The path to Reeteshification

Where to from here now.

2010-05-16T21:34:00.003+05:30

Wow, didn't realize that its been more than a year since my last entry! Last year was abuzz with activities, there was not much idle time. Well, last year is over now, even the last year at GRIET. B.Tech in CSE is complete and now, theres time to do other things :P

Well, first of all, the main thing that comes into mind now, is "What about the future". I've been planning my future carefully, thinking of all that will happen and that might happen. Took insights, help from many people in the industry I want to be in and also from people who are presently working and happy doing what they're doing. What exactly is my plan? Well, that all will be known as and when it unfolds.

Options

After I finished my tenth, the only thing I had to think of was "Biology or Maths" and chose the one I like, i.e. maths. Afterwards it was all a strange 2 year journey. I basically knew that I want to do something with computers, hence always only thought that I should be doing CSE after I complete Inter. Well, inter finished and thanks to my parents, I got to do what I wanted to do. 4 years later, that part is also done.

As years go by, the options become more specific. In one of our long chats, Kunal told me "do what ever u want... if u love it then ur life is set" There were many things discussed before and after that; but that is one thing that I will remember forever. That along with many other chats and discussions has helped me in coming up with the most probable choices for the path to take from now.

Plan A

The thing that is most probably going to happen now is that I will study Masters in CS at SUNY Buffalo. Its a really good university and I'm really glad I got into it. The university offers 4 specializations and the one that I know I will love the most is AI.

Lot of thought went into that decision. The main thing being that I didn't have AI in my BTech (I did have Neural Networks though, liked it comparatively more) and it is generally considered a "hard subject". But after checking all the subjects and the way everything is laid out, I will be learning everything about AI from the ground up, hence the path being smoother for me to take.

Rather than taking subjects that I already know, or which will be "Easier to pass" I will try to take the risk and do something that I really feel like doing. My goal is not to go there and get an MS degree. Its for me to learn what I wish to do, and what I think I will love doing.

Everyone who knows me, knows that I want to live a life doing something with games. It would be like cheating myself if I didn't do what my heart tells me but do what will easily get me a job and settled life. I will only get satisfaction after I have tried my best to do what I always wanted to do.

Its better to try and fail than not try at all.

Thanks to the input from the internet and many people currently in the games industry, I got a realistic picture of what lies ahead; and thanks to my own pessimistic views, I already am prepared for failures. I wouldn't at all be prepared for my failures if it weren't for my parents and brother. They will always be by my side, knowing that, I set forth and once again, make my own decision of what I want to do.

Dreams come true only in stories.

Lot of thought has been put into it, anyone who has had a serious discussion with me knows how much I think. Its hard for me to be optimistic about my future; even as I type, I feel how wrong I am to think that anything I am typing here will go as planned. I tell my self how foolish it is to think so. But the fact that I have written it tells that there is something in me that tells me I can do it.

I always used to imagine myself sitting and doing experiments and getting lost in my own world like the Robin Williams from Flubber (or like in Nutty Professor, or like in A beautiful Mind). My brother will testify about my problem solving self. That thought would immediately lead me to think that a PhD. is best option for me.( There's the absent mindedness thing too :P ) If I have something to do, I'm more than happy to dedicate myself to it, as many years as it takes. That would be the best way to sharpen my skills and get a high entry point into the games industry after completing my PhD.

Thanks to my pessimistic side, very low chances of me doing that exist. So many stories of the perils of doing a PhD.; other thoughts of me telling myself that its just an over optimistic dream, etc made me just stop thinking about it.

Right now what I believe I'll be doing is choose my MS projects wisely, make myself a nice portfolio of tech demos, try my best to get an entry level job and progress from there according to the other huge plan in my head. This will a test of patience and especially a huge fight against the inner self. My exact dream has been available only in a certain Slam Book till now and even thinking of realizing that dream is a huge no-no as my pessimistic side will be all over it like a rabid wolverine.

Well, lets not get into the finer details now... as far as Plan A is considered, it will be most probably what I will be trying to do. There are so many forks in this road, many choices to make.

Plan B

Plan B... well, it is basically something that will only happen if Plan A doesn't happen. Why will Plan A not happen? well, there is still the Visa processing thing left, and the other side of me tells me not to be happy already.

Well, this would mean that I take the TCS Job that I have right now thanks to Campus Placements. What will happen? I will basically be transformed into liking what I will be doing after years of doing it.

If I take this job, the chances of getting to see more places will be higher, and I can always come back home and play games. I can even have a side job of sitting and writing articles for various websites and magazines (of which some, I am doing even now). I'm more into the philosophy of gaming anyways.

This would mean that I will continue to change myself and enjoy what I get, leaving the ever lasting question of "What if" for my Plan A.

Or I can try to break free from it "After a few years of experience" and take inspiration from the words of everyone who has always said that I deserve to be doing something involved with games. Yes, Plan B has its own sub-plans, which I don't want to go into details as I dont even want that to happen.

In conclusion

I will mark today as the day that I promise myself to try what I always wanted to try and find out for myself instead of thinking a lot about it and not doing it. I used to be shy of saying this because my inner self always told me how unrealistic it is to think that I will achieve what I want the most; most of all "Enjoy" when I am in the games industry (I do know how crazy and bad the work environment is in the industry). With no further debate, I'll try and suppress the oppressor.

Expect to see me in a GDC/E3/SomethinRelevant talk sometime soon.

The eye of the Ti...Beholdaaa

2009-05-08T18:29:00.007+05:30

"Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder"

No matter who you are, there is good chance that you've heard that somewhere or the other. Usually being used to point to the fact that different people see things differently. Especially when looking at those "Abstract Art" stuff in painting exhibitions.

So, why mention such a well known thing? Recently, I've had many experiences which relate to that saying. In different ways, learned a few new things. Just thought I would write them down here.

*Its not you, its THEM

Well, one thing I realized was that, no matter with what intentions you say it, people will see what you say, how they want to. Recently, someone on a "social site" made a status update saying that he'll have to shave the beard that he has in his profile pic.

I knew him for almost a year (with same pic mapping the id) but never realized that he had a beard, until then. So I told

"I never knew you had a beard, maybe it was the black BG"

Now.. I was actually referring to the actual black BG of the image and how his face was turned sideways and the beard camouflaged in the BG. But.. that person took it as some kind of schismatic remark with me referring to his face as the "black bg"

Yeah, thats how it works.. it doesnt matter with what intentions you say it, if the other person sees you differently there is good chance of everything going bad. Ofcourse, there are two other basic quotes that you remember at this point, the first being "Think twice before saying anything" but at that point.. even if I had thought thrice I would not have seen that coming!

The other one being "Stop f'ing wasting time on the internet with useless discussions" Yeeeaah.. very famous saying that be... I guess I should keep that in mind very much. These things dont help much but build relations that will mostly not substantiate to anything. Thats what I say now.. lets just hope the condition improves.

*Sometimes.. it IS you.

This is something my mom said recently when we were watching "Are we there yet?". I've seen many bratty kid movies, but the kids in this movie were reaaaaaly crazy.. I had no idea why they were doing those and thought that they were just plain spoiled brats. A common case of "लाड्ला बच्चा being जिद्दी " You know.. గారం బిడ్డా. The part where children are over loved by the parents and they start thinking they own the world or something.

The tricks they were doing had no justification for me and then I couldn't handle it and gave a remark about how crazy those kids were.. then mom said

"They are so nice, they're doing all this to keep their mom safe"

:O

I was totally shocked by this, I didnt even see that angle till my mom said that. I was blank for a moment, then saw the movie with mom's eyes and it all made somewhat sense.. that made me realize how people actually think so differently.

(The movie, however, was a reaaaaal struggle for me to watch.. they even had a part with the little girl singing. I pitied ICE CUBE like anything after watching movie)

*The Beauty of Opinion

So, yeah, because of these and many other events like these, I really started seeing things in a few more angles before saying stuff. The "beauty" is pretty subject, its not actual beauty that the QQ is talking about, its "everything", its basically opinion that it is talking about.

I've always kept the difference of opinion in mind, thats why whenever at a forum or blog (where people know I am not some troll).. I usually oppose others opinion (regardless of what I think) just so that I can get a deeper look into why they think like that how they see things.

These things, might feel kinda useless.. buts thats how I roll :P I like studying people and what they think. Such things make it easy for you communicate with people differently, especially when you are part of a team. You don't want to isolate someone, its not an argument there, so it helps in communicating differently and pleasing them (as always.. regardless of your opinion). I believe, throwing away what you think and flowing with conversations just so things happen is the best thing one can do. Only a bit of experience is what is required for one to just leave away his opinion for a small amount of time, without showing with the face, actions ofcourse!

Ofcourse, this is something you might already know. This is just me, stating the obvious facts on The path to Reeteshification

The Yahoo! and Twitter connection!

2009-02-24T23:24:00.005+05:30

*The Mystery begins

Not too long ago, Shrikey was asking me what I had done to show my twitter status in Yahoo messenger, that time, I was using Digsby, and I was updating both my Gtalk and Yahoo statuses using that, I thought that he mistook my Gtalk updates to be twitter updates and told him the same.

Few days passed by and then one day when me and Phani were experimenting on Apache server I tweeted about it. Later, Venu came online and was asking Phani, what he was doing on Apache.. we were thinking that he was observing my twitter feed and hence got to know of it. But he said that he saw it in his Yahoo messenger. This time I was not using Digsby neither had I updated the my Gtalk status. He even stressed the fact that it was in Y! Messenger and told the location where it was visible.

*What could it be??

So it had to be some service that I used and forgot about. I then started scanning my memory to see what it could have been, but all tries returned no results. Finally I visited everything.yahoo.com its the exact thing I needed, an exhaustive list of all the web services that Yahoo! provides.

