I wrote a small Javascript today that is going to make my browsing easier. Whenever I connect to the internet, I immediately open Doomworld, Astrocenter, Hotmail, Rediff, my site, Astro.com (my Yahoo! Messenger will anyway open my Yahoo! inbox). I just automated this with my script, which opens all these sites automatically with just a single click (nice, isn't it?).
Sometime back I'd downloaded the Half-Life Doom II Total Conversion by Jeremy Stepp. It was only today I got around to actually loading it into ZDoom, and I was amazed. The size of this WAD is about 9 MB uncompressed, and what it does is, literally, turn Doom II into Half-Life! Monsters, graphics, sounds have all been replaced. It's great, considering the amount of work that must have gone into it.
Ganeshan gave me a modified version of my photograph today. With a little Adobe Photoshop trickery, he gives me GREEN hair and a PINK beard!! The photo is here for you to see, and if you happen to do something like this, be sure to tell me about it!
I wrote an update on the site at 9 PM yesterday. At around 10:30 PM I switched on AXN (waiting for Gattaca, you see) and at that time Bad Boys was on. I didn't know about this, or else I would have watched the whole thing. As it happened, I got to see the last part of this very entertaining action movie with Martin Lawrence, Will Smith and Téa Leoni, directed by Michael Bay. After that I saw the incredible Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Jude Law, who are all outstanding in their roles. It's fantastic script is by Andrew Niccol (who wrote The Truman Show), who also directed. I really liked the movie a lot (in contrast, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was on STAR Movies at the same time). Today, on Hallmark Entertainment Network, I saw a TV version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (2000, Muse Entertainment, starring Matt Frewer as Holmes). It started at 7:30 PM, but I watched from 7:45 PM. This was a nicely filmed version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's terrific story, and remained faithful to it except that the last half-hour or so was slightly different. Anyway, the acting was good and the spooky atmosphere came across well.
And now for some good movie news -
- 3rd March, Saturday, 9:30 PM HBO - I am definitely not going to miss Star Trek: Generations! I haven't seen this before, but you can be sure it will be excellent. After all two different timelines cross - you have both the original crew of the Enterprise (William Shatner as James Kirk) and the Next Generation cast (Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard) in one adventure. With such strong characters, it should be a joy to watch. Directed by David Carson.
- Coming in March on AXN - Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels! I like Quentin Tarantino movies a lot. And this one from director Guy Ritchie is done in the same spirit. I've been waiting to see this ever since it came out a couple of years back.
Varun came up with a name for the Doom II project that we're doing - Certain Death (which will also be the name of his MAP04). I did more work on my MAP01 today. Besides that I recorded a 100% demo (100% kills and secrets in Ultra-Violence mode) of E1M1 of 2001: A Doom Odyssey.
Hey - an update written at midnight! This week there are some good movies on different channels -
- Desperado (AXN, 10 PM, 24/02) - It just got over sometime ago, but anyway this is a very good movie with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek. Banderas is a wandering guitar-player (Mariachi) who's seeking revenge on Bucho (Joaquim De Almeida), the man responsible for killing the woman he loved. Edited, written, produced, and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Quentin Tarantino has a nice scene as the "Pick-Up Guy".
- The X Files (STAR Movies, 10 PM, 28/02) - It's very good. Read my review.
- The Usual Suspects (AXN, 10 PM, 02/03) - Starring Kevin Spacey, directed by Bryan Singer.
- Gattaca (AXN, 11:30 PM, 25/02) - Starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, directed by Andrew Niccol.
Besides those we also have George of the Jungle and Rocket Man on STAR Movies.
