I just heard the good news at Doomworld - ftp.cdrom.com is back online. It's been quite a while now, and I was missing downloading Doom/Doom II levels! Now what I am going to do is to finish writing this update, upload my files, and then proceed to download Entryway 1.2 by John Pallai (I remember playing this a year ago), Hell Revealed, and other WADs I haven't been able to download until now.
Ever since http://karthik82.tripod.com has been online, you've been reading a lot about Doom. The Doom Pages I had written before have now become part of a new site, which I have been intending to make for many months. Today I decided to make it a part of my main site, and it's finally online. Some sections of it don't have much content now, but that will change soon as I gradually put up more stuff on it. For now, the main highlights are -
- My level ICK is available for download
- There's a link to my technical paper on Doom and 3D Games
- My Doom Demos are there as well
- And that Archvile Wallpaper, too.
Watch for more material coming soon. The address is http://karthik82.tripod.com/doom/index.htm.
My Doom level that I was working on was completed yesterday. Today I fixed a minor bug in it and made a slight modification in the ammo distribution, and put music in it, and it's now ready for you to download. I decided to call this one ICK. It has been uploaded along with other things, on my new Doom site.
This afternoon at 1 PM I saw Warren Beatty's film Dick Tracy, based on Chester Gould's comic strip. It stars Beatty as the detective who wants to stop Big Boy Caprice's (played by Al Pacino) reign of crime in the city. Glenne Headly stars as Tess Trueheart and Charlie Korsmo is terrific as the "Kid". A very entertaining action movie, this - and it looks like something right out of a comic book. Very colourful, and it has terrific acting and a great Danny Elfman score. The makeup effects are very good too.
And April 27th is the scheduled airdate for STAR Movies exclusive Television Premiere of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. That should be something worth watching. They've even set up a site for it at http://www.startv.com/starwars.
I got a couple more songs by Eminem yesterday, and I've been listening to them over and over again. Now I've got the following songs of his -
- The Real Slim Shady
- My Name Is
- My Name Is (Rock Star Remix)
- The Way I Am
- Role Model
- Oops, The Real Slim Shady Did It Again
I found another Eminem site called Slim Shady World which has Flash-animated cartoons featuring Eminem.
Some weeks back I abandoned development of Demonic, and now I'm also scrapping the other Doom level that I was working on. Yesterday I started making another level for Ultimate Doom, and it looks like I'm actually going to complete and release this one. It's an ACTUAL Doom level, unlike Demonic and the other one which now look like just experiments. My new level is called slim.wad for now, and apart from one nasty moment when I accidentally deleted a sector, development is going really well and I've got many of the areas completed. It's looking good :).
After many weeks in development Fredrik Johannson finally released his Vrack 2 - a sequel to Vrack, a space-station themed Doom II level. Yesterday I downloaded that and I also got a 28min. 22s. demo of that level in Ultra-Violence mode by Adam Williamson. Vrack 2 resembles the original in many respects, and like that one, it's a HUGE, extremely detailed level that really stands out from most other Doom II levels. Some of the areas are simply breathtaking - you won't believe how good it looks until you see it. Because of 21,000 sidedefs, over 700 monsters and use of some special linedef types, this is a Boom-only level.
On 28th (the second day of the Paper Presentation contest) at college I listened to some very interesting papers on Quantum Computers (Srikanth & Ganeshan), Finger Scan Technology and Hand Scan Technology (Rajeev & Kiran), etc. I enjoyed presenting my paper on 3D Games and Doom - and although I didn't win a prize, I atleast got a chance to present a paper, and not only that, promote my site! ("For more details visit http://karthik82.tripod.com" was what the last slide in my PowerPoint Presentation said!)
Once again, the online version of that paper, and related downloads can be found here.
I expected my Paper Presentation to be today, but then due to the number of papers selected, the contest had to be spread over two days. So I will be actually presenting my paper tomorrow. Today I got to listen to some nice papers on Bluetooth and WAP (including one by Nagesh & Srikanth). Tomorrow's papers include many interesting topics like Quantum Computers and others, and most importantly, my very interesting paper on 3D Games - Doom: A Case Study!
