Down — No, this is not a photo version of the caterpillar wallpaper. It just has the same name. And a simlar style - dark with high contrast (maybe I overdid it?).

Apart from the photos, I did make a wallpaper last month that I never posted. It's called 'Burn' and you can have a look at it here. I've been getting mixed reactions about this, so you may or may not like it.

How come there's no thumbnail? I'm lazy. That's why.

Serendipity

2005-05-19T12:44:00.000+05:30

Yep, another wallpaper. Found this dead frog lying in front of my house the other day... thought I'd take some snaps of the little thing. Of course, I had to bear the stink and ward off all those ants while taking the pics, but it was worth it.

I don't really expect you to set this as your wallpaper (unless you REALLY like dead things), but I bet/hope it's going to hold your interest long enough to say "Whoa!" or "Yuck!" or something like that.

15 May was Karthik's birthday so... Happy Birthday Karthik! We went to watch everybody's favourite Indian Idol contestants, Rahul Vaidya and Prajakta Shukre, perform live at Taramati Baradari (Gandipet) that day, and it was awesome!

I'm extremely busy right now (final exams start in 2 weeks and go on till 15 June), so I'll end this post here. If you have too much time on your hands (like these guys) and want to keep yourself busy, maybe you ought to stare at some autostereograms or better yet, try interpreting those e-Serve ads.

Exploding Tamarind

2005-05-03T14:38:00.000+05:30

Didn't go to college today, and I'm finished with the lab internal exams, so I have time to make this post.

The EDC (Electronic Devices and Circuits) lab internal was on Friday — had to plot the frequency response of a Common Collector Amplifier. That was simple. I was more happy when I solved the problem given at the beginning of the test (didn't know I was even capable of solving a problem in EDC until that day). The C lab internal we had yesterday went off well too, I got a Stacks program and the Lagrange's Interpolation program (Numerical Methods). Didn't answer the viva questions too well though... the guy asked me some tricky questions. Here's one of them —

main() { int a=2; printf("%d number is"+1,a); }

I was supposed to tell him the output and explain why, which I did after a while, although it wasn't 100% correct. Actually my viva 'session' was extra long since I finished my programs early :)

Anyway, after the test, we had some extra classes during which it started to rain heavily... wish I had my cam to capture the sky, which was really dramatic with the low-lying rain clouds and all. Reached home pretty late, ate, read an article on the exoplanet which was photographed recently, and then went to sleep.

So what's with the headline you ask? That's just another wallpaper I made a few days ago. Here's a before-after shot (reminds you of those weight-reduction programmes doesn't it?), so you know how much manipulation went into it —

To see the wallpaper click here, or on the image above. Comments welcome, as always.

Old And Very Cool

2005-04-26T20:06:00.000+05:30

Uh, no, I am not talking about the new Pope and his Regnal name.

Excuse the dumb joke, I didn't know how else to start this post. I'm actually talking about a new wallpaper I made yesterday — Water Meter. I'm pretty proud of this one, especially since I made it entirely in Irfan View (yes, that very small image-viewing program you can download for free). The text and borders were inserted with Paint Shop Pro. Errr... guess it wasn't made ENTIRELY in Irfan View after all, but you get the point.

Enough blabbering, here's the wallpaper —

Don't know if this is going to be as popular as The Valve or Inside A Computer, guess I'll just have to wait for your comments... (hint hint ;))

Where's The Truck?

2005-04-18T20:36:00.000+05:30

Finished writing the fifth set of tests on 15th, so I've just been relaxing since then... watched Kaante the other day (I'm watching so many movies ever since Karthik got here... wonder why...) — it's basically a bad, over-styled rip-off of two very good movies, The Usual Suspects and Reservoir Dogs. But I had fun watching it, and there were a couple of scenes that were filmed really well.

Took some new pictures the last couple of days, you can have a look at them on my photo gallery at bytephoto.com —

Water Meter (2 pics) — We had to remove our water meter the other day, because roots (of trees obviously) were growing into the water pipes and blocking the supply. Now since I love old, dirty looking stuff, this was a perfect subject to shoot :) Overexposed the shots to highlight the subject better.

Vanishing Point (2 pics) — These are pictures of a grill door. I like the way they came out, especially the colours. The name by the way, is a term in perspective drawing (saw Karthik reading about that some time ago), where everything in your view converges to a single point. Seemed like a fitting title for these shots :)

Oh, I forgot to mention that I now have a broadband internet connection at home! I'm getting transfer speeds of about 20KB/sec, which is a LOT faster than the few hundered bytes/sec I used to get earlier, on my dial-up connection. Yay!

A Nasty Little Thing Production

2005-04-13T22:18:00.000+05:30

Nothing much to say here. All I did was touch up the scan and add some colours and text. Simply awesome. I think it's his best drawing till date... and I'm not just saying that because I'm in it :)

Thanks a lot K!

Between Tests

2005-04-09T00:22:00.000+05:30

Got a break between internals (that's a just a cool-sounding name for a test, in case you didn't know), so thought I'd chip in a post. You see our textbooks are really nice to read, if you ever get around to reading them. I'll give you an example... this is how the chapter Magnetism (wrote a test on that today) starts — "The magnetic effects in magnetic materials are due to atomic magnetic dipoles in the materials. These dipoles result from the effective current current loops of electrons in atomic orbits, from effects of electron spin and from the magnetic moments of atomic nuclei...". With so-called 'introductions' like these, you can see why I like my textbooks so much. Everything is so clear, so easy to understand... isn't it?

Guess I'll just have to put up with all this for another three years...

Haven't done any interesting stuff lately... although I have been working on a little something for some time now. Well it's too early to talk about it, so I won't. And since I don't have a test tomorrow, I might watch The Grudge today. Seems like a good movie. And since I have nothing more to say for now, I'll leave you with this link.

Edit: Saw The Grudge. Practically no story, has lots of effective scares though :)

Identity, New Wallpapers

2005-04-03T13:05:00.000+05:30

I wanted to start off this post talking about a movie I watched last night on HBO — Identity. But then I noticed that Karthik had already posted about it on his blog and he already said everything I wanted to say about the movie (including the bit about the movie poster). No point repeating all that here, just go watch the movie, it's one of the best I've seen this year!

I made a couple of wallpapers recently... rather simple-looking, but good nonetheless —

[ Looking Down ] - Took this picture a long time ago (I found this caterpillar at the engineering counselling centre). Just adjusted the contrast and saturation levels to give a 'professional' touch to an otherwise crappy photo. If for some reason you like the caterpillar a lot, you can see more pictures of it in my photo gallery.

[ Molten ] - This was made from another of my very early photos. It's actually a picture of the bottom of a door, but it doesn't look quite like it, does it?

[ The Roof ] - Two overexposed photos superimposed seamlessly. I was getting bored sitting in my hotel room in Manipal last week, so I took out my camera and started taking some pictures. I looked out the window and saw the stained roof and thought it had potential for a wallpaper. This is the result.

Note that these wallpapers are high contrast images, so they'll probably look better on new monitors (which are brighter).

First Post

2005-04-03T00:21:00.000+05:30

Haven't been able to write updates on my site for almost a year now, so thought I'd create an account here. Luckily the internet connection was fast at this time, so I was able to set up this thing pretty quick (besides, it didn't ask me too many questions during registration ;)).

Well it's past midnight now, so I'll post an actual 'post' later :)