Here's all the news from 25th of this month...
- Thu/Fri, 25/26 Oct - No NIIT class, I watched A Better Tomorrow II again. I also made a page for my college's site. On Friday, I read a couple of scripts by Pablo Dictter. He sent me a longer version of his On The Next Hour script, and two drafts of Those Crazy Monkeys. This is a really weird story - sort of like something that might happen in a dream! But I really enjoyed reading it. Both versions were really good. Opulent also pointed out a wrong URL on my Doom site (haven't fixed it yet), and sent me some of his favourite DEH patches. And I've now got the full version of Duke Nukem 3D - got it from an abandonware site! The files were in RAR format so I installed Power Archiver 6.0. This is actually a terrific program, you might want to use it instead of WinZip! And it's free too! Varun also started work on a new E4M7 for The 9th Gate, and this first part of the map looks fantastic. I also did some retexturing on my E4M3 to give it a more Episode 4-ish feel. The SNIST Site at http://www.snist.com was inagurated. And I downloaded a few Duke Nukem 3D maps from Mikko Sandt's Site. The maps I got were shade.map, space.map, prince.map, bobafett.map. The one I really liked was Dr. Doom by Dukebert, this is based on MAP04 of Doom II.
- Sat, 27 Oct - My first attempt at writing a screenplay! How did this happen? Well, I was going to send an attachment (some files with a frameset and a CSS explanation by me) to Tobias and Damian, and instead of writing a bland mail, I thought I'd make it like a scene from a movie instead. So that's how it ended up as The Horrible HTML Hazard Part II or Deadly Demonic Developments at Deimos. Pablo, Toby and Damian told me they liked it. That's nice to hear considering it's my first attempt, Tobias even said it was the greatest laugh he'd had in a while! Thanks for your comments, guys! I also played around with that Duke Nukem 3D level, Dr. Doom in the afternoon. Then in the evening I cleaned the computer. Kalpana's World was updated. There's also some good news for people who don't like having to register at the NewDoom Review Center to download stuff - thanks to Grimlock and William Mull, all us hosted site guys are going to get 50 MB of FTP space so that we can offer direct downloads from our sites! Both Doomworld and Doom Center announced contests - go and have a look. There was no NIIT class. Finally, I enjoyed watching Dragonball Z... the Saiyans destroy the planet of Arlia... and Goku falls off Snake Way, into the Home of the Infinite Losers - and actually makes it out alive!
- Sun/Mon/Tue, 28/29/30 Oct - Uploaded my level Out of Phase to 3darchives.in-span.net a few days ago, it was featured on Sunday's /newstuff Chronicles at Doomworld. On Monday I was very tired after coming home from college, and slept for a long time... I completed my IMP Lab Record and also read a little bit for the next day's lab exam. Could'nt reply to mails, etc. But on Tuesday I was relieved because I did well in my Lab Internal Test - what I had to do was to generate the characters M W on a CRO using 8086 and a DAC Interface. Pretty easy to do. NIIT class was nice too. Vivek submitted one of his Javascripts to http://www.js-x.com and Sudarshan's Personal Web was updated. I also replied to mails and my NewDoom FTP's up. I still haven't uploaded anything there yet. The public login name they gave me for the FTP is kartdoom :). Thanks Grimlock.
- Wed, 31 Oct - Got all my IEEE Spectrum Magazines from the college library - May 2001 to September 2001 - issues that I hadn't taken! Anyway, it's not like I was so anxious to read them anyway... :). Speaking of IEEE, our student chapter is going to hold a Technical Paper Presentation Contest on 21 and 22 December, the posters have apparently been sent to various colleges already! Anyway, I'm one of the official "contact persons" for anything to do with it :), so in the next update I'll put up information on that on my site. That way it will save you a phone call to Deepak Menon, Nirish or myself.
Pablo's sent me another version of Those Crazy Monkeys - I'm going to download that now. Out of the scripts he sent me, the only one I haven't read fully is Mr. GoodBar - I only read the first part of it and it was really good (especially one dialogue involving a VCP). Pablo must have had fun writing that. I had fun reading all his screenplays.
Oh yes. Fight Club (a movie that I've wanted to see for a LONG time) is going to be shown on STAR Movies this November. HBO's also showing The Matrix.
Varun updated the 9th Gate Website with photos of himself, Tobias, Pablo, and yours truly - so have a look.
I have some homework to do in Operations Research right now, so I'll wrap up this update here.