...I went to college in the morning, but we all (all right, the 15 of us who were there) came back after about three periods. Like I said, all classes will start properly only on Monday. An interesting thing happened at the Ghatkesar bus stop, when waiting for the 280 bus. I said it would come there at 12:30 PM and leave at 12:38 PM precisely. I was just one minute off - it came there at 12:31 PM and left at 12:39 PM! In the afternoon Nagesh came here and after that I did some more work on MAP01 of the Doom II project that me and Varun are doing together. At 10 PM on STAR Movies I saw The Siege (starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening, directed by Edward Zwick). The movie was interesting, about a string of terrorist bombings in New York (by some Arabs who are ticked off at the Americans holding a Sheik hostage) that leave the FBI and it's Agent Hubbard (Washington) helpless in stopping them, and later lead to General Deveraux (Willis) imposing Martial Law on the city! It was a good movie, but somehow I'd expected it to be better. The movie following that was The Sword (a Chinese movie) starring Adam Cheung, with a story by Wong Ying and directed by Patrick Tam. At the same time on Zee MGM, Conan The Destroyer was also on, but I didn't watch either.
It was the first day of Second Year Second Semester today, and I got to write my first C++ Program in a DOS environment (at NIIT we work on C++ in Linux). The first couple of days will just be intro classes probably, so actual classes will only start on Monday. Today on STAR World they showed the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards, so that's what I was watching in between coming home from college and leaving to NIIT. Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP won a Grammy - and I just happen to have two MIDIs from that - The Real Slim Shady and My Name Is.
This March on STAR Movies they're showing L.A. Confidential, a movie I've been wanting to see! And previously I'd mentioned that they got rid of their rating system - well, that's not true, they still classify movies into G, PG, 12, 15, 18 categories. But as I said before this is redundant now, because they censor the movies anyway. (How long has it been since anyone's seen a movie with an 18 classification??)
Today Ganeshan gave me a disk with some of his experiments with Photoshop, including modified versions of my photograph! I don't feel like uploading that right now, maybe next time. He also gave me some of his Javascripts and VBScripts. Among those was a page with a script called Mad Libs. What it does basically is to ask you to enter some nouns, some adjectives, etc., and then it generates a story using what you entered. I tried it out, and the results are pretty amusing.
BRAD BAILEY'S Mad Libs
One day while I was screaming in the bathroom a nice Karthik fell through the roof. It immediately jumped on the table and knocked over the car. Then it ran out the door into the dining room and wrote a book off the chair. It then knocked a glass of milk off the coffee table. After 5 minutes of chasing the Karthik through the house I finally caught it and put it outside. It quickly climbed the nearest computer.
No comments... :)
On 19th in the night I saw Criminal (directed by Mahesh Bhatt, on ZEE TV, saw a bit of this years ago on Siti Cable). This is what they call a 'remake' of The Fugitive. Well, I call it a rip-off. The first part is a scene-for-scene copy of the original, later it takes on a life of it's own and has some pretty ridiculous scenes, and later resumes the copy-paste sequence. Anyway, it WAS interesting to watch.
Today was a self-imposed holiday by all the II Year students (or was it? I don't know). Srikanth and Sravan are supposed to put their webpages on their sites, and Karan is also getting ready to put up one. He sent me a couple of pages from his site, from what I've seen it looks pretty good.
Got a mail from Ganeshan just sometime back telling me that he'd updated the 'Technical Stuff' section of his site today. Go over there and read this new entry, which is a nice piece on explosives. Also, thanks to him for signing my Guestbook.
Varun and myself are going to make a set of 4 levels for Doom II. I will be making MAP01 and MAP02, and Varun will make the other two levels. It will be released whenever it's done, but since Varun has his exams going on, I'm currently working on my two maps. I started MAP01 at 12:30 AM this morning, and worked on it till about 2 AM. Most of today Varun was studying for a Mathematics test, and I helped - so I did some more work on the level in the evening (made Doom2.exe crash with a visplane overflow for the first time :) and then got rid of the error).
I didn't update the site in the last two days, so here's the news -
19/02 - Late, late night/early morning 20th - I went around PlanetBlood.com and visited quite a few sites and read lots of interesting stuff. I got some more Blood MIDIs, including a superb cblood08.mid song, and also a long list of Blood/Blood 2 quotes (longer than what's there on my Blood site - but then I don't have the full versions of either games). I also visited Ken Silverman's site (the man behind the BUILD engine that was used to create Blood, Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D), and got the whole BUILD source too.
