Another logo. This one for the quiz. Pretty simple enough I guess. The lightning is a bit Harry Potterish. 

Site statistics

One of my favorite passtimes is to keep track of who all are visiting my site(s). This lets me see how many hits I'm getting and from where all. My home page received the most number of hits (164) this month. My blog also received the most number of hits (300) this month. You can check out the stats for my site here. The site stats of this blog can be accessed by clicking at the counter on the bottom of this page :)

Programming event logo. Hurried up effort. This one deviates from the white background thing. 

Logo for the paper presentation. Among other things we have street lights outside our house yahoooo!!!!! We now have the power of sight in the dark.  

Another logo

Surprise surprise!! I made another logo. This one now adorns the make shift ACES site, courtesy myself. 

Growth in Indian Offshoring Slowing

Slashdot had an article on "Growth in Indian Offshoring Slowing". An interesting read. With companies opting out for places like Eastern Euprope, Latin America, China this was bound to happen.

More on Google talk

Google talk has a nice clean UI. The installation is very small (900K) and very fast. I did make a PC to PC call and it sounds very clear. The downsides are quite a few though.
No emoticons. When you try some of the emoticon combos like :) or :D etc they turn blue but you don't get any smileys. Font face and color cannot be changed. No avatars or buddy icons. No "buzzes", "nudges", "audibles" etc. All in all if google wants to stay in the IM race they will have to improve. I still like Yahoo messenger the most.

Google Talk

Google Talk is Google's newest offering. It is an instant messaging service based on the jabber protocol. I haven't tried it out yet, but I soon will :)

Dooba Dooba

doobadooba
Originally uploaded by zadeus.

My brother is in TCS Bombay. He was busy clicking pictures in the recent flood. This one shows the scale of destruction which happened there.

Another logo. This one is for the web site designing event. It is a blend of the previous two ideas. The e is from Internet explorer and the background is from Firefox. I'm a fair person. 

This one I made for the gaming event. The name of the event hasn't been finalized yet so I gave it a name: "Headshot". :) 

I guess logo designing is getting to be the latest fashion these days (especially with Inspire and a lot of other fests coming up). So I said why not try my hand at this thing.

This one being a logo for an event which I shall be handling. The event is a set of progressive hacking challenges.

4 KM

I got my shoe repaired after 5 days (so now I don't have to play basketball barefoot anymore). Unfortunately nobody turned up to play in the evening. So, I ran. I first took a few rounds alone then I had Rahul Bhai for company. He took some 15 rounds and I took some 10. We had a sprint for the last round. I won the sprint in seabiscuit style. But, yes, I had the "I ran 5 rounds less" advantage. It was fun. I got completely dehydrated after that.

Heli attack

Who says you can't make good games in flash. Heli attack 3 is a game on miniclip. The game is a side scrolling 2-D flash game. Basic objective is to shoot at helicopters and other things that try to piss you off. The best part of the game, which I liked, is that you get to choose from a lot of weapons like the rail gun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, chain gun etc (seems to be inspired by quake). Also the game has quite a few levels. Pretty interesting.

My good friend Rakesh managed to make this wonderful logo for our annual Computer Science fest: Inspire. It looks pretty cool. I just hope that others like it too. 

We had a virus attack on our systems by the W32.Pinfi virus. Till now we have detected it on 3 computers out of 4, on our LAN. It infected over 550 files on my system. The impressive fact was that it was able to do all this in one day. Fortunately Norton Antivirus was able to detect and remove it from my system. Although it is gone I would like to format the drive. 

Back from Trivandrum

I had left for Trivandrum day before yesterday for my uncle's housewarming. I had Sunu with me for the train journey to Trivandrum so I didn't get bored.
The housewarming took place yesterday. We had the usual stuff, which take place in a Hindu Brahmin ceremony. I was mostly involved in taking snaps and doing some small help work (when needed). I spent some nice time with my cousin brothers and sisters. I returned today morning at around 10:30 am. Fortunately my friends had taken care of my attendance :) while I was away. So, no worries.