Important News:
My presentation tomorrow will mention that the entire paper is available on this site. For that to be possible I spent nearly two hours now creating a HTML version of it. This is almost like a website by itself, and it contains every page of the original paper. It also has a downloads page where you can get both the document and the PowerPoint Presentation.
The online version of my technical paper on 3D Games and Doom is here.
On a holiday I would never normally wake up earlier than 10 AM, but on 26 March I was up by 6:15 AM. I wasn't going to miss the live telecast of the 73rd Annual Academy Awards on STAR Movies for anything, so I watched the whole show. Gladiator of course won Best Picture, and it was a close battle between Tom Hanks and Russell Crowe for Best Actor. Both were excellent in their roles, it's a pity only one of them, Crowe, could win. Julia Roberts was Best Actress, Steven Soderbergh was Best Director for Traffic, and I really want to watch that movie because it won Stephen Gaghan the Best Screenplay award. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon deservedly won awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Tan Dun's superb score, Peter Pau's cinematography and the excellent Art Direction.
The rest of the day I was very busy, preparing my PowerPoint Presentation for the Technical Paper Contest.
I played Mike Reed's terrific Rabbit Hole (a Doom II level I downloaded the previous day). The TV Page on this site was quite outdated and was mentioning TV shows that I'm not even watching anymore! So I reorganised the page. There is still some work to be done on that. I started work on my PowerPoint Presentation for the Technical Paper Contest, and at 9 PM I watched Guy Ritchie's absolutely fantastic movie Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels on AXN.
I came home from college in the afternoon itself, and I then downloaded three more of Mike Reed's Doom II levels. I've got all the nine single-player levels he's made. The ones I downloaded today were Metro13, The Keep and The Rabbit Hole. I played Metro13 and it was a lot of fun. I haven't unzipped the others yet. For my upcoming Technical Paper Presentation on 27th, I got some information about Binary Space Partitioning that I have to read just in case someone asks me a question on that. As I said before there are a lot of activities going on the next week at college, so that means I can forget about my books for a little while :).
STAR Movies is telecasting this year's Oscars live on Monday 6:30 AM IST (be ready by 6:15 AM because that's the time according to newspaper schedules), with a repeat at 10 PM. After the awards they're also showing the Oscars Post-Show. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Gladiator for Best Picture? (personally I liked Gladiator better). Tom Hanks or Russell Crowe for Best Actor? (difficult to say). Only time will tell, and that time is coming soon. STAR TV's Oscars site at http://oscar.startv.com is a great site that has all the up-to-date news.
I saw Cast Away today with my parents and Varun at Sangeet. This was a very good movie, with excellent acting from Tom Hanks. Although it's a long movie, it is never boring. I really don't have to say much more than that now, because I just finished writing a detailed description of the movie which you can read here. Or if you'd rather not read it before watching the movie yourself, come back later. In any case, here's my review.
There's a lot of interesting things happening next week. We've got practically the whole week off from college too.
- 27, 28 March - ISTE Paper Presentation Contest. A national level contest that I've mentioned before - I'm doing a paper on 3D Games.
- 30 March - Our college's Annual Day.
- The other days of the week are holidays!
- 26 March - The Oscars on STAR Movies. I don't know the exact time yet because they'll be telecasting it live, but I'll have more information on that soon. In the meantime this site should be an interesting one - http://oscar.startv.com (haven't visited it yet myself).
- Sunday - Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels at 9 PM on AXN.
STAR World is now showing The Drew Carey Show and Whose Line is it Anyway? on Thursdays starting 5:30 PM. I saw these yesterday. I'm now also listening to more of Eminem's songs...
"My name is (what?) My name is (who?) - My name is ... Slim Shady!"Today I came home early from college and played Mike Reed's Doom level The Core before writing this.
And our Ist internals at college are almost over, tomorrow we have Design and Analysis of Algorithms. The tests so far were - Probability & Statistics (19th), Operating Systems, Computer Organisation, C++, Electrical Technology (today).
Castaway opens today in a number of theatres around the city.
Since my site was offline for a while, here's all the stuff that I didn't write earlier -
18/03 - Besides being surprised that my site was pulled off the net, I downloaded some nice themes from Themeworld - Matrix 2000, PedleDOOM, and Q3Arena by Edward Santiago.