I found some really crazy things via this.. a site called omg.yahoo.com which has a totally "different" layout, something called myweb.yahoo.com that's going to be shutdown soon (redundancy and Recession :P ) then there was as developers.yahoo.com where I got to know that there is a thing called "Yahoo Query language"(No wikipedia entry for it even!) These yahoo people sure are doing a lot of stuff. They have services starting with every letter of the alphabets but Q and X, I wonder what they're waiting for.. just 2 more and your collection is complete!

*The Root Cause!

After looking into those things, I finally found out which place made my yahoo status automatically change to the latest twitter status.

It was MyBlogLog.com. I recently went to that place after finally clicking on a link to it, in one of the blogs I frequent. I found out that it was a service (now) under Yahoo. As soon as I saw I already have an ID for it, I activated it and started adding services.

I added all services I could remember and then left it to that. Little did I know,it has a thing called "NewWithMe" which is a feed combined from the feeds of other services that were entered by me in the profile.

MyBlogLog being a Yahoo service, was updating my yahoo status message to the latest entry in "New With Me" feed every hour, even when I'm offline (i.e the state in which I am 95% of the time)

Finally, the mystery of the Twitter updates and "How is everyone who is not on twitter also talking about my tweets" is finally solved!

In retrospect.. it could have been very easy if someone clicked the blue line and saw that it redirected to MyBloglog :| Oh well, atleast I got to find out "everything" at Yahoo this way :P
Hope it answers all your questions!

Breaking the habit...

2009-01-28T22:07:00.005+05:30

Ok.. sorry for that superbly cheesy LP reference, but yeah.. today was special.. I finally did something that I never liked doing.. and liked doing it!

What am I talking about?? "Coaching Classes" ofcourse...finally, on my own.. decided to go to one of those factories that I didn't like so much since... ever.

*School

Well.. till 9th class I never even felt that "it is a competitive world" I would always do what I wanted, read and write exams and top with ease.. then there was this thing in tenth where all teachers would always stress on the importance of getting really high marks. I never actually understood it.. however.. with more attention to "marks" than ever before I wrote the exams. I saw many of my friends go to tuition and other things after school, which I never could understand why they went to.

I am you know, that guy who reads and doesn't battify/byheart every friggin thing.. basically most of you reading this are also of type, so I guess you get me when I say this about tuitions and other things.

Other than that one time when we stayed in karnataka and "kannada" was compulsory (my 3rd class) we (me and bro) didnt go to tution for anything, not that I am against tuition.. I can understand that it helps many people because of the "better" teachers they have.

*Interim-Idiot (Intermediate)

You know.. that time after 10th, the 2yrs where practically ANY place can be called a "coaching center" where the main aim of a "college" is to hold one test after the other, making students feel like they're cattle not humans..I was ok with it for the first year, but then.. some kind of stupid thing happened to me.

Seeing all these people around me read like CRAZY, I started wondering if I really deserved getting good marks because I did far less hard work than others, yet was able to perform satisfactorily... its just that the environment was like that.

I know how stupid it sounds but that's how I used to think of it back then.. I thought that, if I would get better marks, there is someone else loosing an opportunity, and almost everyone around me was like this super hard working lifeless machine who have dedicated their life for this thing hence I felt that they deserved better rank than me ( :| )

So after this, I finally started realizing how everyone is competing for everything everywhere and that this is a competitive world.

*Coaching Classes

Rather than being a participant in the competition, I just slid away, the fire to "be the best" never burnt within me. You can say that was basically the most stupid part of my life. I just started hating all these factories with a passion because it was removing all kinds of fun from everyone, going to one was like shaking hands with satan. I always viewed school in my childhood as that lovely place where you learnt things.. but everything changed because of the poor "Teacher-child" relations, and lifeless lectures.

The best thing in intermediate were those classes when the really awesome lecturers taught, it was only about being there and learning things. Only two were really good, almost everyother class felt so dead that my brain learnt only because it was the min. required thing.

All these dead lectures and other things, confirmed my belief that "learning things on your own" is the best way to do it. I've learnt oh so many things since I was young and those are the things I remember even now.. down to the most trivial details. One is his own best tutor I must say.

*Engg Coll.

Well after coming to engg, I must say I've been having the time of life, because I've been doing what I wanted, learning what I wanted, and doing it the way I wanted! The detached attachment with the lecturers and subjects is such a good thing, I can keep having the best of both worlds. The fact that almost all the subjects are computer things, adds to the learning experience..

However, there is another thing , sometimes the thing you really wanted to learn turns out to be one of the subjects of your engg. course.. so because of this, I found myself NOT learning it on my own.. also because of the sub-par to poor lecturers teaching those subjects to me.. those thing totally died :( That's one of the saddest things I felt.

*Why go to them now?

Well, what happened later is specific to me, don't know if all others can relate to this, but the thing is that, the place that use as my "learning tool" had turned into one of my biggest vices.. yeah.. you know..

Using my computer paired with teh internetz as the source for total timewaste by reading each and every article in 10 blogs everyday, commuting in forums, stalking on twitter, among other things, really effected my life.. infact, it CHANGED it totally..

All I did was now look here and there, and waste time, I would plan on doing something but only rarely did I get anything done, because the system idle process was just one click away (browser)

So basically, there HAS to be a way to limit this.. ofcourse, there is "self control" which I have been rigorously applying since the past few weeks, which btw have been my recent BEST, but no matter what, the best way seemed to be the one where I would stay away from the computer..

The thing is that, I am planning on writing GRE soon, and there is no way I'll be able to dedicate myself COMPLETELY, if I plan on reading it on my own on the computer .. I've been controlling myself while reading oracle, but even then.. I feel that there must be a better way.

There is another fact..these 3years in college, have completely changed my perception of the world. I still understand that its a "competitive place" but after going through all what I have gone due to my ... *ahem* confusions of an immature mind then being the awesome environment that is college life..I.. you know, grew a brain and stopped caring about such things..

You could say.. the thing about "equivalent exchange" from FMA really REALLY helped me understand everything better..( another proof that, there is someone out there in the world who has experienced something similar and written/created something to show you the consequences, also, anime/manga has the answer for everything in life :P )

All I see now is 1)set a goal and 2)achieve it. Try your best and SCREW others and how they perform! Its like you know , back to being the mindset that I was in school, I never actually thought that someone would be "sad because he didnt get better rank because I got one better than him" and nonsense like that :P and neither did I keep a lot of burden on my shoulders.

So basically, now my goal is to just write that GRE exam, and do what I can do.. and the best thing is that the exam is also my kind.. THERE is no frigging RANK,seats and all that nonsense.

*The first experience

So yeah.. after Phani talking me into it (in a common sense way :P ) today I went to the class.. and I must say, it felt good, the thing that I have a "schedule" and I need to do things at a given time, really gives the complete feeling.. and the lack of time after returning, makes me want to keep work first and news later, making things more effecient, its not like I am wasting time, and its not like I am totally shileding off one part of life :D

So yes... thats what happens, you can basically see my tansition from a person with different views, its not called being "hypocrite" its called "growing up" and understanding things :P I have not written anything in a way that it'd give you, the reader, any direct info on what to do, but showed you what I've gone through, which might inderectly help you.

Its how I tread on the...

Path to Reeteshification.

BLatNee, A recurring....occurance

2009-01-22T00:09:00.004+05:30

You know.. how you always think.. "OMG this day/trip was so awesome, I hafta write about it!" and end up not writing it at all.. because of how elaborate you want it to be but get busy always and think time is not enough to write it? You know... "procrastination" the never ending cycle that gets you nowhere.

Well.. there is also another thing that I do..I think... a lot.. I usually create the comments that I would get and create total conversations with different personalities even before I actually sit and write the thing. I think of writing it, but once I sit on the computer, something happens, I get distracted and do crazy stuff often "System idle process" stuff.

But soon.. when I get holidays or some "real" free time.. I realize that.. I need to archive my thoughts and start writing whatever was the last thing I thought a lot about.

I totally omit many things just because I think they wont make sense when late..

but well.. times a changing.. from now on , I will sit and write.. whenever I get some time.. just because I love recording things and saying things ;)

I will be tagging those posts with "Blatnee" (pronounced like Matinee, indian way :P ) Its the "Better late than Never" edition of posts..

So yeah.. this has been a public service announcement for both of you who read this place..

Lake House

2009-01-17T18:04:00.007+05:30

I saw the movie yesterday.. it was one of those movies that my bro gave me and I have no Idea of.

At first I thought it was a horror movie because the title sounds very apt for one, then from the IMDB page for the thing I saw that it was a drama movie.

I saw that page long back, when I first saw the movie's name after bro me gave the disc.. only thing I remembered was that it was a movie about a former tenant and a new tenant exchanging letters and falling in love.. like some classic hindi movie.

Recently, I started doing things in an ordered fashion and hence was seeing one movie everyday.. finishing up all those backlogs , you know :P So I decided to see "lake house" and put it in.

The beginning

Not until I saw the opening credits did I know that Keanu reeves was the main hero.. I saw that and went "ooh, keanu reeves in a lovey dovey movie?" and wondered how it would be to see him after only seeing in movies like the matrix.

The movie started a bit slow.. the dialogues were over cheesy, it felt kinda boring.. until

THE TWIST

It happens that by some strange magic, the heroine (sandra Bullock :D ) is from the future, and the hero is from the past. The heroin lives in the lakehouse from 2005-2006, and right now the hero has come into the house in 2004.

So by some magic both of em, communicate by putting letters in the mailbox of the same house and using it like IMs where they sometimes, just stand and keep exchanging letters.. the mailbox goes into "unread" position.... automagically!

