OnLive

For once, I'll try not to bitch about music or my random thoughts or that arbit rhyming stuff..
I've been intrigued by this start-up called OnLive for close to eight months now, and luckily, I get to use their service from June 17th for a year, FREE! I didn't get the chance to beta test their service, so all I've done is watch some of the presentations by Steve Perlman, their CEO.

His talk at Columbia University sometime back just blew me away. Apparently, they've been researching a video compression technology aside several other things, over the past 7 years, and after some 100+ patents, their service is finally ready (or is it?) to reach the public. Cloud gaming, as they call it, enables a person with an internet connection of at least 5Mbps who is within 1000 miles of their data centers in USA to play a game on his PC/MAC (Yes finally, the world is better for mac users) w/o using the quite old, CD/DVD distribution model. And since all the intensive graphics processing is done in their data centers with the ultra high end Nvidia and ATI graphics cards, one can actually experience the "real" deal, which is hidden from avid gamers most of the time, simply because they don't have the costly graphics cards that games nowadays require. Their innovative video compression technology goes away from the usual "group of pictures" paradigm that video compression has always used. What it is, I'd love to know, but that is OnLive's proprietary IP..

Anyway, this completely shakes up the gaming scene if it becomes (and I really believe/hope it does..) a runaway success. The studio to publisher hand-off in gaming forms a huge chunk of the capital required to make an AAA game title. I don't quite recollect the figures, but it is really hard to make a good profit in the game industry. Generally, AAA titles take anywhere from 2 - 4 years to develop and since the return on investment is highly unpredictable, you find the game developers earning mediocre salaries when compared to other high-profile software/electronic companies.

Content creation, i.e art, cinematic, etc, form a huge chunk of the headcount when compared to the programmers/tool developers. Hence, the latter is expected to literally slog it out most of the time.. the crunch time never really ends; all this could change if OnLive becomes a success! The money that changes hands from studio to publisher would be a lot lesser, since OnLive essentially becomes the publisher. We've witnessed the music industry shift from cassettes to CDs to digital distribution, though with it comes the digital rights management headache.
The game industry on the other hand hasn't changed its distribution model that much. From the consoles of the 90s to the Xbox/PS/Wii's of today, not much has changed. PC gaming has always relied on CDs and DVDs though Valve's Steam has changed the distribution platform a bit.

The problem has always been thought of as "Games are so frigging huge, apart from LASER drives, what other distribution model makes sense?". But who really cares about "having the whole game".. all you care about is playing and having fun. The AAA game titles of today come with so much graphic content, that it almost feels realistic/fantasy-like. But you can't really enjoy them even if you own the game unless you have a monster number crunching machine. So the problem is two faced, graphics rendering issues and the distribution model.
With Internet speeds increasing at insane rates, TV going digital and wireless broadband speeds of 50+Mbps becoming a reality already, the stage is set for GaaS, Games as a Service. I really hope India skips past all the 3G chaos and jumps into 4G. Qualcomm has opened my eyes to the mobile space, something I had no clue (still do..) about.
Things are about to get a lot more interesting very soon..

Time, you slime!

I can scarcely believe that eight months have flown away since I landed here. Another month and fifty percent of my Masters degree is over. Looking back at what I expected to accomplish/learn within my first year, I don't think I've done much at all. But then, this reminds me of my expectations before joining BITS. I dreamed of doing crazy geeky stuff and then reality hit me, harder than a head shot from a sniper! So, I lowered the bar of dreaminess this time, yet, very little has materialized.