21/03 - Ist internals going on at college. 21 March is Ganeshan's birthday. On 20th he gave me a very nice Javascript that he'd written - it animates a set of pictures. After coming home from college I saw that script, played Fredrik Johannson's Vrack (a Doom level that's got a great look - in a few days Vrack 2 should be coming out too!). I also saw a new Doom-related site that was launched just a few days ago - Doom Center, and Karandeep's new Homepage.
22/03 - 1 AM - Relieved that my site came back online. I finally downloaded Chris Ivarson's Mortal Kombat 4 desktop theme. This theme was one of the very first ones I tried out - back in 1998! I then lost the theme, and couldn't find it on any site later. A few days ago I searched Google and it turned up one (just ONE) site with this theme. I tried downloading it many times, but somehow the transfer kept breaking. Finally I was successful in getting it.
It's a great theme, and here's the link for those of you who'd like to try it out - http://anime-cartoons-games.com/games/dt.m.005.html. It was quite difficult for me to locate this on the internet, so I hope the link is helpful.
22/03 - Downloaded and played Christian Hansen's Flay the Obscene compilation from The Doomer's Recess. A terrific set of levels. There's some inventive tricks used often here - one is the respawning chaingunners that can be a real nuisance, and the really SCARY trick of monsters suddenly appearing in front of you. It made me jump more than once!
On 18th March I tried to connect to my site - and to my surprise I found that Tripod had removed it, saying that I'd violated their terms of service! Because of this, I started searching for information about getting my own domain and getting my site hosted at my own server. I found a company based right here in Hyderabad, http://www.rdsindia.com that seemed nice.
But then to my relief, on 22 March, at around 1 AM I found that the site was restored. Tripod mailed me saying that it was due to a technical error that member sites were accidentally removed. Now they've fixed the problem and things are back to normal. My site's back and I'll be updating it as usual. The address will remain http://karthik82.tripod.com. I'm not going anywhere else!
By the way, the headline for this entry, I live... again! is from Army of Darkness, and it's also one of the first dialogues you hear in Blood.
I am currently about halfway through Linda Goodman's Star Signs. It's got to be one of the most unusual books I have read. There are chapters on numerology, ghosts and avatars, déjà vu, and other such things. I am particularly looking forward to reading the chapter on lexigrams, which seems very interesting. After I finish reading this book, I've got Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy to read.
I got to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon today. A fantasy/drama/martial-arts movie, this has very good acting by Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Chang Chen and Zhang Zi Yi. The version I saw was the English dubbed version. It was very well made - the scenery, sword fights, martial arts sequences are terrific to look at. It's ten Oscar nominations include ones for Best Picture, Foreign Language Film and Directing. Definitely a movie not to be missed, although I felt it was a little slow in parts - and the ending could have been better.
I made a new wallpaper today based on some graphics from Doom and Doom II. Basically what I did was to take the SKY1 texture from Doom's episode I, put an Archvile sprite in there, add a lens flare effect and I ended up with a nice wallpaper to suit my new gray colour scheme. Go to my Wallpapers page to get it!
My First Internal Tests at college start on Monday. Something unrelated to that is the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in theatres tomorrow - which I will write about after watching.
With ftp.cdrom.com being temporarily inaccessible (they're moving servers, you see) I haven't been getting any new Doom levels to play! (I'm actually waiting to download and play Hell Revealed, and John Pallai's Entryway 1.2 which I remember playing about a year ago). So today I played a little of 10sector.wad, and then watched Varun play some more of the levels. The levels are extremely well constructed (and that's an understatement), but my only complaint is that they sometimes get too tough and complicated. Starting off with a super shotgun facing two Barons of Hell, opening a door and getting shot at by half a dozen Revenants only to wake up a couple of Archviles - too tough for me. Luckily there's always the convenient God Mode cheat...
There are two birthdays that I'd like to write about now - the first is Avinash's birthday, which was today, 15th March. Happy Birthday Avinash! Another birthday that I forgot to write about earlier is Doomworld's third birthday, because it was on March 13, 1998 that the site first came online.
The technical paper that I wrote a few days ago called 3D Games - Doom: A Case Study has been selected for presentation on 27th at the contest held by the ISTE at our college. A large number of papers on various topics (from our colleges and various other colleges) have been submitted, so they were naturally screened. I'm glad they let mine through! And as I've been saying, I will put that paper on this site after I present it.