The explanation

The movie gives no kind of explanation to how it is happening, but I think its not needed.. its just happening! Its fantasy.. enjoy it and see how things play out. The main story is about how they both get to meet each other,eventhough they are talking in a very confusing time lag.

The experience

Just when I saw the "OMG TIME BEND" part.. I started thinking that this would be "my kind of movie" you know like Toki wo kakeru Shoujo and all those.. time travel movies with "love" themes.

Basically, the movie had a great chance of being one of my favourite movies of all time.. it was so confusing (in a good way) that it kept my brain thinking of what all things they could possibly do and how they would meet each other.

But, for some reason.. there were many scenes that were just unnecessary, the characters at time expressed emotions which made no sense, the dialogues... could definitely have been better. There are some other things, but I just cant seem to put my finger on it...it was missing a certain factor that almost every other "great" love-fantasy had. Maybe its the BGM and scenry.. or the direction..

However

Do watch it.. its a nice movie with great twist, It will keep you excited in many parts. There is a lot more to the movie than I mentioned.. don't want to spoil everything :P

I however, wish that this movie is remade after a few years or so.. in a better way. It was good, but could get definitely better in many areas! Or maybe is there already some movie from which this was inspired? something that was done better? hmm... will have to look around on the net first..

[UPDATE] Thanks to my friend I found out that, there IS infact another movie just the same as this one.. and it came before this movie (lake House was inspired from that) and just as you guessed it.. it is infact better than this. Gotta get my hands on that movie soon :D

It's a Korean Movie named Siworae/ II Mare . Check it out :)

ReeTweet : My First PHP/AIR/Twitter ...thing

2009-01-13T21:20:00.006+05:30

Well, I am in 3-2 now (thats, IIIyr IIsem ) and its high time that I decided I go "deep", following one of the many paths open to me in the computer field. I can say I am marginally good in many things. Although its "many" its still marginally, I can make a simple webpage for myself, make a poster or two, edit some photos, write some codes, edit videos, mix audio, animate stuff in flash, do some DB management etc.. but nothing did I go too deep where I could actually say I am VERY good at.

My interesting in web-developing started back when I was a 12yr old making websites with flash navigation bars, but it stopped there, afterwards 10th class etc started and it was only curricular learning, extra-curricular things only involved "fun" :P

And seeing that I am very much interested in internet related developments, I thought that it would be better if I did something to expand my knowledge in this field.. So one fine day I asked @aalaap for some suggestions and after hearing what exactly I wanted to do, he suggested I learn PHP, and directed me to a nice learning place for beginners.

And I don't know why, just 5 Days ago it hit me that I should try out Adobe Air too (knew nothing about it till today) and just downloaded the SDK and stuff.

Lets fast forward to today, which after THIS happened, and also when I really started feeling that I should just have one small dabba with me using which I can just keep posting to twitter, not using a browser, so that I dont waste time stalking the timeline :P

So, I set my goal this morning (first "my" day of the holidays) to finally sit and see this Air thing and learn some PHP.

HelloWorld

So, I started off the day by reading how I could make my first "HelloWorld" app in Air. As I read on, I realized that the Air is really awesome! I dont know if there are already things like this, but its basically like having a browser window of your own! You just write HTML things like you would usually do for it to appear in a browser, and then you point that HTML file as the source for your app, and then Air creates a window showing that HTML page, making it look like its a standalone App.(FYI uses Webkit engine)

Pretty good it is! This technique of doing things compliments my forte very much!

So, I kept doing things from that HelloWord tutorial and within no time I had it successfully working.. no hitches or anything :D After doing that, I immediately shifted my attention to PHP

Monkeys are your best friend.

You have your code monkeys, greasemonkeys, lab monkeys, and lots more, @aalaap directed me to this "webmonkey.com" which has good resources and tuts for beginners and experts alike.

So I made my way to that place and then started reading the PHP for beginners tutorial. Everything is basically like just any other programming language you've learnt in the past, so learning that part was not that hard. The main thing was knowing exactly how things work, the way communication between HTML and PHP things happen and all that.

And once again, the way PHP and HTML work together seems like MAGIC, i.e compliments my interests :D

After reading the whole article, ( which I say should be THE way anyone should write tuts! ) I did a bit of experiments with Air and PHP.

Now comes Twitter!

So, after making myself comfortable with how all things work. I started looking at how the twitter API works.. its basically just updating a RSS feed. So I started looking up on how I access and update feeds using PHP, and webmonkey lead me to THIS place.

It has links to things that people have already done to use Twitter API, using different platforms. The main aim here is "Dont re-invent the wheel"

I.E. Rather than sitting and writing those codes of lines again just take them from others who are sharing it.. but this, if you're a beginner, stunts your knowledge..so what I did was just sit lookup all the methods and variables that the person used in his small code by going to PHP.net and tried to figure out what how it was working.

After spending a good amount of time I was comfortable with what all of it meant and what was exactly happening. I also realized that there is a looooooot more to learn.. its the just the beginning.

Here comes ReeTweet!

After observing everything, I finally started making the application. I just used the code provided there in the TwitterAPI Wiki, and then added forms in my HelloWorld HTML.

The first build I made had only Username and Password dabbas, along with the tweet area. Basically not much work was needed to be put into it. Just make your text areas, give them ids, POST the values to the PHP script and then update the twitter.com/statuses/update.xml using cURL commands.

So here is the Box you've all been waiting for!

So simple, is it not?

So, after a few hours of reading and trying out various things, I was finally able to get the thing done in the same day!

First I thought only email id can be sent for the authentication so tweeted that.. then I tried using my Userid instead. It works both ways! :D

It echo()s these lines of text after submitting, I guess I can use the information and then render a nice page after submit :D

Afterwards, I realized that there was no point in using the userid and password, as this was something I created for myself.. so made the simple dabba I was talking about :D

So, yeah thats how I am leaving it for today.. will see more next time.

My app Link is where?

One of the main things that I wanted was that I will get "from ReeTweet" whenever I make the post.. I used to think that it was a parameter in the XML file that I should be updating in order to give the name and link.. but after looking around a bit.. it turns out that .. inorder to get "from app" and make it link to someplace, you must "File a request" and it has many constraints set.

It was very discouraging :( I dont see why they should do that, I mean, make it possible via some xml parameters and people who make things can show it.. I dont see how it can be "abused" linking to something there is similar to linking something in your tweet. Well, I guess its them being on the safe side, or maybe doing that to have an "exhaustive" list of all the apps that people are making.

I just hope that after I finish working on the thing I can get permission to mention my app :P

So what's next?

Well there's LOT of stuff to be done! I didnt take any security measures, and neither did I make more "personalized" here is a small list of things I want to do.

Look around about what security measure should be taken
Go back to main page after successfully posting!! (right now have to restart the app :P )
Add script to show remaining characters.
AJAXify IT!!
Make my own icon
Make a nice BG
Show @replies in another tab
Count number of tweets in current session and show

Well thats only a start, I just hope I learn a lot of things doing that :D

Final Thoughts

There is no guarantee that I will be doing web development in my future, as in, job.. but for the moment, I am loving and will keep doing it till..well.. circumstances force me to do something else... I wouldn't be sad if it had something to game programming :P (comfortable with designing algorithms there too :D )

And as for AIR, I have to say! Its far far FAR better than me having to make those swings/jFrames applets in java, this feels so natural to me, and very comfortable with it! Swings and all feel so scary when you look at them, and doing this in Air is... just so ME.

So.. yeah, thats it about what I did today, Now I will look into where I should go next to learn more about PHP, the exhaustive lists and everything at PHP.net are a bit scary :S

Reetesh's Scheduling Algorithm

2009-01-13T01:37:00.004+05:30

Note: Well, no matter how silly/incoherent/unnecesary this felt when I typed, I finally gatehred the strength to post it..

Everyone has stacks of work queued up with them.. and you do them in some order or the other. But it is very important to note that the environment you do your work in, should be such that it compliments your work and method.

Not too long ago, I was happy sitting doing my things and flowing along with the time. I always had notes and a small notice board filled with things that I had to do (on the computer), With not much problem I used to achieve those tasks. But recently, those notes have been piling up and that board hasn't been erased since ages.

The problem here is that, there have been only two processes running when I come home and sit on the computer..

Process A : AKA System Idle process, wander aimlessly in social sites and Reading RSS feeds
Process B :Help someone with some problem.

Process A

These things have various threads which keep happening in a round robin fashion.. I look at the RSS feeds and read for sometime, then go to twitter and stalk a little, then go to forums and help some one, check my scraps and reply to the doubts, the cycle repeats.

The Blog news sites keep putting news for hits, I get suckered into reading everything because of my thirst for.. well, anything that happens in my areas of interest (One big goal of having a huge encyclopaedia in me head). So that keeps giving new things to read once the cycle is over, then people on twitter keep tweeting and there are so many people with common interests that keeps me watching, to see if they found something interesting that I could probably make use of.. that is another never ending process.

Then there is the forum thing where you periodically go and keep checking if the person asking the question to which you replied has answered back or not..

In this way, time gets wasted, so obviously this way of round robin-ing all these process is a very bad thing to do. Socializing and having connections with people is good, but one should never go overboard.

Process B

Basically, there is nothing wrong in helping others, I actually love seeing that what I know is helping in making others' life easier. But the thing here is that, since the past few months it has gone to such lengths that I get daily 1hr+ phone calls, chatting for an hour (altleast) and then roaming in the forums for another few hours .

The main culprit here is me ofcourse, I can choose to say "I am short on time" or "have to do something else", but I just can't say that, and then again there is thing that, I have my chat clients ALWAYS on, so anyone looking for help instead of googling will ask me first, because.. well, there is a good chance I would know how to help.