It doesn't matter if the time zone here is 10 odd hours behind India, time just flies away. I still can't get to terms with the fact that the Spring semester is getting over.. a bunch of deadlines this week to meet, and I'm done! And there isn't the "Yay! Finally done with it.. " kinda feeling at all. There is something about striking a balance that I just can't get a grip of.
The 'Work hard, Party harder' , 'Work while you work, play while you play' thingy has just eluded me completely. I see some of my friends here stick to a schedule.. for a start, wake up early enough, get to work and get done with it by the evening. And then, go back home, relax and spend time on other things that they enjoy. The wake-up-early part is just unfathomably tough; I'd rather do a night out to be awake early enough than go to bed by midnight. There is no concept of work while you work, or rather no meaning of 'work'. I do what I feel like, and if I don't want to do something, I don't make much of an effort to do it. What happens eventually is that the crappy work that has to be done just gets piled on, and finally the day comes when you have to absolutely slog it out in bitter disgust.
And when I enjoy doing something, there isn't any limit unfortunately. No sense of "Ok, that's a good deal of stuff done, enough for the day"..  which kind of explains why I haven't got past 10 pages of Dawkin's book..
Ok, I have no clue where I'm going with this post.. I seem to be rambling randomly in my blog off-late, so may be, the time is ripe for another attempt at some amateur poetry..

Oh time, you freaking loner,
Won't you slow down, I'm a goner!
Hours, days and weeks.. they just get over..
And now, all I can do is but ponder


The wise bray 'time and tide wait for no man'
But I say who gives a dime when sleep is sublime..
Only to be disturbed by the dreaded chime
When the hour hand reaches nine.. 

That perfect dream, no longer mine
Oh time, you bloody slime!
As you can see, I'm trying to rhyme..
Its really easy 'coz i_dont_whine


That's one of my Garena nicks,
To give the n00bs a big kick!
You don't follow, you say?
Go to the gallows, I'll show you the way..

Random Crap

I'm back and so is Spring! Does geography make more sense here or what? Back home, the year was generally made up of seasons such as Summer, Deadly Summer, Rainy Summer and Mild Summer. If you lived in an uber cool city like Bangalore, you'd have Freakishly Awesome Weather as a major season. Over here, you actually see so much variation in weather that the whole Summer/Winter collection showcased in fashion makes more sense now :P

As usual, I'm gonna deviate from the topic. My mind just wandered away to the day I landed over here and I just made this crappy whatever-you-call-it in the last 25 minutes.

Remember, Remember the Seventh of August
When Amrika opened its arms at dusk
To yours truly, a man in bitter disgust..
Almost thirty hours clocked in flight
Not a chick seated near me, oh my plight!


Chicago O'Hare, I was finally there
Just a bus trip to Madison left to bear
I was tired as hell, but all was well
Or so it seemed, I had to tell..
The weather was so chilling and I, shivering,


How terrible will the winter be, I thought..
Now that Spring is here, I ought to say
Hype it was, all the way
A bit cold at times, but what's to complain
When snow is so serene, white and plain..

Bah, enough! I can't mix any more words :x
Moving on, I've always believed anyone can become good at anything, provided they put in a good amount of effort. Yes, there are prodigies/savants, who just 'get' it, but then most of the world is full of normal people like me! Also, research suggests that 10,000 hours spent in learning something will make you a master at it! And its amazing how everything we do fits into 'patterns'. Be it recognizing patterns, creating patterns, or even doing things repeatedly (which in itself is a pattern). The guitar keeps reminding me of patterns and learning to recognize them. My current favorite chord is A-minor. It sounds so awesome =] Such a sick learning curve it has, I wonder when I'll get a hang of the normal tuning and shift to the 2 step down tuning Insomnium use..

Damn, I wonder how I never got into music as a kid. I still remember loving the tracks of a Hindi movie named Mohra as a kid. All sorts of bollywood and some tamil music till 4th, the pop music craze of BSB, Boyzone, Code Red, Westlife, N-Sync, 98 degrees, Britney, Enrique and all the other shitty stuff that MTV and [V] brainwashed me with lasted till 12th. That ruined everything :( I still remember the lyrics of a number of BSB songs and I just hope to erase that sector of my brain.. what a waste of memory :-/
Thank goodness I didn't choose Anna or NIT Trichy for my undergrad. No offence to either of these awesome colleges, but from a cultural perspective, I would have been exposed to a lot more local tamil stuff than the heavenly genre of rock/metal. When I joined BITS, I don't think I had even heard of Metallica, Iron Maiden, Nirvana, Pink Floyd etc.. I think the first"rock" song I heard was Linkin Park - In the End and was the end of all the crappy pop music I had heard before. The state of some of my best buddies was also the same; it was their first one too! Together, we embarked on a journey to explore the genre of rock music. Soon, Evanescence, Metallica, Maiden, SOAD and a ton of main stream metal bands followed. Marilyn Manson was also one of the pit stops we had a good laugh at. Damn, some of their tracks are so awesome, but the videos are sick as hell. And finally, in my last semester, I downloaded a song called Fate of Norns by Amon Amarth by mistake. That changed everything. And the rest, as they say, is history. The Melodeath post contains the continuation of this saga.
This point of the post has been randomly selected as the sudden death, keeping with the theme.
The End.