After I came home from NIIT yesterday I watched the final episode of Survivor on AXN. Next week's episode is Survivor: The Reunion, and then probably they'll start Survivor II. Friday Night Premiere on STAR Movies is L.A. Confidential, and tomorrow on HBO they're also showing Demolition Man.
It's been one month since Varun updated his site - mainly because he was busy studying for exams. So this new update on the site is a pretty long one about that, and the release The Anomaly: Part II (a set of two levels for Ultimate Doom). I've played level 1 and the initial part of level 2 he's working on, as I wrote before, and they're great. Varun also writes that in a short while Varun's Home will become The Sanctum, a new and much bigger site with sections devoted to games, quizzes and jokes. I've seen the initial layout of the site and I must say, it's looking very good. The address will remain the same.
There are some new downloads at Ganeshan's Site - a program called Browser which is a text/image viewer, and updated versions of his Multimedia Player and Text Editor. Go there and download.
One of the sites I've gone to recently is Eminem World, which has lyrics, wallpapers, pictures, and other stuff related to Eminem, and then shortly after that I also went to another Anti-Eminem site called Will The Real Slim Shady Please Shut Up? This was a pretty good site too, and the people who've put that up express their opinions on Eminem's music. The site must be getting a lot of hits because there are about 500 entries in their Guestbook (!) mostly from Eminem fans abusing the site!
I also listened to Eminem's My Name Is (Rock Star Remix).
11/03 - I saw the second half of Rocket Man on STAR Movies, an enjoyable movie about a nut who somehow ends up on a mission to Mars! After that I went to 007's Domain, a James Bond Fan Site with some nice information on the Bond films, pictures, reviews, music/sounds, etc.
12/03 - 1:40 AM - This article by Hellchick on 3D Action Planet is a nice one on the New Doom Engine Footage that has by now, been uploaded to almost every Doom and Game news site I know of.
It was my first visit to Qwiky's Coffee Pub today with family. It's a very nice place and they have excellent coffee there (what else would you expect!). Just a few minutes ago I went to their website at http://www.qwikys.com. It's a very well designed site (great use of colours!) and has interesting information on coffee and the company too.
"The award for devotion to coffee must be given to the 19th century author Honore de Balzac. He was one of France’s most prolific writers, a feat accomplished by drinking 60 cups of coffee a day and sleeping only two hours a day!"
My paper for the contest to be held at our college on the 27th of this month was written in about three and a half hours, and was finished at 3:30 AM this morning. Today with help from my parents and my brother I put all the finishing touches on it - it's all done now! The paper is on 17 pages (including the abstract, the contents page, and references). The paper's title is 3D Games - Doom: A Case Study. Like I said before, what better topic would I do a paper on than that? The references listed in the paper are unlike anything you'll see in other technical papers - NewDoom.com, Doomworld are quoted, and the list also includes my site and Varun's Site. One interesting thing about this paper is that I haven't used any pictures from actual Doom at all - all are taken from level 1 of Varun's The Anomaly: Part II. There are many pictures from DoomCAD too, showing me designing a level. I will be putting the whole paper on the site, but not until 27th.
The program I use for uploading files to my sites is a freeware FTP client called FTP Explorer. I got this program a couple of years ago from a PC World CD. I have put the program on this site for you to download. Get it from the Downloads Page.
It's not often that I update the site during the day time. For a change, this is 11:40 AM and not PM! Yesterday after replying to my mail, I decided to start writing my technical paper and started at midnight. It took me more than three hours to finish, and today I'll be putting the finishing touches on it. The paper is on 3D games, something that I enjoy playing. I like playing Doom and editing levels for it, so what better topic to choose than that? Once it's properly completed I'll put the DOC file (and probably a HTMLised version too) on this site.
Yesterday we went to Gangarams' to buy some books. I got Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Linda Goodman's Star Signs, and the one mentioned in the title of this update - Dogbert's Big Book of Business: Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies by Scott Adams. I finished this book after coming home from NIIT, and it was great. It's one of the funniest books I've ever read. Dogbert, the dog from Adams' comic strip Dilbert, reveals the truth about "office life and the dog-eat-dog world of business", and has practical tips on "staying out of trouble", "taking credit for other people's work", etc.