20/02 - Most of the day I was at Srikanth's house, and there I watched some great video clips (from martial-arts movies) that he's got on his hard drive. I was showing him some of DoomCAD's features and ended up making a pretty fun 3-sector map that looks quite nice. I was thinking of putting it on this site, maybe I'll do that later. Also in the early morning on 21st, I downloaded two maps for Doom II - Omega by Metabolist, and a First Map from Jaakko Lintula called D208. And then from Compet-N I got a whole bunch of demos showing off some superhuman Doom II tricks!
After I came home today at around 3:30 PM, I played this set of nine levels for around one and a half hours, finishing at 6 PM. This is a replacement for the first episode of The Ultimate Doom, and is done completely in Episode 1 style. I really enjoyed myself playing these levels because they're beautifully designed, and capture the atmosphere of Knee-Deep in the Dead perfectly. The levels are designed by Paul Corfiatis (who also did the music) and others. The full release of 2001: ADO will be sometime this year, with replacements for all four episodes. That should be a lot of fun! I might do a demo of this episode sometime.
Whenever I don't update the site for a period of, say, two or three days, the next update will have the news that I missed writing. So you, the reader, won't miss anything...
16/02 - Jan Govyaerts' birthday today. He's the author of an extremely nice program called EditPad, which I use as my default text editor instead of Notepad (because it's much better). The reason I'm mentioning this on the site is that the program itself prints out a message in the status bar, "Did you know that today is the birthday of EditPad's programmer?". Also in the afternoon I found an article at Rediff mentioning Windows XP, Microsoft's next OS. At Doomworld there was an interesting link to a 3D Action Planet article as well - Ways to cash in on Doom. And in the afternoon I also played a little of Jazz Jackrabbit 2, a most excellent game that hasn't been surpassed in it's genre ever since I played it in 1998. I also listened to Unreal Tournament's excellent music.
17/02 - At around 2 AM I downloaded two nice levels for Doom II - Vrack by Fredrik Johannson, and Ballistics by Metabolist. Both were nice, and I was playing till around 2:45 AM. I didn't study anything the whole day, rather, what I did was try out some different colours for the site (I'm not going to change them, anyway, not just yet). Finally I optimised the style sheets used here to a small size of just 944 bytes!
18/02 - Most of the day, studying COBOL. At night, Channel [V] showed the video of Everybody Wants To Rule The World, by Tears For Fears. At midnight I watched a little of Enemy Mine (starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr., directed by Wolfgang Petersen on STAR Movies), and simultaneously a little bit of Circuitry Man (on AXN). STAR Movies seems to have stopped their practice of classifying movies into G, PG, 12, 15, 18 categories (1:30 AM movie, Crimson Tide didn't have the rating near the logo). I suppose it's quite redundant now, because they censor the movies anyway, and give them 15 ratings. And here's a coincidence - early morning 19th (2 AM or so), MTV showed the terrific A-Ha video Take On Me (album 'Hunting High And Low').
...that is the end of B. Tech. II/IV I Semester! Today's exam was COBOL, and although the paper wasn't tough, it took time to answer. I usually finish my exam fast and walk out of the hall early - but today I was there until the allotted time. Everyone was happy because the exams got over, happy because we'll have some free time until Thursday, and again, because today was Sai's birthday. Happy Birthday, Sai!
I guess I've got to change some things on the site now that the I Semester is over.
Did I mention that I was extremely happy to finish my LDIC exam today? I wanted to write an update immediately after coming home, but then I did some other things, generally playing Doom, listening to music, etc. I also wrote a small Java program that is the beginning of a Notepad! Browsing through the Java docs, I was simply amazed by the power of the language - there's one page where they give you 4 lines of code and tell you that it'll swap all the reds and blues in an image! And tonight I watched a little bit of Ghostbusters and then Goodness Gracious Me (after a long time) on STAR World - an episode I've already seen, but great anyway.
So that's why I'm late in actually updating the site. But I have added something very interesting this evening. I was going to write a page with my First Year Engineering marks, but ended up adding my marks memos from SSC 1997, Intermediate 1998/99, and the Engineering marks! All these are there for you to see here, if you're interested.