Gateway To Hell

The second month of the two thousand and fifth year anno domini witnessed the much awaited LAN facility to every hostel room at the BITS-Pilani Goa campus become a reality. To a reader outside India, this would seem like a joke. But sadly, most engineering colleges in India couldn't offer such luxury to their students back then, and many don't even now. BITSAA, the alumni association of BITS-Pilani, pooled in to create a state-of-the-art Internet and LAN facility in Pilani and if my memory serves me right, I think they were partly responsible for the facility at Goa as well.
Anyways (its baffling how often I start a new para with this word :x), the seven months before that, students of the very first batch of the Goa campus didn't have much to do within the campus premises. Normal time-pass activities were limited to chitchat, TT, carrom and exploring Goa's beaches. All this was about to be overhauled by 100 mega bits per second LAN!

Getting straight to the subject, gaming took over the life of a good number of the students, with the RTS marvels Age of Empires/Mythology and the FPS masterpiece Counter Strike becoming a common sight in every wing. The junior batch landed in soon enough and forming gaming clans became a necessity. A bunch of fanatics and good buddies from the 2004 batch formed a clan called Gateway to Hell aka G+H, the naming credits going to Maali aka Hulk. Many people think I exaggerate the lifestyle we had in undergrad. Clocking in at least 8 hours of gaming every damn day, with peaks of 16 to 18 hours, the virtual life seemed a million times better than reality. Actually, reality and virtuality (which apparently isn't a word.. :-/) merged in such an abstruse fashion that I couldn't differentiate them. The junior batch were equally good at Counter Strike, with BRAS and @$ featuring in some epic clashes with us. And there were other awesome clans from our batch like O2, FyF, bmp, etc (my memory is short-lived..), but unlike most of the clans which kept changing their squads, ours was a stable lineup throughout the three years we played this gem of a game.

Strangely, I'm not able to remember how it all came about. Ani (maverick), Chaitu (sc/bozo) and I (kissofdeath), being from CS (expand it as you wish..) used to play AoM and Warcraft prior to CS, and we used to hangout a lot together. VPk (gay) was no where near the terror of the player he came to be when we all started. I still remember him camping a lot in the initial stages which used to atract a lot of banter! Somehow the joom lens of a sniper changed everything. Meanwhile, Giri (thu) and Tinku also joined in the addictive fun, and we became good buddies and we had a clan!

This pic courtesy Mohan aka Orange brings back so many fond memories!
Each one of us had a different style of approaching the game.
Mave was an all-out aggressive player with insane reflexes with the colt and ak-47;
Sc used to play as though he was in a real war situation, with a lot of intelligence and caution.
I loved the nutcase style of playing which is die/kill and type wtfwtf/yoyoyo and found nades and flashes to be more fun than guns at times.  
VPk became the famed sniper who didn't need to zoom at all, with the reflexes and attention to sound of a poaching tiger.  
Giri was a class act, he could do it all, rush/defend/camp/snipe/psycho modes and a famous thu-mode as well!
Tinku had the most unbelievable strafe gameplay (and many-a-time was invincible) and the ability to flash his teammates at will.
Mojo being one of our best buddies, became the self-appointed team manager in charge of all the press interviews. What he ended up doing is another story, best left untold here.