Unfortunately I couldn't see Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in the night because the power had to go out at that time! Anyway, in the afternoon I got two excellent Java applets called Navtool and Navbar from http://navsurf.com. Also I installed the most excellent Bloodshed Dev C++ 4.0 off a CHIP CD. I'm learning C++ at NIIT and at college, and I wanted a C++ compiler. I was very happy to get this one, because it has support for things like Windows programming, even GL programming. Plus it has a great GNOME like interface. This is the third C++ compiler I'm using - at NIIT we use G++ on Linux, and at college we use Turbo C++ on DOS. Bloodshed Dev C++ seems much nicer :).
I came home from NIIT today just in time to watch Hemoglobin on AXN. This horror movie directed by Peter Svatek wasn't bad, but it wasn't exactly a classic either. It's a strange story about a man who's dying of a blood disease coming to his ancestral island with his wife, discovering he's a descendant of a family that now consists chiefly of flesh-eating mutants. (I'm making it sound better than it actually is). Somehow it wasn't really involving, and was pretty dull at times. One thing I liked about the movie was the setting of the concluding parts in a storm - it creates a nice atmosphere. I wrote a more detailed review of the movie after watching it. (Seems I'm doing this a lot nowadays).
Tomorrow's Friday Crime Thriller on AXN is one movie I've been wanting to see for a long time - Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Celebrations started early for Holi at college, as I expected - after the last period things were quite colourful. By the time I got home my face was covered in pink colour :) and I had to wash that off before I went to NIIT. I wish everyone a Happy Holi, have fun tomorrow.
The Shawshank Redemption is a prison drama about a young man, Andy (Tim Robbins) wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment at Shawshank State Prison in 1946. He makes friends with another convict, Red (Morgan Freeman), and the film depicts their life in prison. There are a number of twists at the end of this story. This is a very well-told, touching movie that is based on a short story by Stephen King (screenplay adaptation was by it's director Frank Darabont himself). It has excellent acting by all the stars, and it definitely is a movie that you must not miss. The movie started today at 9:30 PM on HBO, and got over at around 12:15 AM. I then wrote a summary of the whole movie, just as I did a few days earlier for Star Trek: Generations.
Interested in reading them? Here they are - The Shawshank Redemption, Star Trek: Generations.
Sravan got his URL http://sreenidhian.terrashare.com sometime back, and yesterday he uploaded the initial pages to it. The site is still under construction. On his homepage he says he's always wanted to do something related to the web, and yesterday he's made a start :). I'm glad for that, and I hope I'll see regular updates on his site.
Literary activities at our college continued today with the Quiz. Srikanth, Ganeshan and myself took part as one of the teams. Among the 25 questions the more interesting ones that come to mind right now are -
- If Ursula Andress was the first, who was the twentieth?
Answer was Catherine Zeta-Jones, who will be the twentieth Bond girl. I thought it was Sophie Marceau (I was one movie off).- Who coined the term Cyberspace?
William Gibson. I haven't actually read any of his books, but I have read the novelization of Johnny Mnemonic by Terry Bisson, based on his story/screenplay.- What is Clinophobia? Fear of sleep.
- What is a group of Dolphins called? A 'smile' of Dolphins.
- Which celebrity's middle name is Neliyattu? It's Manoj N. Shyamalan! For something related to that, read my review of Unbreakable.
- Which TV show will complete it's record run on 11 March? Baywatch.
- What's special about the song Video Killed the Radio Star? First song to be aired on MTV.
This is a program I had to do for Operating Systems Lab today. I spent two hours figuring out just what to do yesterday (finished at around 2 AM), and finally the program didn't do what it was supposed to (how frustrating). And in the mess of all the variables I used, it was difficult to find out just how all those unwanted numbers were finding their way into the results. Atleast my logic was right -
Read all the jobs' arrival and burst times into the array, sort on arrival times. All the jobs that have arrived before the first job's execution time have to then be sorted on their burst times. I apply the same principle for sorting the remaining jobs too.
Implementing this is quite a complicated task, I must sit down one of these days and do it properly.