There were many more things I wanted to add today, but I didn't get around to doing it. Hopefully I'll get around to it tomorrow morning or afternoon. Right now I'm going to look for a MIDI file of A-Ha's "Take On Me".
It's been a few days since I wrote a proper update here. So here is all the news from 13th Feb -
13/02 - STAR TV channels came back! Early morning that day, at around 1 AM or so I downloaded the terrific Batman Doom II TC by Ace Team. Really great, this - like Ghostbusters Doom II, you won't believe what they've done with the engine!. I also got Icarus by TeamTNT. And in the afternoon, I played those two before starting to study for the DSGT exam. In the evening I went to NIIT, worked on Techedge mostly, and was reminded of Hari's quote - 'A class cannot be static'. Also listened to this great song on Channel [V] - "Sandstorm" by Darude (12" Sandstorm).
14/02 - The DSGT exam was harder than expected, the questions in the exam caught everyone off guard! Anyway I did OK in that exam. But no one was really bothered much about that because of something more important - our First Year marks were given to us finally after a long wait. I got a total of 684/850, which comes to 80.47%, and that is the 7th rank in the entire college (and 5th in my branch). Congratulations to Ganeshan and Nagesh for coming 1st and 2nd! After getting home I experimented with DoomCAD a little bit and found out how to get an endless sky (atleast that's what I call it). It seems rare that I write an update without mentioning Doom somewhere - and that's exactly what Sravan commented on - "You seem to like Doom a lot!". Doom is a simply great game, and has been my number one favourite for the past 2-3 years.
15/02 - 1:45 AM - saw a video on Channel [V] that I remember watching on 19th December 1999 - this is "Gin Soaked Boy" by Divine Comedy (12" Gin Soaked Boy, directed by Toby Tobias). It's a nice song and the video is nicely filmed in black-and-white. Most of the day all I was doing was studying for LDIC - hoping that the exam would be easy.
16/02 - Nice songs on Channel [V] - at around 12:30 AM, "Take On Me" by A-Ha, around 1:45 AM "We Didn't Start The Fire" by Billy Joel, and at around 1:50 AM "Desert Rose" by Sting Featuring Cheb Mami (Album "Brand New Day", video director Paul Boyd). Resumed studying for LDIC after that, and wrapped up at 2:30 AM sharp.
Five exams over, and only COBOL left to go on Monday! And today's LDIC exam was quite all right, not tough as every one was expecting it to be. I am really relieved that this exam is over. The exams are practically almost over! Now I can get back to updating this site on a regular basis, and also to attending NIIT classes regularly.
Siti Cable has stopped transmission of STAR TV channels because of some dispute over the charges. Atleast this week there isn't anything that interesting on them, but I hope they're back soon! There's still Zee MGM, AXN and HBO to watch, however...
Many weeks ago I'd downloaded both Memento Mori and Memento Mori II, but it's only now that I've been actually playing them. Today I played a few levels (about 6 or 7) from the first - and I enjoyed it. The maps were a lot of fun, and there's great music (by Tolwyn and Mark Klem). One of the levels, Power Station (MAP06) was designed by Mark Klem - there were some parts in it that weren't so good in my opinion, but overall it was nice to play. There are still about 25 levels I haven't even seen, so this should keep me occupied for a long time.
This evening I downloaded the Ghostbusters Doom II TC by Stephen Browning - and it was worth the 15 minutes spent on 3.04 MB! This demo includes 7 levels, and it's simply superb. You will need Boom to run it. The effects, extensive engine hacking, new graphics, sounds and music all combine to make this one great playing experience (of course, after more than three years of work, it's got to be spectacular). You even get to drive the ECTO1! There are many scary parts in the levels (especially Sedgewick Hotel, where you can actually walk in rain!). I highly recommend you download this!
Ghostbusters Doom II uses a DeHackEd patch to change many game parameters, so the cheats are different - gozer (God Mode), ray (Ray Stantz Pack - Full Ammo), egon (Ammo and Keys), warpto (Level Warp), slimer (No Clipping). Look in the GbD2.deh file for all the cheats.