The discussions after a night of gaming were so much fun as well. Everyone boasting about their awesofuckin' skills and having a laugh at some of the n00by moments. The walks outside BH2 towards the cafeteria/mess, oh how much I miss those days..
We had our highs and lows, eventually getting raped by ju's and subju's :D, but the best part was the fun that came out of it. Sure, losing wasn't nice and we did get pissed sometimes, but then it was just a game and more of a reason to stomp n00bs in the pub play after a bad defeat!

To all the wonderful and friendly gamers and clans in BITS, to the dedicated servers that brought all the fun, to being the elite breakfast tasters in the morning, to the thousands of de_dust2 and awp_india clashes, to being sniped as you ran towards B from the ct spawn zone in de_dust2, to the yoyooyo and wtf ckfkn mkl bc m2l2 moments, to using new nicknames and revealing them only after some pr0 play, to all the friendships that came out of it, to memories worth reliving over and over again, Counter Strike and Valve, take a bow!

Gamer to Making one

The weekend before the one before the last might have witnessed the wisest thing I've done in a long, long time.
I've said it time and again that I'm interested in making computer games, but that is all I have ever done. Talk, blabber, give gyaan and preach on why I wanna make games.. but apart from a tic-tac-toe back in school, I've never done anything close to a game. Who am I kidding, I suck at coding. The very thought of coding makes me feel low. I don't know where it all went wrong. I loved to code back in school. Watching your code do even the simplest thing brought a great deal of happiness and amazement!
But, somehow, undergrad changed it all. I love to brag about my sucky coding skills, I don't know why :-/ Its so easy to prove the whole thing. The first time I encountered a Segmentation fault was in my internship at Cisco, which would be the 7th semester in an undergrad curriculum. Yeah, true story. They even hired me after that. If you don't know stuff, use humor to fake your way out or get a good looking number as your gpa. The latter is the most over-rated shit ever.

Anyways, coding isn't a big deal. Its just like anything else in life.. if you wanna get better at it, keep doing it more often! As usual, I've blabbered enough unnecessary content. I'll try to stop digressing from the topic for once. I signed up for this Global Game Jam thingy, which is a 48 hour marathon during which the participants (form teams) and attempt to make a game on a theme that is unveiled at the start of the event. It was to start Friday 1700 hours and go on till Sunday 1700. I knew I would be a misfit there among the artists and coders, and given that Friday night had a DJ with a huge ABCD gathering, there were definitely much better things to do in life!

But no, not this time.. I couldn't let go of this rare opportunity. So, I reached the venue and it had the most amazing facilities ever. After all, it was a research center for Educational Games and any department in Madison would offer better facilities than the Computer Science building.
Just 8 participants. That was kinda lame, but then I didn't really care. Soon, teams were formed and various suggestions around the theme 'deception' were offered. I hated almost all of them :-/.
Four hours passed quickly and I was like WTF, mebbe I should have just gone to the DJ. The organizers made me feel a lot better though and I was still searching for an innovative game theme. Nothing good yet :(

I've never really brain-stormed in a group ever before.. well actually, I take that back. I've brainstormed hell a lot, and with a lot of people as well, but its always been about making cool strategies in those addictive computer games. And thus, the white board has always been more of an can-you-draw board for me. Its amazing what ideas come out if you just attempt to write your thoughts out.

In 15 minutes, the whole scenario changed. Some random stream of thoughts were manipulated into what I felt was an awesome game idea. There was consensus in the team, and with two artists, two programmers and one joker (yours truly), things were looking good! After a good nights sleep and a sumptuous breakfast of bagels and donuts, we got to work. The next twelve hours were just fantastic. The artists Raffi and James were coming up with brilliant stuff and Ryan, Will and I were getting some chunks of code to do stuff with the art. It wasn't complicated at all, but then C# and XNA were alien to me a day back. There were lots of design changes as some of the initial ideas were just too complicated to implement in such a short time. We settled for something simpler and with the artists coming up with neat lookin' stuff, we just needed a working game. At 1500 hours on Sunday, we were finally done and pretty satisfied with the outcome. A very very simple game, that looked kinda nice coz of the neat art, called Hare-y Care-y (harey = rabbit, carey = carrot).
If you're so jobless, you can check out the game here. (there is a problem with the source code zip though..)