My college, Sree Nidhi Institute of Science and Technology, launched it's official website on 26th - you can visit it at http://www.snist.com. I had nothing to do with it, except that I made the Guestbook Page's layout. The site has all the information you'd want to know about our college, so go and visit it. They're also planning to put up attendance reports and marks in various tests of all the students on the site, which should be interesting.
This is a coincidence... the last time I updated my site was on 17th, the day my brother left for his trip to Delhi. And today he's coming back in the evening. No college till next Monday :) which gives me some free time... Well, here is the news for the past week or so.
- Thu/Fri, 18/19 Oct - Didn't go to college that day either because of the bus strike. Still, I found out there would be a lab exam the next day thanks to Nagesh. I also sent Out of Phase, my latest Doom II effort to all the guys on The 9th Gate. On 19th I went to college and to my surprise found that classes had been going on in full swing inspite of the transportation problems faced by everyone... but luckily the IMP Lab exam was postponed to 30th. After coming home I was really tired (didn't have my lunch) but watching A Better Tomorrow II on STAR Movies (7:30 PM) refreshed me - what a terrific movie! John Woo is a great action director - and you don't need any more proof of that after watching the last ten minutes of this movie! Probably a little exaggerated (dramatically) in some parts, and the first film was a shade better - still, this movie is a must-see. I also wrote lots of mails to everyone that day (Toby, Pablo said they enjoyed my very weird, unusual level). Jai redesigned his site. And Pablo sent two scripts of his - Mr. GoodBar (which I haven't read yet) and On The Next Hour (pretty twisted, thriller-type story - I got two incomplete versions of the script, but just yesterday Pablo sent a much larger version).
- Sat, 20 Oct - Thanks to Albert Valls for sending three demos of Out of Phase. Great to watch - the times are UV Max 1:23 (wow!), UV -fast 1:28 and Reality 1:52. I also downloaded Heroic Bloodshed for Quake II after reading a review of it on Joel's Site GG Inc. Varun is having a nice time on his vacation. My mother recorded Dragonball Z for me. Vivek sent two new versions (v2.2 and v3.0) of his VivEncryptix program to me for beta-testing (I'm privileged)... Although I was able to break v1.0's algorithm, the new one employs a very complicated encryption method. Imagine, for a single character, you could get an encrypted string of anywhere between 10 - 30 characters (approximate numbers)! The program itself has a nice interface and is easy to use.
- Sun, 21 Oct - My first experiments with DeHackEd... the tool that allows you to hack doom2.exe! Inspired by watching John Woo's A Better Tomorrow II, I decided to make my DEH patch all action! Mainly intended to modify Doom's former humans and the pistol/shotgun, this one features some interesting stuff. I also made a small WAD to go along with it (Doom II MAP01), with Chow Yun-Fat in the TITLEPIC. Fortunately nowadays we have ports like PrBoom, JDP and MBF to use DEH files, so I didn't have to (and neither do you) hack my doom2.exe each time. If you want the files you'll have to email me, I'm not releasing it. I also watched Saturday's Dragonball Z episodes. Gohan metamorphoses into a huge monster - Piccolo destroys the moon - Goku's still on his extremely long journey through Snake Mountain - and the little bald guy and another fighter are going to train with a master (heh... does any of this make sense to you?). Next week - the Saiyans stop off at a planet on their way to Earth - and destroy it!
- Mon, 22 Oct - Went to college, but then missed some classes because I was among the 10 or so members of our IEEE branch who went to a printing press to help out with work concerning the upcoming Technical Paper Presentation Contest at our college (Dec. 21/22). We had to address and send posters to 500 colleges all over India... This took a long time and I came home only at 7:30 PM. Then I read my mail, and found some nice words on my map Out of Phase, from Joel. And then, my parents and me went to see Swordfish at Anand Cinema at 10 PM. I thoroughly enjoyed this action movie with John Travolta, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry. Directed by Dominic Sena and written by Skip Woods - plenty of action and style to carry the movie... although I still don't believe it's possible to break a 128-bit encrypted password in 60 seconds - no matter HOW fast you type :)
- Tue, 23 Oct - Again came home only at 7:30 PM from college (staff bus left late because someone had an exam) so I didn't go to NIIT. Anyway, after I came home and stopped by NewDoom.com as usual, I was surprised to see a news post about my recent non-update update on Karthik's Doom Pages! Thanks to FACE.UK for that. Pablo signed my Guestbook, thanks for that. He redesigned his own site, Pablo's Place too a couple of days back. It's nicely organised now into different sections, with all of his stuff, so go and have a look there. The Doom/Games section has a nice look too, I believe it was based on a design by Tristan van Puten.