Before I started writing this program I wrote a quick abstract of my technical paper on the Doom engine (took me just about 20 minutes). I'll post these documents on the site as soon as I've written them.
Ever since I got this month's issue of CHIP I've been listening to the MP3s on it - songs by DJ Virtualizer and Mangoo. Those who don't like this kind of electronic music will be put off, but I like them. I also listened to an MP3 of Eminem's Role Model. This song is nice to listen to, but the lyrics are another matter. For an example, here's the first few lines of the song -
"Okay! I'm going to attempt to drown myself (bubbling sound is heard). You can try this at home. You can be just like me."
Among other things, I'm also listening right now to an MP3 of Bobby Prince's Dave D. Taylor Blues from the Doom II soundtrack.
'Student's Unions in Professional Institutions' was the topic of discussion at our college today in the afternoon - because there was a elocution competition (part of the literary activities). I didn't have any plans for taking part but somehow I ended up participating anyway. I enjoyed myself, and it was interesting listening to what the others had to say as well.
Tomorrow's a holiday for the college, although I have NIIT class in the evening. The only thing that's bothering me now is that I've got to write a program for simulating Shortest Job First scheduling algorithm for Operating Systems lab on Wednesday, and I don't really know how to do it. I'll have to think of something...
Here is what I wrote on 02/03 at 20:25...
Varun's The Anomaly Part II was supposed to be released as one single level, but today due to some editing problems with DoomCAD, he decided to spread it across two. The first level was completed today. I played it and I really enjoyed it! It's a really well-planned level. I know the whole area inside out, I know where all the secrets and monsters are. Yet, when I played it in Ultra Violence skill, it took me a good 4 minutes to finish, and I was down to 36% health! That's how good the enemy placement is - there isn't even one Baron of Hell in sight, only the earlier monsters, yet it's tough. Even on skill 1, I accidentally got caught in a trap. And the map looks terrific. I'm waiting for level 2 to be done, and the final release version.
Today Varun started work on level 2. I've gotten better at level 1 with practice - I can now complete it with enough health and ammo for the next one.
I got the March 2001 issue of CHIP today. From January this year they've been including two CDs with each magazine. The main reason behind me buying it this time was because they've given the entire Java 2 Standard Development Kit 1.3 on it. I also got a nice Eminem "Slim Shady" desktop theme from the CD, which is the one set on my desktop now. There were also some nice MP3s on the CD, tracks by DJ Virtualizer and Mangoo. Most of these songs are Eurodance/Trance music, so it depends on your taste. On one of the CDs there are also good books - Plato's Republic, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (I want to read this, it'll be the first time I'm reading anything philosophical!).
That's just a catchy headline to begin this Doom-related update. I went to a site called Doom Funnies, which was launched just a few days ago. You can read funny Doom comics there. I went there at 12:45 AM (that's about 11 hours ago) and read all the 5 pages that are there at present.
All your base are belong to us! is what you can see on the UA-Corp site if you look properly. It's there below the image, but it's black text on a black background, so hold and drag your mouse over it to reveal the text.
I haven't updated in a while - so here is what I missed writing before.
02/03 - Downloaded two more songs from http://www.mp3.com/bobbyprince. These were Suspense and Rise of the Triad, both excellent. Varun also completed level 1 of The Anomaly: Part II for Ultimate Doom. The level is terrific, I wrote a short review of it which is also there on this page. At 10 PM on AXN I saw The Usual Suspects (directed by Bryan Singer, written by Christopher McQuarrie, starring Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey), which was a great crime thriller. I also downloaded the following screenplays -
- Seven by Andrew Kevin Walker
- There's Something About Mary by Ed Decter & John J. Strauss and Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly
- Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
These were of course obtained from the usual place I get screenplays from, and that is Drew's Script-O-Rama.
03/03 - In the afternoon I downloaded Goldeneye Doom 2, which was pretty good, and DCK, which I really wanted to use, but it doesn't work on Windows. I also got Christopher McQuarrie's Oscar-winning screenplay of The Usual Suspects.
This is interesting. If you did this in C++, what would be the output?
int i=4; cout << ++i << i++ << i << i-- << --i;
I found out at NIIT - the answer is 42233.