Three down, three to go. Today's Managerial Economics exam was quite easy, and I did well. But the problem is that it's mostly theory - so you can't expect a lot of marks even if you write long answers. The exams left are -
- 14/12 - Discrete Structures and Graph Theory
- 16/12 - Linear and Digital IC Applications
- 19/12 - COBOL
I will continue to attend NIIT classes during this time - as I've been doing for the past few days. After all, C++ has started - it's going to be fun learning it and I definitely don't want to miss any of it! The only day I won't be coming is on 15th - once my LDIC theory exam gets over, it'll be a relief.
It's been many months since I wrote anything in Java. Today I started writing a few small programs just for fun - which later led me to rewrite my Fortune Teller applet. The program was first written in C, and I wrote the Java version back in June 2000. I had made a number of improvements in a later version, but lost the source code in a hard drive crash. I had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch today. This new version is functionally better than the older one, although I have to still incorporate better support for fonts and colours.
Anyway, go to the page and ask the program some questions and see what replies it gives!
STAR TV channels are back, and this Monday they're showing Office Space, a comedy from Mike Judge.
More things that have been happening recently -
- Today Varun updated his site and added some great MIDIs. Go there and see...
- STAR TV Channels were suddenly pulled out by Siti Cable yesterday because of some arguments over the charges - hopefully transmission will resume soon.
- The day before yesterday, I found 35 messages in my Yahoo! Inbox - because somebody sent me and about 10-15 other people junk mail!
- C++ will start at NIIT soon.
- Have you seen http://www.ua-corp.com? Don't go to http://www.uac-corp.com by accident because instead of something related to Doom like the Union Aerospace Corporation, you'll end up at the site of United Airconditioners Corp.!
- The samosas at our college canteen are tasty.
- Read an interview with Brad Carney at Doomworld today.
- Went to Mark Stewart's From Dusk Till Dawn Page again and got some pictures of the FDTD comic artwork.
- Saw The Silence of the Lambs again today. What a good movie! Conicidentally, 9 Feb is the U.S. release date of the sequel, Hannibal, starring Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore, directed by Ridley Scott. (Official Site) Posters were already up days ago at Sangeet.
This is all old news noted in one of my text files -
- 3/02 - Downloaded screenplays of Point Break, Pitch Black and Men in Black from JoBlo's Movie Emporium. Also found two other nice sites - Rotten Tomatoes (movie reviews and related material) and Rock Toons. [Sent Nagesh a sound file of James Bond!]
- 4/02 and 5/02 - Downloaded the latest beta of Skull Tag - The Special Hissy Edition! (and spent time until 2:30 AM or so playing it afterwards!!). Also I got the Classic Episode for Ultimate Doom - a nice set of levels by a number of authors, and played that a bit too. In the afternoon on 5th I played a lot of Skull Tag, and also played through three levels of Classic.
- 5/02 - Early morning - took me until around 2 AM to download three MP3s -but it was worth the one hour it took. Remember I was talking about http://remix.overclocked.org (DJ Pretzel's Overclocked Remixes)? This site links to the home page of Bart Klepka, from where I got these great MP3s - At Doom's Gate (On Speed Mix) (Doom E1M1), Running From Hell (God Mode Mix) (Doom II MAP01) and Gotham (Distorted Mix) (from Duke Nukem 3D). While doing that I was also looking at the Doom3D Page - a Quake II conversion.
There's Something About Mary is one movie I watched a little of in the afternoon yesterday. They were also showing it on STAR Movies at night. I watched it the day before my COBOL Practical exam, and I did well in that. Same with STLD today! I think I've mentioned it before but that movie is really very entertaining! It also has nice music (by Jonathan Richman)-
His friends would say stop whining, they've had enough of that
His friends would say stop pining, there's other girls to look at
They've tried to set him up with Tiffany and Indigo
But There's Something About Mary that they don't know, oh Mary-
There's Something About Mary!I also got to see Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey yesterday (I only missed the first 15 minutes, but I saw the rest after coming home from NIIT, which is why I was awake late studying for today's exam!). A weird movie, maybe, but a lot of fun. At around 1 AM, on Channel [V] I got to see the video of Eiffel 65's Move Your Body, directed by Celestino Gianotti.