Well, that's it for this update, thanks to all you guys for the recent entries in my Guestbook - Sudarshan, Kumaran and Praveen. Thanks, Pablo, Tobias and Joel for your comments on my new Doom II level and your comments on my site redesign. Jai's site after the redesign has a nice elegant look. Speaking of friends's sites, I rewrote my Links Page, added some sites, and organised it better. I also completely rewrote the About Page, so take a look.
I didn't go to college yesterday either, because of the bus strike! Which is again a good thing. I got my II Year II Semester Marks Memo - this time I got a total of 494/700 which comes to 70.5% (not a good performance, unfortunately - I must do better next time). Anyway, I think the top percentage was 80%. Can't say for sure because I didn't go to college :). I'll be putting up my marks memo on the site soon.
Anyway, yesterday Varun did some more demos of my new Doom II level Out of Phase. I cleared all the messages from my Yahoo! Inbox (about 2.9 MB this time). And I cleared up my Doom folder a little, deleted about 41 MB of WADs. Yesterday's class at NIIT was nice - we are doing a VB project. And Tobias sent a small Doom II map he made with WADAuthor, called The Gauntlet. Speaking of Tobias, I was playing his levels Deimos Control Center and Unknown Fate yesterday. Those are fantastic levels.
Note: Varun's and Tobias' sites are currently inaccessible because their host, Doom Center is experiencing server problems.
On 15th I watched 8MM which was shown on HBO earlier. This is a very good movie starring Nicolas Cage. I wrote a summary of the entire movie after watching it. You can read it here - 8MM Review.
I watched Shootfighter 2: Kill Or Be Killed on STAR Movies yesterday. This was a pretty ordinary action movie, starring William Zabka, Michael Bernardo, Bolo Yeung. Directed by Paul Ziller (the guy who made Bloodfist IV). When a cop's son gets killed in Shootfighting, he assembles a group of fighters to infiltrate and bust the Shootfighting ring. Worth watching once, for the fights.
Today I got up at 5:45 AM!! Can you believe that? I got up because I wanted to accompany my brother to the train station (he left on vacation this morning). He's going to have a nice time in Delhi, Shimla, Chandigarh along with his friends... the trip is for 8 days, he'll be back on 24th.
I've been at the computer almost continuously from this morning till now. I put together a demo issue of SINE with some submitted articles. I cracked an encryption program my friend made :). I also did some work on the college website redesign. And I redesigned my site too. The bus strike allowed me to do all this stuff. :)
As you can see, I redesigned this site... It was about time, actually. I was getting tired of the older design and I wanted this site to look more like Karthik's Doom Pages. Hence the new look. It's compatible with both Netscape and IE, but it's best viewed with 800 x 600 resolution or higher. I also reverted back to the title Karthik's Home Page, rather than http://karthik82.tripod.com (because I was losing out on a search engine listing because of that).
I also added a review of 8MM which I saw recently. More about that in the regular news section.
I decided to stop the "Featured Quote" section because it's difficult to keep on thinking of new quotes to put on the home page... so there won't be any more of that. I don't think anyone's really going to miss it either... if you want it back, email me at karthik@newdoom.com and we'll see about that. Anyway, all the quotes that have appeared on the homepage are listed here.
Another long absence, another long update... I won't bother to introduce the update this time, because I'm sure you're used to it by now.
Or maybe I will write something... today I didn't go to college because of a strike by the APSRTC - no buses available... which is a good thing - I can update my site now! I was supposed to have a test in Systems Programming today, hence the assembly-like headline.
- Wed/Thu, 3/4 Oct - Out of Phase, my latest Doom II level, was completed! (The level was just released yesterday at Karthik's Doom Pages, download, play and tell me what you think). On 4th, at NIIT, Kannan gave me copies of some photos of our band practice (see news of August 4). And a new great wallpaper was added to Kalpana's World, this is called Cross and is on my desktop right now. If you see her wallpapers page you'll know which one it is.
- Fri, 5 Oct - Lots of rain in the evening - I got completely wet walking to the bus from college, and spent an hour in the bus getting dry again :) ... but that was fun! Anyway, Friday evenings are always nice and later on I downloaded The Darkening after reading Joel's review, and some of Jxt's levels. I also got TASDoom.
