A Flyer in a Newspaper

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amusing

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?