The reason I haven't been updating for the last few days is, of course, my Semester Exams! The first exam, on 7th, was Mathematics II, which was unexpectedly, quite difficult (comments on this include "...that horrible Maths paper...", "...I thought I was sure to answer three questions from Matrices...", and such) - on the other hand, today's STLD paper was unexpectedly, quite easy! The next exam I have is Managerial Economics, on Monday. I only hope the LDIC exam is easy.
I have also been attending NIIT classes during these days. And I will be continuing this even during the remaining exams, except when I really need the extra time (like maybe before the LDIC exam).
Spent a very long time this afternoon doing a Linux installation at Mr. Jain's house - I couldn't get X to work - but I did find a solution to my problem installing!!! As the Red Hat documentation said, Red Hat 6.2 won't install if you select a / partition larger than 1.7 GB!! So I'm going to attempt another installation soon...
Demonic, my Doom level that I was supposed to complete and release, has now been abandoned. I'm not finding time anyway to do level design nowadays, and further, the level was giving some strange errors with WADAuthor - so I decided to just stop working on it. I installed DeeP 97 about two days back and it seems very good, so I'll make another level using that when I have the time (probably after exams).
The MIDIs I keep listening to over and over again nowadays are -
- The Hell 'Prince' Medley by Tolwyn and Mark Klem - one of my all-time favourite MIDIs, from the soundtrack of Alpha Dog Alliance's S.T.R.A.I.N. Doom II TC
- Children by Robert Miles - awesome MIDI
- 'Some Secret Level' from Skull Tag by Mark Klem - great techno song
- Theme from Bloodlands by TeamTNT - another one of my favourites, ever since I heard it more than a year ago
And the MP3s and CD tracks I like are -
- Informer by Snow - since 1993, one of my favourites
- Tanha Dil by Shaan - a very nice song to listen to
- Blue (Da Ba Dee) by Eiffel 65
- Move Your Body by Eiffel 65
- Brother Louie by Modern Talking
- The 'Win' and 'Loss' music from Quake III Arena
- Doomed by Rimco (http://remix.overclocked.org) - simply beautiful
- Track 25 from Half-Life - my favourite song on the CD (Windows Media Player however identifies it as Track 24, ignoring the data track)
On 7th my II Year I Semester exams begin at college. Here is the schedule -
- 07/02 - Mathematics II
- 09/02 - Switching Theory and Logic Design
- 12/02 - Managerial Economics (we have two days holidays for this!)
- 14/02 - Discrete Structures and Graph Theory
- 16/02 - Linear and Digital IC Applications (why couldn't they have kept this at the beginning?)
- 19/02 - COBOL (again, two days before this!)
So tomorrow is a holiday (it's so nice to be able to wake up late on a Monday morning) and so is 6th. The exams are on Mon/Wed/Fri (can't help wondering whether JNTU was inspired by NIIT's way of scheduling classes!). I will still be updating this site whenever I get the time. And if you didn't get the email that I sent yesterday (I got a few 'failure delivery' messages), here's wishing you all the best for these exams.
Yes, that's right, when I checked the counter on Varun's Site yesterday, it showed 501. I left a screenshot on his desktop called "Looks like I missed it". Today I found a screenshot on my desktop from Varun, with the title "I didn't miss it!". We've got both screenshots on the hard disk here, let's see if they show up on any one of our sites. Anyway, congratulations, Varun, on getting 500 vistitors to your site!
I missed Gladiator the last time it was released here many months ago. I saw the movie yesterday and enjoyed it thoroughly. Today I wrote a review for the movie, which you can read here. And I also updated the 2001 Movies List. I was also going to write a review for The 6th Day, but I will do that later, seeing as how my semester exams are coming up.
I've made some small changes here and there on the site, as listed below -
- Rewrote the introduction (surprisingly hard to do!)
- Modified the layout of the homepage's main table a little.
- Reorganised the links on the left - they take up less room now!