- Sat/Sun, 6/7 Oct - I tried to learn to use WinDEU 5.21 but then got frustrated. At NIIT we did some tweaking to the Windows Registry with Visual Basic. And after coming home I saw the first episode of Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network (thanks to Varun for taping it). I also saw a little bit of The Craft which was coming on AXN. Kalpana's World has a new article on XML, which was added on Thursday or Friday. On Sunday, I started work on E4M3 of The 9th Gate and I sent it to the other team members too.
- Mon/Tue, 8/9 Oct - IMP Test at college which I didn't do too well in... but on 9th I did well in the OR test and the SP lab exam. At NIIT we have a break from the regular classes for some time. Thanks to Sunil for signing my guestbook.
- Wed, 10 Oct - DC test was quite easy. Hectic day at college - we went to the II Year student's classes to announce memberships for the IEEE Student Chapter. After coming back home I opened up WADAuthor and tried to use it. It seems great. I also decided I didn't like the look of SINE (the earlier design for the IEEE Newsletter) so I redesigned it - it looks a lot more professional now, with easier navigation too. All the IEEE members at our college - you'll see it soon.
- Thu, 11 Oct - My mother's birthday! And at college the TC test went OK. I saw at Doomworld that the /idgames Archives (previously at CDROM.COM) were restored, and are now at this new location - ftp://3darchives.in-span.net! Great news, and thanks must go to the maintainers Ty Halderman and Frans DeVries for all their efforts over the past few years and now. I also got the Boom Source Code and a WADAuthor Config File for Boom, and made a short map using a couple of Boom triggers. And I caught a cold too...
- Fri, 12 Oct - Missed the college bus but still went in time for the PPL test, which I did pretty well. IMP Lab - Controlling traffic lights with an 8086 microprocessor worked nicely! (I was writing the sequence of numbers to be sent to that interface in between classes earlier that day :) ). I started an update on Karthik's Doom Pages - I updated all the links on my Review Pages to point to the new location of the WADs on 3darchives.in-span.net. (If you notice any broken links there please email me at karthik@newdoom.com and tell me). And I also did some editing on an article that will be seen in the first issue of SINE.
- Sat, 13 Oct - Thanks, Dipak for signing my guestbook. I didn't go to NIIT because of my cold. Experimented with WADAuthor a little bit - now I can make some nice looking areas... once I get used to this editor I might use it for all my maps - it's got a lot of advanced features. I also watched Episodes 3, 4 of Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network - really excellent! Plenty of action.
- Sun, 14 Oct - Karthik's Doom Pages updated! Out of Phase, my latest map is released and there's also some more news on the site. Varun is finishing his Quarterly Exams on 16th, and on 17th he will be leaving on an 8 day tour to Delhi, Shimla, Chandigarh... he will be back on 24th. After studying for his Biology exam yesterday he did a demo of Out of Phase in 1:31. Finished OR homework and DC assignment, and I watched a documentary on STAR Movies about the Star Wars movies and other work by Industrial Light and Magic.
- Mon, 15 Oct - Unexpected holiday today thanks to a bus strike. Out of Phase - 16 downloads already. Thanks to Opulent for sending me a "first look" demo of it. I also downloaded PrBoom. And I made another Doom Winamp Skin.
That's the news for now... see you next time.
This time, the quote is a cryptic crossword clue from the newspaper two days back. This is one of the clues I could figure out easily - but the others are very tough! I started doing these (not in a big way yet) thanks to Deepak Menon, my senior at college, who's extremely good at them. The clue above is "German goods include fruit (5)" - the answer is "mango" because you can find that word embedded in "German goods".
It's update time again... I only wish that it would come more often than this, but things are quite busy for me. Anyway, here is, as usual, all the news that happened between the last update on the site and now.
- Sun/Mon, 23/24 Sep - On Sunday, I spent three hours defragmenting the hard disk! The reason it took that long is because first, it's a 20 GB hard disk, and it's been about a year since the last defrag! I had to do it in Safe Mode. That afternoon, Srikanth's Home Page came online after a long wait. Srikanth finally uploaded his site, and it's got a lot of interesting pages. Go visit, and join the Student's Forum which he has set up on his site. I've added his link on my Links Page. Speaking of websites, there is an IEEE Students Chapter Web Design Contest (2002), which I might be contributing to. And on that note, I also spent time redesigning my Doom Site!