The main reason I go online (not invisible) on these things is because, I've been getting calls from people/relatives saying they haven't seen me since so long, etc etc..(all that mushy stuff) giving me a feeling of "loosing your friends". So that the social tie is tied tightly once I go and stay online.

But thats basically "asking for it" Once you go online you are sure to be bombarded with even more people and waste a few cycles there.

What Happened?

Simply put, I got the proverbial "kick in the nuts" all that information junkie-ness finally proved fatal and it went to such an extent that I lost the sense of responsibility, never thinking about things I should actually be getting done. It was, always, the same cycle, repeating. Even sometimes when I decided firmly that

"I will play this game today"
"I will complete this task today"

I would get pings from friends or maybe a call from someone to do/help with something and then keep doing that and then after doing it, go into the system idle process and waste the remaining time.

How bad was it? Simply put, I completed only 13 games last year, compared to 23 from 2007, and most of the 2008 games were rather, short.

This was at its peak in the past three months, with even movie/anime/game activity being close to 0 so you can forget about "learning/studies" etc. And day before yesterday I got my "kick in the nuts" by failing to pass an exam by 2 Qs (which I openly accept, could have prepared more for, even though I did the minimum required preparation)

As they say.. "Its all fun and games until someone looses an eye"

Well, I guess you require something BIG to happen so that you get back intoright track and start doing things the right way...

So... What now?

Well, I guess its time for a CHANGE, and what kind of change?

Everytime I remember this saying from a good friend of mine "Life is all about getting your priorities straight" I always loved that sentence, wanted to follow it, never felt it was that necessary, but I guess it IS now.

So , shifting from my Round Robin ways with no priorities at all.. now on I will be having a very highly prioritized method of scheduling my tasks.

I have plans to learn and do a lot by the time this semester ends, so I guess its time to get my other kind of knowledge's fill and do it in a right manner. Everyday will have its own fresh board/page and will do those first, and only then go to my feeds/twitter etc..

WONT start my day with "Lets see whats the latest news at kotaku"
Will not keep stalking my timeline on twitter.
Apply appropriate Stealth settings on Chat clients
Remove all Social Apps from Startup
Do atleast one thing that you WANT to do.. not what you HAVE to.
Learn to say "NO"

They might sound cheesy and all, but yeah, thats what I am aiming for.. ofcourse at first I will try to completely be away from everything so that I can later manage having limited exposure to them.

Will it work?

You have no idea how many edits, cuts, and modifications this post has gone.. I was going to NOT post this thing at all.. just like 100s of other things that go through my head, but I finally decided that I will make this post and let all my friends know, so that, atleast they will keep me kicking back on the right track.. i.e not just @sadaarjun and @PhaniPS :P

Just writing this is like overcoming a huge hurdle...

----
Comment on twitter

Basically, most of the people in there are people either working or.. well, not in college like me.. I mean the people with as much activity as mine. All those @SathyaBhat s and @b50 s spamming timelines are happily tweeting along from their office computers when they have nothing else to do...its bad, to try and replicate that part of them :P Its better me, as a student, utilise that time for something better :P

I guess I finally understand the on again, off again, moods of @preshit and also why @xubz has disappeared.@QuizMaster seems to be doing fine.. but has been less active recently because of the exams.. well, just hope @Rockstar_sid and @pcsbox dont get too carried away. @karthiksn seems to be in a similar System Idle process situation though..

Tracking..

In the end, will be tracking my own progress via twitter and blog activity.. let us just see if something happens after I post this thing... I dont want it turn out like all those other times when you get serious and think of doing something but endup being overwhelmed by the wretched System Idle Process.

Pickup Mission 2: Package Smackage!

2008-12-19T01:25:00.003+05:30

Today was another pickup mission! Another one of the students doing their MS in SIUE (where my bro studies) had come to Hyderabad just the other day, and guess what? My brother sent things via her! Yeah, that's pretty common anyways, people send things for their parents/relatives back in India via friends leaving to India! So what were those things? Where was the pickup point? Read on!

Oh yeah, that's "Reeft Punk" btw.. my avatar when I ride on the bike :P The helmet with no Visor gives the cool, winged helmet feel to it, and the shades block the dust completely (there is a LOT of dust in HYD, eyes get destroyed). Oh and always have my iPod on whenever riding :D

*The Destination!

The destination was also quite far away this time! (it's like a mandatory condition that the friend's house should be really far away) Luckily it was not as far away as the previous one, and this time it was on the opposite side of the city. The complete path is on the Highway!! That's the best part of it, finally got a chance to ride on the Highway (for a long distance) Enjoyed the ride a lot I must say.. but don't get too joyful! Things can get really dangerous. Good thing it was not very deep into the highway, else ultra super fast trucks would have started zooming by.

The house I had to go to was in Chanda Nagar and there were many other nagars inside ChandaNagar, it was a confusing mess! I was going on a straight path and then it split into three. Let's just say that I roamed 3Kms ("gullies" and all), for 15 minutes of every path. AND the last one was the right place :| Ofcourse, it always has to be the last place! (stupid Murphy and his law)

*The Package!

So I finally reached the house, (ofcourse with a lot of assist over the phone from Pratibha didi :P ) and there I was greeted to THIS chunk of awesomeness! Just look at towering package! I put everything into my bag, and also gave the things that I prepared for my brother.. made a complete DVD (along with labels and Covers) Took me around 3 months to edit the 3hr + Video (along with handpicked BGM etc :D ) And another DVD with all the pictures taken when he was not here. I also gave the 1 GB DDr ram that I had lying around here, with no use at all.

Then Sat there for a while talked a bit with Pratibha didi, got to know a few things about how they all saw my bro :P After talking for about an hour or so (and after eating 2 Ferrero Rochers! ) I started the return journey. It's getting dark very soon now a days, was pretty dark by 6PM itself! Reached home in under an hour and was ready to...

*Layeth the SmakethDown!

I guess I already told you all about how my brother is a deal finder and always tries to get things for... not the standard price :P Lemme write down the things with their price and how he got them for that much! Ok, without further ado, here are the things!

As you can see.. There are 4 PS3 games

LittleBigPlanet - $39 (Amazon Coupons)
Resistance 2 Collector's Edition - $59 (Offer in Amazon)
Heavenly Sword - $19 (Amazon again :P )
UT III - $19 ( $21 with tax, Walmart )

And then there are two BD Movies too!

Hulk Limited Edition - $16
TDK 2-Disc Special Edition - $10

Both from Columbia house, don't ask me HOW though :P

What? You thought that was all ? Now have a look here!

The first 3 games are from the buy 2 get 1 free GameStop offer that was up not too long ago. And remaining are form Amazon :D

Pikmin 1 - $24.99
Pikmin 2 - $39.99
LoZ: TP - $44.99
No More Heroes - $14.99
Wario Land : Shake it - $29.95
Mercury Meltdown : Revolutions - $9.95

Yeah! That's 5 Wii/GC games in there! Can't wait to start playing them all, hehe.. just need Luigi's Mansion, SMS, and Eternal Darkness now :P

Here is a panoramic shot of everything in one pic! (two pics stitched together)

Huh? It seems Mr.Ephelant seems to have found something.. what's that? AppleSeed : DuesEx Machina DVD and PURE for PC! (for JUST $5! )

So that's it for this pickup mission! Sure was exhausting! Came home, took pics and then posted the blogs, that's all what I did this day.. now off to sleep!

As a Special gift here is another nice shot of the whole of the whole package!

Check out the Full Album for more pics!

Package Smackage

Wii Music Impressions and Video!

2008-12-13T16:17:00.003+05:30

So, I've finally got my hands on the Wii today, but I was not the first one to get their "hands on" it. I made my mom have the honour of being the first to play the game, with me and dad watching as she played.

The game started with no menu's, it had the tutor appear, and teach the basic 4 styles of operating the instruments in the game. My mom did all the tutorials and then played her first song! The rhythm of "twinkle twinkle" is well known to my mom (she is the one who taught me that afterall :P ) She did pretty good in her first ever try at playing instruments using the wii mote (she used to play real instruments back in her days). How did it go? well here is a Video :D

After that..mom and dad, went on playing for hours and ha real fun making music and seeing their music being played on the BG when they were playing the different instruments. (your previous plays add to the whole arrangement, automatically) soon they had done a whole 2x3 person band music of DoReMe (another one my mom and dad know, thanks to "The Sound of Music" ) well, it was good but not... how do I say this... video worthy :P However the amount of happiness and joy my parents had , was more than worth it to give it a 100 popularity points :P

Later I sat and experimented with a few things, wanted to see if I could do some custom changes to songs I know. I acutally wanted to play the SMB 1-1 song.. so to unlock it went on playing, soon I unlocked 47 songs but SMB song was no where to be found :(

One thing Wii Music really helped me in was, knowing the names of all those songs that I liked but never knew the names of. You know, the songs that came in Tom and jerry cartoons and some other merry melodies or Silly symphonies.

Here is a video of me doing that song which comes in that Tom and Jerry episode, you know, the one where nibbler sings the Ferero Rocher song :P

Here is another video of me playing a song that's OUT of this WORLD, and I think I heard this in another Tom and jerry episode :P I used this instrument I like very much, whose name I never knew till I played the game, and also dont know now, only remember that it starts with a "D" hehe.

You wont know the difference unless you've heard the original, tell me how it was :P I know I am no expert and it was just my first try, wanted to see how the whole thing goes.