Looking back at some of the games made at GGJ 2010, ours is nothing. Just check out this and also this. You'll be shocked with the creativity people possess. This is the icing on the cake for me (so far), though this wasn't made at the GGJ.
I've been postponing both this post and a link to the installer version of the game for a while.
Hopefully, I'll do the latter by the next weekend. Sionara!

The real meaning of Bazzinga

I've finally accomplished something in life, however fleeting it might be. To be ranked 1 against the billions of web pages google indexes for 'The meaning of Bazzinga' is quite shocking and flattering, more so, because the post it appeared on had only the individual words in a completely different context.
The attention seems to stem from the Latin/South American countries and from Southern Europe. I guess those who searched for it were interested in knowing the etymology of Bazzinga.
Poor souls, redirected by the wise sage Google to this blog containing kilotons of crap.
For the uninitiated, anything that sounds like Bazzinga (or Bazinga or the most recent mod, BUZZinga..) had its roots in the awesome sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory' wherein Sheldon Cooper uses it to add the icing on the cake to his 'pranks' or 'successful attempts at fooling others'. I wonder how the last sentence will translate into other languages, with all the added complications. It might sound like a cake recipe. Oh well :-/

Apart from cementing my place as the world's renowned scholar on this post's title, its just unbelievable where we're headed to. Information at the click of a mouse, at the touch of a screen, available to anyone. Its been there for almost a decade now, but it struck me only recently on how different things are. The web has changed everything, EVERYTHING! 15 years back, having those hefty encyclopedia's at home was the ultimate knowledge base. Anything you wanted to know back then was surely listed in those limited books and I used to be quite shocked on how almost everything could be condensed into a bookshelf. Cisco's Viking Router advertisement strikes me as I typed that. Quoting from their site, "400 gigabits capability that is akin to sustain a flow of 20 Niagara Falls passing through it every second or downloading a digital library of every book ever written in any language in a single hour." Sure, it makes a great advertisement, but then the magnitude is VERY shocking!

We have all the entertainment we need at the push of a few buttons, access to anything we'd like to know more about via a simple Internet connection. Where do we go from here? I remember an article in Gamasutra that listed the top entries for 'What games would be like in 10 years' which just blew me away. There were such insane stories, so out-of-this-world, brilliantly creative to say the very least.
Though the question has been posed several times, I never bothered to think about it. I seemed to have lost my 'thinking cap' and a lot of hair with it when the dot-com bubble burst :x
I'm sure there are many others, who'd agree that they've almost stopped thinking after the advent of the search engine. What could be more easier than typing a query and allowing electrons to figure out everything for you? If within a decade of web explosion, this is the state, I wonder what it would be like in the future. May be, the future isn't far away or in other words, the end is near. December 2012. The End.

First US concert

Finally, I can cross out Goto a metal concert in US from my long TODO list. It took place right at Madison, so commuting wasn't a problem. There were 3 bands playing that night, and I really liked their music back when I was at BITS. Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace and Flyleaf! I still remember Chaitu loving the female vocals of Flyleaf :-) Personally, I like BB the most among them, but apparently TDG is so big here that they were the highlight of the night.
I would have absolutely loved the show, but for what happened the day after Valentines Day in 2009. Something that just blew you away.. a stage presence that IMHO is tough to beat and metal music at its brilliant best. It was all about Iron Maiden at Bangalore on Feb15th '09 and they played hit after hit to leave you baffled to the point you knew that this was going to be your greatest evening in a long time.

Comparing what I saw the other night to that at Bangalore would be a sin in hell itself. The organizers added all the spice they could to make it special. A rotating platform for TDG's very talented drummer, lights shaped as cannons and fireworks! The crowd was ecstatic and loved every bit of it. Hell, the bands put on a great show. Whatever few songs I had heard of TDG and BB were dished out and I enjoyed every bit of it. But its just nothing compared to Iron Maiden. TDG's lyrics revolve around teenage love/breakup and being lonely. Song after song, its the same thing and still the band is so huge over here! :-/ Breaking Benjamin were brilliant, and I was waiting to hear the Diary of Jane which was their last track of the night. There's something about that song that is so refreshing!