- Tue, 25 Sep - Came home early from college. I did some demos of Wim Vanrie's Dead Simple: Revisited. One of them is a pretty funny demo - something weird happened while I was recording it so that's why I've kept it. More on that a little bit later. At NIIT Mr. Shyam showed us how to make a basic text editor in Visual Basic (although it's not in the official curriculum). And Hollywood Action Night this time on STAR Movies featured Brian Bosworth in The Operative, a low-budget movie (made in 18 days!) written by Paul A. Birkett and directed by Robert Lee. Bosworth plays an ex-CIA agent who, after spending 11 years in a Russian asylum, breaks out only to find that an old enemy of his (an ex-KGB agent) has kidnapped his partner - and he must now steal a priceless painting to save her life. Things of course get complicated in this action movie which was not bad.
- Wed/Thu/Fri, 26/27/28 Sep - I did some more work on my Doom site. I finally got around to uploading all of my stuff to the new NewDoom Review Center. And I sent news to NewDoom after I did that. I played a bit of Doom's E3M1 after reading some fan fiction based on that level at The Inkwell. I also noticed at Kalpana's World that the design has reverted back to the old look - and there is a terrific new wallpaper called Fire. On Thursday, at NIIT, Mr. Shyam said that we should take tests on BrainBench.com and other sites (on Visual Basic, C++). He also proposed that we should do our NIIT project for this semester in VC++ instead of VB. And most of Friday evening/night was spent on my Doom Site redesign - I made a number of new pages for all my downloads, levels, etc. and cleaned up the site.
- Sat, 29 Sep - Finally finished my Doom Site's redesign! I also downloaded JDP 1.01 (Joel's Doom Port). This is a port of Doom written by Joel Murdoch, beta tester for our project The 9th Gate. Joel's engine features a number of bugfixes to MBF, including the "Picked up a medikit that you really need!" message. Currently, I have this on my desktop and I'm planning to play with that for all my reviewing. At NIIT, everyone took tests on sites like BrainBench.com and HotExams.com. I took a VB test and a Java test. Now since I only started learning VB, I couldn't answer very well, but anyway, it was good. After I came home, I uploaded my Doom Site - with the all-new look! So, Karthik's Doom Pages has been redesigned, visit it and tell me what you think! I also sent Opulent and Wim the Dead Simple: Revisited demos that I mentioned earlier. From now on, my Doom Site won't have any demos, I will send them all to Opulent's site. I also downloaded Cyber Dreams.
- Sun/Mon, 30 Sep/1 Oct - I spent most of Sunday working on a new Doom II level! This will be released soon. It took about 7-8 hours but I finished it! And at night, I saw a post on Doomworld about the CDROM.COM situation. Looks like the Doom/Doom II levels and such stuff is gong to be shut down. Joel's site is completely up now - PHP-driven, with reviews, etc. I read a few of his reviews there. NewDoom also did some modifications on their site, the File of the Moment and such features are enabled now that the Review Center is up. But because of that some anomalies were there on my site for a short while (the counter got stuck at 1 visitor!). But on Monday, everything came back, Karthik's Doom Pages was at 4028 visitors. I also downloaded Bon Jovi's One Wild Night 2001 fully. I made some more addition to my WAD. And I was reading some old news from NewDoom's Archive (June 2001). I took a Doom Action Gaming Test from 3D Action Planet after spotting a link from the News Archive... and scored a 20/20!
- Tue, 2 Oct - My Doom II level is now finished and all that's left is to pick out a music for it, think of a proper name, then I'll release it. I also got some terrific Techno MIDIs from this site. And Ganeshan also updated his site, this time it has a new look, and has some new articles. All his Winamp skins are up for download this time, there's a section on science in movies - where this time he discusses about certain scenes from The Matrix. Also, there's a game review for Hexen II. Go visit his site, I really like the new look (style sheets make a LOT of difference!).
And that's it for this time. As usual, we have tests at college, I also have to finish my redesigning of my college's website, and I have stuff to upload to Karthik's Doom Pages and this site... well, all that will happen...
Important Announcements: Dragonball Z will premiere on Cartoon Network, October 6, 9-10 PM! Friday's 7:15 PM martial-arts movie on STAR Movies is the must-see Armour of God, with Jackie Chan!! And lastly, the Présage Site has a fantastic look.
upd.txt is a file that I put together just now. Do you know what that is? Well, I have been writing updates on this site from May-June 2000. You can read all of that from the News Page. I copied all the pages upto September 2001 as plain text and pasted them into one file, just to see how big it would become. It's 419 KB or 429288 bytes long! A 1 MB file would be approximately the size of a novel, which means I'm halfway there...