Ciencia '08 and other Assortedness

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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?