- Some small changes in the colours.
- The About Me Page has more information now.
In the last three days I have gone to college - on 30 Jan., 1 Feb. and today, it's been a coincidence that I am ready to leave college by 12 noon, I go to the college canteen and buy two samosas, walk to the Ghatkesar bus stop and find a 280 Metro Express just waiting for me (no need to switch buses!). And I get home early. How nice it would be if this happened more often.
After finishing my practical exam today, I waited at Tarnaka for sometime to give Srikanth his record book. I got home at about 2:30 PM. And now, happy at completing my practical exams well, I updated a number of things on the site -
- First of all, here's something you might be interested in if you have your II Year JNTU exams coming up - I collected all the COBOL Programs I wrote at home into one ZIP file and put it on the site! It's available on the Downloads Page along with the MEPA Notes that's been downloaded often from here.
- I uploaded all the Doom demos I played recently, so you can get them from the Doom Demos Page.
- After a considerable gap, Varun has resumed work on his Doom level, The Anomaly: Part II. Some of the new structures he's added look very good! I've put up one more screenshot from that level here.
- As usual, there's a new page on the News Page for February 2001.
I am really glad that my II Year I Semester Practical Exams are over - something that's important in more ways than one to me. Yesterday, 1 February, I had my COBOL Practical at 10 AM. The program I had to do was Write a COBOL Program to merge two files, with fields item-no, qty, price, sorting on item-no, which is quite easy - all I had to do was to accept details from the user into two separate files, sort them individually (although that isn't really necessary) and merge them using the merge verb, something which I finished very soon and took printouts also. After that was the viva-voce, which was taken by Mr. Suresh - and he asked a lot of tough questions!
That evening I studied for LDIC Practicals that we had today. The title of Doom II's Map28 song - Getting Too Tense, describes what I was feeling in the evening, because of what I'd heard from the CSIT students - the experiments they had to perform were very tough. So I studied late yesterday (stayed up till 3:30 AM) something I don't generally do unless the exam is difficult. But today when I got my question I was really relieved! Just look at question I got - Design a MOD 8 counter (I used 7490 IC), design a T Flip-Flop using a D Flip-Flop (I used 7474 and 7400 ICs) and realise an EX-OR gate using NAND gates (7400 IC again). Now when the others were struggling with multiplexers, phase locked loops, multivibrators, differentiators and all those things, I was really very lucky to get the easiest experiment in the lot! As expected, the viva-voce was by Mr. Partha Sarathi, but atleast this time I knew he'd ask tough questions (he's an expert in Pulse & Digital Circuits, LDIC, he taught us STLD so well, and he asked questions for my SCD practicals last year) so I wasn't caught totally off guard. I answered what I could, and that concluded my Practical exams this year, and this is my last electronics-related practical exam in my CSE course!
As you can see by the way I'm going on and on, I'm very happy and relieved :).
In the afternoon I recorded a demo of The Villa of Pain in skill 1. I wrote some COBOL Programs as preparation for 1 Feb.'s practical final exam. I also read a bit of LDIC - 555 Timer, Integrator and Differentiator using op-amp from the books by Botkar and Roy Choudhury. By the end of the day I was quite confident about COBOL.
I went to college to submit my completed LDIC record book. I got home in the afternoon and played Mike Reed's Hoover Dam (a fantastic Doom II level). I played with cheat codes and explored the level completely (43 minutes, 26 seconds, finishing at 3:34 PM!). In the evening at 7:15 PM, I was waiting for Rajeev and I played another Mike Reed level, The Villa of Pain in skill 1 (without cheating). Mike Reed's Doom II Levels site is at http://home.att.net/~m.reed/doom2/d2levs.htm, I strongly recommend you get these levels, they are really good!
In the afternoon I connected to ftp.cdrom.com and went to the Doom II levels directory and downloaded some files which had interesting titles. I'm never going to do that again, because all the WADs I got were absolute junk (poorly designed levels, missing textures, misaligned textures, and so on). Next time, anything I download will be linked from a site that reviews the level, so I know what I'm getting is good.