Cant wait to sit and record some videos of me playing with some beat boxer or maybe doo wopper, but, I want my SMB 1-1 theme! Played for 5h:47m today and it was awesome, unlocked 47 songs, SMB 1-1 not included, played only 4 songs till now though :P

P.S : Btw, you have to hand it to the guys who do the Wii game musics, I mean, everyone of those Menu Musics are so soothing and relaxing, they are some of the best musics I have heard in recent times, the one that comes when you save a video is just too good, there are many in other Wii branded games too, and ofcource SMG also has some good music.

A Pickup Mission and Feorgotting

2008-12-10T01:47:00.002+05:30

Today was Eid, (Happy Eid to all! :D) Hence a holiday. So I decided I make most of this time and went to my brother's friend's house where he sent things that he bought in US. And these are just not normal purchases, everything was a special Deal...

*Point A to B

The journey was 60KM long and as usual I travelled via my lovely bike. Was happy to see that the traffic was no where near to what you see 90% of times here (and trust me, you'd never want to drive with that horrible traffic ) So I reached there and look at what I picked up!

Oooh yeah! Thats a lotta BDs and DVDs :D lemme list em.

BDs

Iron Man Limited edition
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Kung fu Panda
Batman Begins

DVDs

Predator
Independance Day
The Day After Tomorrow

And theres a PSN card and also a Fischer Price Cartoon DVD, that DVD was free. will see it... justcoz :P

As for the BDs, My brother bought it in a Buy 1 get 1 free offer from columbia house so Iron Man is the one he bought and BB is the free one, and I discovered that KungFu Panda was accidentall listed for "free" and ordered that ASAP, hehe (got a mail saying it was cancelled and then a "sorry, take it" later :P )

And Journey to the Center of the earth, just now I and my parents watched, it was a great movie.. I mean the BD comes with 4 pairs of 3D glasses and Both 3D and 2D versions on the Same disc .. AND a "digital copy" on a dvd, which I guess is a avi version or something of the whole movie. It has a CD key for it and everything, I dont know why it was give, but oh well. thats awesome, its 3 movie versions in 1!

The 3D effects did infact feel 3D-ish, and luckily it was more and better than Superman Returns (yeah, I saw that in 3D... in IMAX, lol)

As for the DVDs. I and my bro have a plan on buying almost all those old movies that we watched and loved. And with our complete Home theater set-up disaster movies with the extra blasts and eveything are top priority :P Ofcourse, its not like he bought all for direct price, my brother being the deal guy he is, always bought em in such a way that theres profits o matter whats, hehe 8)

He IMed me the other day saying he bought Ace Ventura Double Pack! and he wont send it.. that !@#!# :P

*Point B to C

Since I cae oh so far to take those things, I made sure that I made most of the milage and visited nearby shopping areas, so I went to the computer heaven of Andhra pradesh (CTC ) and first visited the Book depot there, its one of the hugest book selling place here.

First thing I saw was a "Guiness Book 2008" book and I immediately remembered this Story in GS (mine is 10th comment) I asked the guy if he had other versions and he said "I dont know" So I went deep into the shop, searching for new MAD mag issues (nope, still no issues, since 2+ years) and looking at various Amar Chitra Katah Books.

and Lo Behold What do I see?

Oh yeah! I got that thing.. I just couldnt help myself, but I just love General knowledge...as I put it

"I am always on a trivial pursuit for trivia"

As much as I love stories, I mostly love books that are information based, than novels and stuffs, have a ultra huge collection of magazines and stuff (8+ years of 2+ mag subscriptions :P ). Once I took a look at the book I saw so many things that I would just eat away, so many things that you wouldnt necessarily find written in articles all around the place, so it was an instant buy!

Official Price 1300 got it for 1100 :D

As for the other thing its a DK multimedia (remember, I hate I love maths?) CD on Human body which I bought for my uncle who runs a big tutorial. His methods of teaching are very homely and unique. He already had an old version of the thing which he used to show to students and teach but the disc got corrupt so I bought this new version (also compatible with Xp! :P )

*Alternate Path

Now instead of going home (Point A) from this place... I took a detour and encountered a shop which... sells games! I just tried my luck and asked them.. "left 4 dead hai kya?" (Do you have l4d?) and BAM... he said yes and got it! Woot! I was waiting to get my hands on this thing since a long time and I finally have it. So yeah.. if you are an indian and waiting for the game, just go and get it.. its out!

Just saw the opening cinematic, sure did describe what kind of experience Valve was planning for gamers to have. Now... I wonder if my first playthrough itself should be on Co-op or SP...

and Yeah my Steam ID is Reetesh. add me if you want to play along sometime :)

*To Point A, and Feorgotting

What? You never heard of Feorgotting? Well.. it could be because.. I made it up :P The thing is that, when coming back, I was wondering if I "put the CD back in after checking it" at the book shop (DK CD) And then I was thinking if put my Card back into the wallet after paying the bill. (even though at one point I remembered doing it) Soon, I started feeling that I checked for it and then removed it and didnt put it back in :lol:

Such kinds of loops went on happening as I rode back to point A, actually, this happens a LOT to me, I keep forgetting such things, JUST so that I can worry about it..its like there are two brains inside me :P

I coined this phenomenon as "fear+forgetting = feorgotting" always forgetting and getting that "fear" inside you if things were done right or not.

perfect example "Did I lock the doors while leaving or not"

*Mission Complete

So yeah, I came back took these pics, emptied around 70GB of HDD space, reorganized a lot of files, installed L4D, saw journey to the center of the earth and then.. wrote this! Thats all for this entry, oh yeah! did I forget to tell you theres a Wii Music there too!?

I dont know about you, but the game sold itself to me the instant I saw that demo by .. no not ravi, but this guy, J.C.Rodrigo Well, to be honest, I bought the game even before I saw the video, I just love psuedo music making games or what ever you want to call it (Passive Reactive Rhythm game etc etc) and I know that my mom will also like it, so why not buy it, and hey it has SMB 1-1 Music in it!!

See you soon then, lets hope theres more coming.. I heard TDK BD has come out today :twisted:

Organizing a Lan Gaming event

2008-12-07T09:01:00.002+05:30

Pragnya is the name of my college's "Tech Fest" The story of how this thing started itself is some 100 pages story, so lets not get to it :P At the end, it indeed "started off" and was its 3rd and final day. I am one of the 4 organizers of the "Lan Gaming" event for the fest. Its a 3 day event, being held all day long and that too in a lab of our college.

The games included in the Lan Gaming event are CounterStrike 1.6 (obviously :P ) , NFS MW, FIFA 08, Warcraft III (DotA) , and Quake III. The QIII in there, was there because of my request. I never see UT or QIII in any of the events of other college's, so I just put it there for players like me :) We planned to have Tournaments for CS and NFS, everything else was planned to be a regular "friendly" match which means that we basically set up all the systems in lan and the people visiting could play on Lan connected systems for cheap and have fun (generating income for the prizes)

Out of the 4, I and another person were like the main people handling the games and systems etc etc. I was there helping with all the hardware and networking things, being a college computer lab, we faced bazillions of problems, I was so happy that everyone of those problems we faced was easily fixable for me (not that the problems themselves were not too big :P ) All 4 of us spent the first 3 days of the week assembling, installing all games and stuffs on the systems. When the event actually started one of us was the registrations handler, the other was seeing all formalities and coordinating things, I was the NFS referee the other was the CS referee.

We organizers have "black t-shirts" and the simple volunteers who came in during the events were the "white shirts" once again showing that "Black is 1337 choice" :P So yeah, the white shirts were there to help us monitor the tournament matches, noting down timings etc etc. Really helpful bunch I must say, made new friends too!

On the first day I and another one of the organizers had to run up and down the college building for almost an hour to get the permissions letter signed by 4 different people out of which one was not available for 45 minutes. In The end however, we got signatures of one Associate professor, two Head of Departments and our principal to formally "get permission" for doing the thing and take responsibility for it.

I am trying to start "cut-short"-ing my blogs now, so that I can write things faster.. so lets just skip the majillion points of trivial details (in the inside, I don't think of them as trivial :P ) and skip to the main points!

One small point is that we allowed only the playing people inside the room, so there were 2 CS Clans and 4 NFS players in the room at any point and all others waiting outside in the waiting room, because all responsibility for the things in the lab was on us and we dont want nothing to be getting lost now, dont we?

*Satisfaction!

For the first time in our college's 10 year history a Lan Gaming tournament was conducted and I was very happy to be a part of it, and most of all, I was happy that I was a "big guy" in the whole thing, as I now had a part in making the thing as fair as possible. With no "college partiality", etc etc. I am happy to say that the whole thing went smoothly. Every match was under my observation and I didn't find anything objectionable being done, Its not like I had to go there and tell them to not do something wrong, everything was being done in a very fair manner. I was just making sure everything was going right or not by double checking everyone's stats. (self satisfaction)

*Sportsmanship.

I was actually thinking that I would come across a lot of un-sportsman people who would... you know do "un-sportsman" things and complain a lot at the end of the matches, but NO. They understood that we were on college systems, which are not built for total gaming, understood that there was lag and EVERYONE was under the same condition. Also they were very cool about going according to the rules that I set. They were not bothered by the delays and were patient enough to wait till everything was fixed! Its great to see people like that participating. One of the participants is in top 10 of the state, a very good national level player too. He was there helping us , after finishing his matches by setting up some systems and giving bits of info on how other colleges organized things.

*Collision Detection

The only thing that I found wrong in the whole event was that almost every participant in the NFS event went :O after hearing that there would be collision detection in the races. I've read the whole WCG rules and know that its "off" in their games. But I don't see any point in having a "LAN" game and turning collision detection off.

I was telling them "Why not just play on any non lan system without traffic or bots and we will note down your times" it's the same thing as not having collision detection. They were worried about the race start mainly, as NFS puts 4 players in a 2x2 order (hence back people hitting front people etc) but I told that "that's the way it rolls" you can't come all the way and say it's a LAN event and have a sissy "no collision detection" event. I told them its an "underground" event, so forget about world standards.