Anyways, Feb 19th is gonna be much bigger than what I've just witnessed. Dark Tranquillity, one of my favorite bands is playing (you can check the melodeath post for my recommendations :D) and there's Killswitch Engage too, so I'm sure its gonna be a treasured experience. I've finally ordered a cam (am so pathetic at decision making :'( .. ) so I'll try to get some pics with DT after the show if all goes well! Damn, this semester is gonna be so screwed up!~!

3i, 3 times the imaginary crap

I speak for a lot of people when I say "3idiots is simply amplified bullshit". I guess all the 'Aal eez well' shit on facebook raised my expectations, but even if it wasn't for that, I'm sure I would be writing this post here, albeit without this line. Lets start with the biggest nab of the film, Silencer. WTF man?! Are you such a sad actor or did the director actually think portraying the bookish college goer that way would leave the audience in splits? Total retarded crap! Here I am, having traveled 45 mins hoping to enjoy a movie and here you are, screwing the whole thing up.
And then there is the principal or dean or whatever his role was. The acting during the 'comic(?)' scenes was just yuck. If you have to act stupid, don't overdo it then for fcuks sake.
How many times will you drop your pants in a movie? Good Lord, thankfully, they didn't make Kareena do that, or I might have puked. 


Whats with using all the e-mail forwards as jokes? Seriously, is it so tough to come up with funny stuff or have script-writers just stopped thinking? The million$ pen v/s pencil, putting your exam paper randomly in a pile coz the prof doesn't know your name (duh..), the crap just kept piling on. The speech modification was nice, but then over-repetition killed it. I have to admit, I absolutely despise Kareena which becomes yet another reason to dislike this movie. Her 'sister' in the movie was way hotter :-/
Oh yeah, what's with the baby kicking every goddamn time someone says 'Aal eez well'? They just overdid it the whole time.
The job interview, Oh c'mon! Seriously, give some practicality to it.
The songs weren't that good either barring the first one. The only thing I liked about the movie was the scenic pics during the journey :-/ College stories might have become a good selling point, but this one was utter fail in my opinion. Many people might say, you shouldn't try to focus on the stupidity in the movie. If they wanted to make a hilariously stupid movie, why try to depict it with seriousness then?

I expected a much better movie, especially given the amount of earned-hype Aamir gets. 
Happy Days, a telugu movie was way better. That at least brought back college memories :-/

3i = intolerably idiotic iMovie

Reminiscences

The good ol' days. How I wish I could get back to my first day as an undergrad! Flocks of students from across India (ok little exaggeration here, purely gults + illads population :P), who mugged the living hell out of their 12th standard textbooks, with big dreams in 180 acres of land. Here I am, more than five years later, realizing that those big dreams were just dreams at the end of the day. One of my best friends describes the BITS saga as a four year vacation. How true! After a decade of being the sincere school going student, its amazing how you can change before you even realize it. I lol at myself when I think back to the day I got the MSc Chemistry admit. Chemistry was my pet subject in school and though I loved computers, I'd always thought about inventing a way to dispose plastic in an 'earthly manner'. This is what happens when you're slogging your rear off for so many entrance exams at such a tender age. You lose sight of reality. To hell with the education system.
Anyways, the reason I got into writing this post was the new feeling towards holidays. Back in school, summer holidays were the most awaited thing. No more classes yipee! In college, any day of the year was a holiday. Speaking to the same fun loving people now, either working or in grad skool, there is a new found essence in holidays. There is a new meaning in going back home and staying with family, meeting old friends and reliving some of the past. A week back, I went to a guitar shop for the obvious, and ended up chatting with the owner. He mentioned his brother being senior VP of a big corporation, earning truck loads of money, wanting to quit because of the sheer work stress, and himself, earning a middle class income with a lot more freedom in life.
Its something that keeps coming back to my mind every now and then.
Why does work life have to be so hectic or so mundane and boring?
Why can't we try to enjoy everything we do or do what we enjoy for a living?
Why is it so difficult to find what you like?











   Comic pic taken from jessieleeblogs.blogspot.com/