I came back from NIIT just in time to watch Star Trek: Generations on HBO at 9:30 PM. This was an excellent movie, so good in fact that right after watching it, I sat down and wrote a summary of the entire movie (not many movies make me feel like doing that). If you're interested, the whole thing is here. And the movie following that on HBO, that is, at midnight, was Tim Burton's excellent 1989 Batman. On AXN this Thursday, they're showing Hemoglobin, a horror movie that I want to watch.
04/03 - Played Superbike 2001 at Rajeev's house today. Today's episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was excellent too. In it, Riker beams down to a planet and returns only to be told that 16 years have passed since that happened, and all of his memories since then have been wiped out! Great story, twists, and conclusion.
There's a Technical Paper Presentation Contest organised by the ISTE at our college on March 27. I was inspired this morning to participate in it after watching the Doom3 footage I was talking about earlier. I'm thinking of doing a paper on Computer Games - how they actually work. The only problem is that I have to write both the paper and the abstract in the next one week, which doesn't give me much time.
Today's class at NIIT was a very interesting one on pointers in C++. This is something that isn't as easy to understand, or for that matter, code, than regular programs, but pointers are extremely powerful. It was interesting to do in C, now I'll have to try writing some of the programs I wrote before, now in C++.
I've been getting mail about my Buffy website not being updated at all. The reasons for that are -
- I don't have the files of the site on disk. I lost them all in a hard-drive crash. One way to get them back is to download all the files from my server, but that isn't something that would happen quickly.
- STAR World stopped the show months back. So there isn't actually much to update the site with.
- And third, with college and NIIT classes, I'm only focusing on updating this site at present.
Of course, I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a terrific show, and STAR World should definitely resume showing it sometime soon. But until that happens there will be no updates on that site. I will still keep it online for all the downloads, pictures and reviews that are already there.
On 21 Feb, nVidia introduced their latest graphics processor, the GeForce 3 at the MacWorld Expo in Tokyo. It was there that John Carmack of id Software presented a demo showing off his new graphics engine for id's upcoming Doom game. You can watch this streamed from the net, but then for those of us who don't have broadband, Doomworld posted a downloadable version of the footage.
The file is here: http://www.3ddownloads.com/?file_id=138158.
I was trying to download this for the past week, but I couldn't because the servers were too busy. Finally, on 1 March, after 1 hour and 39 minutes, I got the 13.8 MB ZIP file at around 12:40 AM. It contains a 14.5 MB ASF format video which runs about eight and a half minutes. The first part has Apple's Steve Jobs introducing the GeForce 3, and then, there's the new Doom footage - which was absolutely stunning. I've never seen such realistic lighting, environments and characters in any game till date - not even in Quake III: Team Arena. I watched the video twice yesterday, and twice today. It's great. Download it and see for yourself, it's worth it.
Updates aren't happening as frequently as I'd like them to (ideally, everyday!), so here's the summary of things in the recent days -
27/02 - I downloaded the MP3 version of The Dave D. Taylor Blues from http://www.mp3.com/bobbyprince. The last 10-15 seconds didn't come through - but this song is great anyway! I've got the MIDI version here for you to listen. I also wrote an interesting program in C for Operating Systems Lab today, for simulating First Come First Serve CPU scheduling. I was doing that while watching MTV Biorhythm late at night, which was about rapper Eminem, and his hard childhood and early days. After listening to that I'm able to understand why his lyrics are so full of violence and hate.
28/02 - My CPU scheduling program worked out quite well after a few changes were made. That's another program I'd like to put up here. I've got a lot of pages I want to add to the site, but somehow I'm just not getting around to actually doing that.[Wrote Stylesheets for Varun's Sanctum site]
01/03 - I read some of the old news pages (from 1998 and 1999) at Doomworld. Very interesting. 12:50 AM - downloaded the newdoomengine.zip video, and more songs from Bobby Prince's place at MP3.com. The songs I got were Mechanical Snake, The Dave D. Taylor Blues (the full thing, this time) and Demons on the Prey (here's the MIDI version of this). The video clip was nearly 14 MB, so it took 1hr. 39mins. to download, during which I got the songs too. At 12:50 AM I had finished watching the 8 minute video for the first time after downloading it.