We had one volunteer observing each of the 4 simultaneous participants and made sure that no one did any intentional crashes.

*Fairness

The whole event was as fair as possible, Out of the qualified Semi-finalists we divided people accordingly, so that we don't see a final in the semis itself, and also such that the least tier people don't play with all the first tier people.

There was no HUGE a gap between people and no one had any complaints :) Due to some technical difficulties we had to make some changes and the competitors accepted without raising a fuss about it.

*The Moneh!

We've had over 100 Participants, with ~65 for NFS and 11 Clans for CS. The participation number was quite good! Not only was this our first Lan Gaming event, but due to some mistake the event was not even mentioned in our event's website or the poster. In other colleges its around 250 or something, so relatively we did pretty good! All registration money was in the hands of the person who handled the registration. I always worry when it comes to money matters. The main thing being the doubt if the person who is collecting is a honest person or not. In almost every event I've seen till now, there were people who kept eating some of the money. I was having my doubts if there would be one now too.

But all these days working with them and seeing how they behaved, I was assured that they are good people and not someone who would eat away the earnings of the event. Not only that, but also the organizers of all the other events and the main co-ordinators are cool people with no intention of cheating out any of the money into their own pockets.

Maybe its because this is the "Tech fest" and not the college's "cultural fest". Why does it matter? Because every event is something related to things like paper presentations, programming competitions Robotics etc. so that means that only geeks and nerds are the organizers :P Not those meat heads, who somehow just by seeing you can say that will do something like that.

*What to DO with the Monnies.

Once everything was collected and registrations were closed, all the money was given to the appropriate authorities. The college decided that they keep 30% of the earnings and we use the remaining for the prize money... we had to reduce the NFS and CS prize a bit because of this (we were giving 1st and 2nd prize ) but the participants were cool with that.

*NFS Rules

The NFS Finals was won by the person in blue sitting on the far left. It sure was a great match, I planned the finals' scores in such a way that any mistake can lead to a total turnover of points and make the one in lead, loose the game. We faced a lot of problems during the finals as one of the connected system was always closing automatically as soon as the match started. We tried several combinations of 4 computers and after a lot of trials somehow got everything working smoothly.

The first Circuit race was 20 minutes long and tested the stamina of everyone, next one was a curvaceous sprint testing the players control and handling, then the third was a traffic filled collision having drag race. Drag is something everyone has trouble finishing, and it felt awesome seeing them play like that, going under the truck and all :P

*End

The CS winners had to leave because they had another tournament, after trying a lot to try and get them the certificate and prize before hand, and not succeeding I gave them the prize money out my pocket and asked them to leave for their tournament (for which they paid a lot to register and were getting late ) I took their prize money for myself :P

The certificates could not be given to the winners as the tournament ended at 2 PM and certificates were written and locked by 1PM. They will however get it on Monday :)

*Other things!

Well, I first of all used one of my designs to make a poster for the Lan Gaming event. Made this in under 20 minutes, and it sure caught everyone's attention :D Other than that, took print outs of tables that I made to note down all the preliminary rounds' timings. Helped in framing questions for the "Tech Quiz" and some general help here and there too. All organizers got free lunch everyday too! The lunch was excellent in our canteen. And it felt great that we all organizers were being rewarded like that.

We spent 3 days installting various games in all the systems, and today when it ended, we spent around an hour deleting every game from every system in a synchronised and quick manner, the work was done leaving now trace of it ever happening, just so that people dont sit and play those games during normal lab sessions, hehe.

Well, I think I am missing some details but I guess this is more than enough, will keep making shorter posts if possible, hehe. All in all, the event was awesome and it had a great surprise in the end which I will save for later. It was the first time our tech fest was so huge (only the cultural fest was a big thing, till now) it did go pretty well, but will surely be better next time! There were many things wrong with the timing and promotion and (lack of) sponsorship for this event.

Any doubts or anything, feel free to ask :P

Heres the poster I made

Check out the full gallery here!

Pragnya '08

New-Gen Polaroid

2008-12-01T21:34:00.005+05:30

Before I start off writing about the my 3 day trip to Srikakulam, its various Temples, Araku Valley and Borra Caves, lemme show you something interesting that I found during the trip.

I was here at the APTDC View point in GaliKonda, the highest viewpoint in Eastern Ghats. And obviously everyone (me included) were getting their pictures taken.. Some with their cell phones and others with their cameras.

Here I saw a person roaming around saying "On the spot photo Rs. 30" in the general black ticket seller rhythm. I didn't even look at the person telling myself "Who needs Polaroid pictures now"

So after getting on the Bus and when it was leaving, I saw someone else's picture, it was normal photo size and printed on the regular Glossy paper.. I was wondering what kind of camera it was, then as the bus moved I saw something really unique.

These guys put up a special Laser Printer, powered it via some car battery or some electric line (it was not clear as the bus was moving) and took "on the spot" printouts. I was really surprised after seeing this because we were in a highly remote location with almost no electric towers/lines near us.

Now that's some "new gen" methodology! Bringing a laser printer and then printing on the spot, very economic and profitable!

Later I found people taking power form the electric box of the lights in Borra Caves doing the same thing! This time I got a closer look and everything was clarified!

The printer even had a LCD Screen! Don know, since when they are doing this, but man, no matter what, its really something worth mentioning.

Have a look.

click for big pic

Now thats what I call Resourceful Engineering!

..Once you dig in..

2008-11-16T00:23:00.008+05:30

First of all, watch this video

This is a video I watched around 6-7 years back, on TV. Back then I found the song funny because i used to translate what he was saying

"Once you dig in, you find it coming out the other side"

as something related to what happens when you "dig in" your nose :P because well, let me put it this way, I saw people who dig their nose, "very frequently" when I was young and after hearing this song I used to think of "It (the finger) coming out the other side" and used to laugh (on the inside)

And it also made me understand why one would actually pick their nose.. because.

"Once you dig in, you find yourself having a good time"

So yeah, that's what I basically thought after hearing the song... when I was a kid.

For some reason the song was brought back in my head and because of that.. I started singing it again.. (in my mind, of course ) but this time when I said part that again.. it was like this..

"Once you dig in, you find it coming out the other side"

hey, wait.. that's the same thing right? So whats the bid deal? Well, lets just say that a certain word has a certain homonym that one would have learnt after "growing up".. you know the thing that implies

"Once you dig in, you find yourself having a good time"

Very peculiar to see how perception of things change as time passes by! You see and hear things different after "growing up" thats for sure :P Well, just to be sure I was not singing a mis-heard lyrics, I went you youtube and saw the video.. and this time.. I heard it as..

"Once you dig in, you find it coming on the other side"

*ahem* OK.. so now I was totally confused and didn't understand if it was the old me or the new me that mis-heard it.. So I type "Dig in Lenny kravitz lyrics" in my address bar (FF) and came here.

This is the starting lyrics..

It's time to face it,
Come on in and
Join the party,
Life has been waiting
For you to care,
Don't try to fake it
Jump on in and,
Get it started
There's so much lovin',
For you to share
There is nowhere to run,
There is no way to hide
Don't let it beat you,
Say "Nice to meet you"
And "Bye"

Once you dig in
You'll find it coming
Out the other side
And once you dig in
You'll find
You'll have yourself
A good time

Let me phrase it...

"Don't try to fake it" "Jump on in and get it started"

Ok.. now I was totally convinced that he was singing about something else..something that I thought it was talking about when I recently heard it, especially NOT about picking nose! Something ,you know.. for which "Life has been waiting"

The whole lyrics can be translated as to something that is telling a "first timer" to "do it"... with respect...by saying "Nice to meet you" and "bye"

This really makes me think, what the singers actually think when they write these songs.. and what the fans think of it.. I mean look at the youtube comments

"'So rockin' inspirational for me'...thanks Lenny :)"

I have nothing to say to this because.. well, maybe he meant something else and my brain is thinking in a very unintended manner and spoiling the whole "inspirational" song.. I mean, the video at least, is not this bad, so I guess its just me.. or is it?

All I can say is that something are just good to "listen" but once you start hearing to the lyrics and dig in to it... heads will be rolling!

The GNU Cake.

2008-09-27T18:09:00.006+05:30

Today is GNU's 25th Birthday and the FSF Student Chapter (of which I am a member too) at GRIET, my college, celebrated the event with great enthusiasm.

It was a two day event where we organised technical Quiz and C Programming Competitions on 26th September, and then Seminars from Special Guests and Prize Distributions (for the previous day's Events) on 27th (Today)

But yeah, the main part was the cake Cutting at the end where all us FSF members and Staff of CSE Department ate a GNU!..... Cake :P

I and my Senior (Raam) went and ordered the Cake yesterday and out of all the 3 bakeries visited, only one guaranteed us that it would be ready before 10 AM (and its ALWAYS the last place we try :P )

It took a whole hour to get the Cake! It was this less only because I left to the Bakery on my Bike, else it would have taken way longer on a car! How far was the bakery you ask? well.. it was a whopping... 4Kms :P Well, yeah, thats the amount of traffic we have here in Hyderabad (even in one of its remote areas) The amount of Holes, and craters on the road proved a huge challenge to cross without damaging the cake.. It was like traveling through a Mine Field!

But in the End everything came home fine and all had a blast! More on that later.. now, the Star of the Show!

The GNU Cake!

Visit the Whole Gallery for our Celebration Pics.

GNU Celebrations

All-Nighter : Chrome Chronicles

2008-09-03T19:30:00.011+05:30

Ever Since I saw that episode of spongebob SqurePants where he time-travels to the future and finds the whole world coloured in "Chrome" (as its the colour of "Future") , It was implanted in my head that.. Chrome infact, is the colour of future :P Even in my university's "Soft Skills" Class when they asked me what my favourite colour was (2 years ago) I replied it was "Chrome" :P Why all the chrome talk you ask? well, Just yesterday, Google released its own browser which is named, you guessed it.."Chrome" So lets find out if it really is "The future"...

What follows is a log of things I did and noticed yesterday when I spent an all night playing around with Chrome.

After a long day of playing Resistance Co-op with friends and then playing some GTA4 myself, I logged in and checked what my friends were tweeting. The whole place was abuzz with Google Chrome Talk. It was only yesterday that I realised that google was actually making a browser of its own and that too, it was going to release tomorrow itself! I am the kind of person whose pc life is more "browser dependant" than "OS dependant" , hence, as soon as I found out about Chrome, I knew that I HAVE to download it and have a look at it no matter what, and see if it will let me stay in Vista always (I mainly use linux because it works oh so nicely with me opening bazillion tabs with all kinds of MM things running) So I cancelled my plans of watching a movie (4 brothers) and waited for the download.

As soon as I downloaded the thing I started Tweeting about all the things I felt about it, now that thing proved pretty useful, as all along this post I will refer to one of those and expand on what I was saying :D

Remember that I will only be posting about how things that I frequently use, work in Chrome. And yes,I do understand that this is a beta. To know how Chrome is Completely different and awesome.. Check out the Chrome Comic here

It Begins!

First Impressions

Cool.. love the way the tabs are opening and closing..same awesomness like when the picasa logo loads

After installing chrome, right before clicking the icon, I was wondering if the browser would have an awesome splash screen like "Picasa" has.. but then again, the browser is made to load fast, so a Splash screen would prove the opposite :P I.E. no Flash Splash screen. Then I saw that opening and Closing Tabs, had Slick animations, which were just as good as the way the splash screen in picasa appears. Its so nice that it makes you want to open and close tabs again and again. It smoothly animates also when you move tabs from one place to another, which is also a welcomed addition.

First Things First.

ok.. the address bar usage is not as good as in FF :( writing "[movie name] imdb" doesnt do a "i'm feeling lucky" :(

The First thing I tried after starting chrome was to see if the address bar is as useful as FFs. In FF (even in FF2) I always type my destinations as words and the address bar does a "I'm feeling lucky" whenever there is an exact match or takes me to the google search result if there is none. For Instance, If I type "Four brothers IMDB" in FF's address bar, it directly takes me to the imdb page for the movie, it removes an extra click from the burden and is very useful in many other ways too. This works by default in any fresh FF2/3 install.

So what About Chrome?

Well, in Chrome.. eventhough its by google, the address bar is not as intuitive as FFs, when I type that in, it takes me to the google search result page rather than doing a "I'm feeling lucky" . So thats one disappointment right there :(

The Start Page

The Start page looks like opera's start page, but... not.. manually assignable?

Now you might be wondering how I didnt notice this before doing the address bar thing, well.. the thing is that , I like that address bar feature that my basic instincts didnt allow me to notice anything else :P So yeah, what about it? How does the start page look? Well, its pretty good :D It looks a bit like Opera's but is somewhat different.

Instead of allowing you to manually assign what is to be shown in those boxes at the start page (like in Opera) it automatically puts small snaps of your "most visited websites" which is pretty nifty, but I always prefer a keypress over a click. (look at bookmarks impressions below to know more). Not of much use to me, other than to have a good looking start page :P In the Same page you have a list of recently bookmarked pages and recently Closed tabs, which I feel will prove useful to many.

Bookmark Woes

Hmm.. bookmarking is no where as good as in FFs :( I mean.. I imported stuff, my "keyword"ed bookmarks seem to be working fine.

But I am not able to add keywords for my bookmarks by "editing" them.. I wonder how I can add keywords for them..

Bookmarks are something that I see as very near and dead to me, however, I am ok with the fact that there is no default syncing option available. There was Google browser sync back in the FF2 days, I was thinking they will have that in this, but , No, they dont have it here.

A Very important feature that I use for my bookmarks is the "keywording" feature where in I just put a single letter keyword for my most visited/important bookmarks and use them to visit those pages. For example, I just put the keyword "p" for my Gamespot posting History page and whenever I feel like seeing if there is a new post in any of the topics I have posted I "CTRL+T -> P -> Enter" and the page loads. It gets the work done, quick and easy :D

So what about Chrome?

I right clicked a bookmark and then edited it.. to my surprise , only "Name" , "Address" and "Where to Store" options were available. I was disappointed as it was one of my most frequently used features from FF. However, I saw that , my imported bookmarks with the "P" keyword was infact, working in Chrome.. How did that happen? I dont know.. maybe there is a possibility to give keywords somewhere hidden, if that is to be true, one thing is for sure, it isnt accessibly placed :|

BookMark Management

Is there no Bookmark management option at all? WOW! I am surprised.. please direct me to it if you find it somewhere

I dont know how many of you spend time organising the way your bookmarks are placed, in which order and down to the separators that separately different types of bookmarks, but I sure do that. I also try to get related things in a single folder , as much as possible. There is a easy option in FF/IE where y0u can manage bookmarks (it opens up a window and lets you manage things just like any file manager/explorer does)

So what about Chrome?

Its not that I am only mentioning those things which are absent in Chrome, but these are the things I use very much, and once again, I was surprised that this simple feature was absent from Chrome. Only way now is to drag and drop things here and there, which can get really tedious if you have 60+ things to move around in. I Hope this feature gets added later on.

Tabs and Performance

LOL.. opened all my Bookmarks.. there be bazillionty tabs open now.. lemme see how it works :D

The Most demanding feature of any browser is its performance quotient. There are many factors which decide the overall performance quotient, i.e even the OS. I dont want to go all Benchmarky, the basic thing I need is, I want it to work with no performance drop or delays in tab changes when atleast 10 MM Intensive pages are open.

FF On Vista gives me a LOT of problems with mem fragmentation and leakage. And many times, when I load many tabs, Embedded videos get this strange problem (only on Windows, not on Linux) where they play only for 3 secs and there is no Audio. The performace stays the same if you close all the open tabs , only choice left is to restart the browser, which is a very big pain.

What about Chrome?

Why has me be silent for a long while? well.. Its coz Chrome isn't responding since then!

Well, after reading all about how awesomely the google labs people had made the memory management and stuff for the browser, I felt like directly giving it the ultimate test of opening "All bookmarks" now we are talking about more than 60 tabs here.

I was totally surprised to see that the pages did load and all tabs were open.. the SYSTEM didn't slow down, like it doesn't when using FF but the browser sure did. The main problem was that there were many pages which had embedded videos in them. Because of which I got many errors asking me to disable the "Flash" and "DivX player" Plugins.

This was a very nifty feature as I didnt have to restart the browser. Also.. when all these tabs opened, after a long gap of no response, a small window opened asking me if I wanted to close those tabs that were not responding. This was the first time I got to see the famed, "task manager" in action. It feel like it the best thing to happen to browsers since .... tabs? One can manually popup the task manager whenever they want and use it just like the task manager in any Windows OS. but for Tabs ofcourse :P

One thing I found very disappointing was the fact that there was NO way to understand which tab was which when you have many tabs open so as to not make the favicon visible (which happens to me many times when reading Feeds after a huge gap) in FF you have a DropDown menu that shows you a list of all the tabs open so that you can atleat select and pick the one you want to watch. you can hover over a tab and know its Title but thats is not as good an alternative for the drop down menu.

On a Side Note.. some nerd Stats :P

29 tabs = No Favicon Display

60/61 Tabs = No way to hover over new tabs.. only CTRL+Tab

How did I close all those Tabs?

Oooh, the nifty "Close Tabs to right" helped me save chrome session.. still in my first session, didnt need to restart till now :D:D

I was wondering how I would close all those tabs, I didnt want to restart the browser as I was testing how long I can make it work without crashing. after a bit of looking around, I found that right clicking on any tab gives you two nice options "Close other Tabs" and "Close Tabs to the Right". I used the latter option and it did the job.

The best thing was that the performance returned to being good after closing the many tabs (unlike in FF where restarting the browser is the only option)

Now the Small Stuff
(click heading for tweet)

Error Messages, personified.

All those "no Image Found" and other page errors, have nice icons with personified versions of folders, processes etc etc, which is a neat touch and makes the experience better

Ctrl+tabbing

It would have been better if the CTRl+Tab feature of Chrome would be like it is in Opera where it works more like the OSes Alt Tab Feature (i.e you get to choose to which tab you want to change by keep pressing "tab" Button)

Open Image in new Tab

In FF when you do a "View image" It opens the image in the same tab, leaving you with two options, to either copy the location and paste it, or drag and drop the image in an empty tab space. But In this you have the nice feature to directly right click an image and open it In a new tab :D

Universal Shortucts

The Browser has the same shortcuts found in ther major browsers, which is obviously a good thing.

Ctrl+Tab -> Change Tab
Ctrl+T -> New Tab
Ctrl+W -> Close Tab
Ctrl+Shft+T -> Re-open previously Closed Tab

Ctrl+J -> Open Download Manager

And many more..

No Title, Menu or Status bars

At first sight I thought that it has a hidden Menu bar like in IE7 but pressing Alt didn't bring it up.. i.e it has No menu bar! was surprised by seeing that. you have two buttons beside the address bar which have the Basic functions.

There is NO Title bar either, and there is no status bar.. I was wondering how I would know where to a link is linking wihtout visiting it.. But once you hover over a link it pops up a small bar at the bottom left showing the address in the link. Which is quite good :D its of fixed size though, sometimes doesnt display the whole linke (cutting the end)

Feed Reader

My whole day revolves around reading and checking many RSS feeds, and I was expecting the browser would have something in the lines of opera with its own Feed Reader, but it doesn't and neither does it have any addon support till now.. so thats a very big nono for the browser.

Tab Positioning

New Tabs in Chrome Open just like in IE i.e right beside the one from where you opened the new tab (unlike in FF where it opens always at the last)

But one thing it lacked was that, reopening a closed tab, places the tab at the end, instead of in the same place where it was when it was closed (it happens in FF)

Aesthetic Beauty

Chrome Shows, that its not only the guys at Apple that are great making things look good and feel good, everything in Chrome feels good and neat, The animations for things like "Download started" and other things are really good to look at too.

Acid Test

I did the Acid test that many talk about.. for the browser, and it Chrome was able to create a perfect recreation of the face, just like FF3, unlike IE7, which is waay off from the reference picture.

A Very Closed.. Open Source Browser

One would expect a plethora of options for modifications in Chrome, as it is an open source program, but to my surprise the thing had less options than any browser seen, it lacks very much in this department. Hope it improves in the next versions!

CTrl+F Is not all that good

When you search in a webpage, for some reason the search is not jumping to the location of a match if it is in the Text area of a WYSIWYG editor, which is a real pain if you are trying to manually insert HTML Codes in a blog.

Finally, What do Me thinks?

Well, The broswer with its "No title bar", "Good performance", "Great on Slow System"-ness and the very "Closed" options.. feels very perfect for computers where people will just do a little bit of working and then leave. I.E perfect for places like Cyber Cafes and Schools, where the systems are usually of very low config (something FF would kill in minutes) and places where you wouldnt want to make it look like some home computer

I however dont see myself using this as my primary browser anywhere in the near future. I have many addons in FF which completely define my daily life, and I dont see even one of those being implemented here. neither do I see anything like "Addon Support" for the browser..

I Might use it everynow and then to see if there are some developements, and to log into my other accounts for same portals (different blog Ids, different Gmail Ids, etc etc)

All in All, the browser is a great breakthrough in how it works and deals with things, but in terms of functinality lacks a lot of things, but this being still beta, I hope has all those things soon so that it makes more people use it.

Uniting Everything, Harmoniously

2008-08-30T18:03:00.008+05:30

As most of my friends will know, I have a dedicated "Home Theater" Room in my house where I spend most of my holidays, playing games and watching movies for complete enjoyment. But only some of those friends, who actually paid a visit to my HT, know that, I have to use a plethora of remotes to get things up and running. My bro knows that too, (being one of the founding fathers of the HT :P ) and he recently bought the "Logitech : Harmony 880" Universal Remote control, which would be the answer to all our remote woes. I already knew that the thing would have IR Reading feature, but never imagined that the end product would so customizable and good. So lets have a step by step look at the thing.

The Total Package.

The Remote comes packages in a nice box, which contains the remote, a "Base Station" (fancy word for a charger-cum-holder),a Battery(similar to that of cell phones), charger (110-220V), USB cable(normal to Mini), and Installation Disc. Everything was safe and intact even after its bumpy ride to India

The Slender Body and Sleek Interface

The Remote itself is pretty ergonomic, which feels very comfortable to hold. Standard buttons like the number pad, menu, guide, Volume change, channel change are all arranged accessibly on the remote, and then on the top you will find a LCD screen with 8 buttons bordering it (4 on each side). The buttons are positioned in such a way that they merge very well with the body.

The LCD Screen is a Low Res one, It shows you a list of activities that can be selected. When a certain device is selected, it shows the additional buttons from that specific device's remote. You can have pages and pages of buttons for a single device all of which can be arranged in any order,

There is a tilt sensor in the remote using which the remote's backlight lights up when the remote is held in the hand and raised. There is a manual button to explicitly turn the light on or off. The LCD screen is not the only one with a backlight, when the lights turn on, the whole remote is illuminated in a way that you can pin point the smallest of buttons in pitch black darkness.

Easy to Setup and Use

After the initial impressions, the thing that made the most happy was the fact that this thing had a rechargeable battery, the kind that I like. So no more AA or AAA batteries to run around for! and the Fact that surprised me the most was that there was an "Installation Disc" for the thing. Up until now, the Universal Remotes I was familiar with, had a simple paper with list of makes and models which had their codes which when input would lead to the assigning of functions to the remote. But this thing had a complete CD for it. Soon, I connected the remote to my PC via the provided USB cable (with the remote getting charged on the charger) and inserted the installation disc.

Installation of the Software is as simple as it gets, it supports both Windows and Mac OS. After installation is complete and when you first run the software. If your remote is connected it will not only check for a S/W update but also see if your remote's firmware has an update. After this process is complete, you will be asked to create an ID at the logitech portal. Why an ID you ask? Well, the software works in such a way that all the customizations and settings you have done to your remote will be stored on the Logitech servers, which will allow you to modify your remote using any computer, anywhere you take it! This feature is very useful, as I found for it on the first day itself, when I took the remote to my HT and used the laptop to the changes, at a later stage.

Universalizing the Remote

Once you've finished creating the ID. You will be asked to enter the model numbers of the devices that you want to control using the device. After listing out all the model numbers it searches the Logitech database for a matching remote. Incase there is no match found, it will ask you if you have the original remote with you.

In this stage what you do is, hold the two remotes atleast 5Cms apart and press the buttons that are asked on the screen. after a few keys are read. it will analyze the data based on the sample and using some kind of internal formula it will automagically select the closes match.

The surprising thing is that, When I input the signals from the "Weston DVDR" It returned the remote as the remote for a certain "Onn DVD R" which after a bit of googling, I found to be an exact replica of the DVDr at home. I had another big surprise moment, when my Videocon X-Lent TV was detected as some Australian brand tv, which also looked the same! Its a big world out there, and many companies share their ideas for nationally localised brands. This ordeal made me realize that.

In the Rare case when you Remote is so obscure as to not exist in the database in any way, it has the nice step-by-step wizard using which you can enter the basic ways your remote works (1 or 2 buttons for power, TV/AV selection type etc) and then you can manually "Learn" any button from your remote. Which comes in handy in many ways. Let us now take a look at the ways the thing can be customized.

Customization is the Key to success

Most of you with well know models of famous brands may not have to go any further entering the model numbers in the first step. But if you are like me and my bro, who like to survey for months and find the best models with a better price, you might have ended up with a collection of devices(from famous brands) which are either discontinued by now (because of features/price being very hard on the company or many other reasons) or were from some obscure company. There is also another trend where same devices have different model numbers in different countries. All these things lead to a bit of problems during the installation of the remote.

Every device in my HT other than TataSky,PS2, and 360 didnt have an exact match in the database. However, they did have approximate matches. Because of this, there were either too many or too few pre assigned buttons for the remotes.

To solve such kinds of problems, the Remote's Software allows you to completely customize the buttons and button layout in the remote. Missing buttons from a remote can be manually added to remote's database along with an associating label. Any of these buttons from the database can be assigned to ANY button on the universal remote.

There are only limited buttons in the remote, you have the 0-9 buttons, volume, menu and the other stuff, so what about all those extra buttons that you see in many of the devices? All such buttons can be added and neatly arranged to be displayed in the Remotes LCD screen, all using the software it comes with. You can have many pages (10+) filled with all these buttons for each device. This is a real Plus as it gives you the freedom to experiment with as many combination as possible.

As the software allows the user to assign any button from the database to any of the buttons on the remote control, it gives rise to possibilities where we can assign frequently used functions to any of the non LCD buttons , for faster usage. We can even assign functions to the number buttons, which is helpful as some devices dont have any use of the number buttons.

There might be some cases where the remote is sending singals at a higher rate making the device react differently, like pushing channel one time would result in making it skip channel 3 times. To adjust this, the software allows you to manually set the delay time (in Ms) individually for all the devices that are set in the remote.

Activating Activities

Setting up activities is another nifty feature which allows for one to start a sequence of events with the push of button. The user has the freedom to select any event from any device and arrange them in any order they want. So how will a activity be useful? for example, whenever you watch the TV, you turn on the TV, your Set Top Box, and maybe your A/V Receiver that channels all the sound and video. So what you can do is, assign functions to the Activity which will do just that. You can also select which channel the TV should be on when the activity starts and all such things. everything at the push of button. This is a very useful feature!

Not only that, users can also choose to create or use any of the custom themes for the remote, and you can put up your own custom slideshow to be shown when the remote is idle. You can name Devices and Activities in anyway you want. You can arrange the order in which the devices and activities are shown in the LCD. And it also shows you the time in one corner of the LCD.

All Such customization options allow gives great freedom to the user to make it as personal as possible. Look at me for example, I spent more than 12 hours sitting and modifying and adding things to the remote, just so that everything would be exactly like I wanted.

Ease Of Use

Something this customizable might make people think "its not user friendly" or something on that lines. But the fact of the matter is, Its VERY user friendly.. I mean its a remote, how much simpler can it get? its looks and works just like the age old device that everyone has held for HOURS of their life and the software it comes with has a very simple point and click interface that will get the work done in no time.

Nothings Perfect

As good as it may seem and be, there are still somethings that could have been made better in the remote and its software. For example, the sorting of buttons for LCD screen can get tedious if you are using the "Move up/down" buttons, which makes you want to just delete a button and enter it on the place where you want to move. There are a few other things which could be made better, but mentioning those would seem like I am nitpicking, well because, they arent necessarily a huge problem to the overall experience.

Hows it be?

All in all its a pretty useful device that will make your HT experience far better allowing for more use with less stress and ofcourse.. less Remotes ;)

Check out the SlideShow for a nice Short story and more pics of the Device :D