Sarovar.org

Sarovar is an Indian site where you can upload your projects something like sourceforge. The good thing is that almost all of sourceforge's facilities are provided and it is easier, than sourceforge, to get your project approved. Check out my page at Sarovar.org.

Brother crossing a river.

DSCN0892,
originally uploaded by zadeus.

This is my brother crossing a "river" (which apparently doesn't have any water, duh!). This was in his "Outbound learning module". I don't know why these companies use such complex terms for a simple thing called "picnic".

Second revision to Pong

I made a few cosmetic changes to my game: Pong. The game pauses when the ball hits the ground and then plays a "smash" sound. The computer now does get defeated, although I was unable to remove the to and fro motion. The controls are the same and the bat still moves at its usual "fast" pace. Source and executables.

Happy Independence day

India turns 58 today. Salutes to all those who helped us gain our freedom. We are truly indebted to them and their sacrifice towards the country. Jai Hind !

Addy gets placed

Addy finally got placed in Hexaware. He had worked hard for it and I'm happy that he cleared it. Hard work finally pays its dividend. Time to party.

Black and White

Spoiler warning: Certain plot details of the movie Mangal Pandey: The rising, follow. Do not read if you don't want to.

Today was one day after the release of the much awaited movie : "Mangal Pandey: The rising". After a long wait of 4 years we finally had a movie starring Aamir Khan. We had done the bookings in advance at Sridhar. Sourav had booked 10 tickets for us all but unfortunately not everyone could make it. So it was just me, Anshul, Sujit and Sourav along with some juniors who went to see the movie. Two of my classmates had asked Sourav to book tickets for them too, but they couldn't make it on time. So we were left with two spare tickets. The movie was about to start and we needed to get rid of them fast. So, we started asking other people if they needed two balcony tickets. Now, we did this at a great risk, because we were surrounded with a lot people who were selling tickets in black. There was a pretty good chance of us getting beaten up. Even though we were selling the tickets at the same rate at which we brought them, there were no takers.
When there were 5 minutes to the start we went to the people who were selling tickets in black and asked them if they needed two balcony tickets !!! Two of them said "No", when suddenly one of them came and brought the tickets at Rs 100/-. We earned a profit of Rs 10/- Hurray!!!
Mangal Pandey as a movie doesn't live up to it's hype. It is a nice movie all right, but it is not something of the scale of Lagaan. The songs are not too great and seem to be inserted forcefully into the movie. The title song is good though. The movie rolls along smoothly in the first half and the final thirty minutes are good. The scene where you have Mangal Pandey firing shots alone at the whole Rangoon regiment is quite awesome. As expected Rani Mukherjee's role is confined to just the songs. Amisha Patel's role is not even that much. The English actor who plays the role of "Captain Gordon" has done a good job. Aamir Khan is obviously good.
All in all I would say you should see this movie at least once.

Another day in my life.

Today was special, because the day started of with me falling into the wet mud outside our house. I was planning to distribute the lab records today. So I asked Bhupen to give me lift on his bike. The bike hadn't gone two feet when the bike slipped and we fell along with the bike. I was more dirty than hurt. So I had to cleanup before going to class. I arrived a full 40 minutes late *big grin* to class and got away with it.
Today was special also because it was the first day in our 7th semester when we had full day class. We have faculty shortage and two of our subjects didn't have a faculty until recently. We had all 3 hours in the morning and lab in the afternoon.
Evening was spent in playing basketball. We had players from Sacred hearts and we had a nice 3 hours of full court action. During the game I also managed to destroy the sole of one of my shoes (which, by the way, costed 5 grand).
I now have a good long weekend in front of me. Hope to sleep right through it.

My second game

Well I am supposed to be making Pac-man for my graphics micro-mini project. Instead I made a game of pong (It would be surprising if you haven't played it). No idea why I made it.
Anyway the controls are the usual "LEFT" to move left, "RIGHT" to move right and "SPACE" to stop the bat. Why does one need "SPACE" to stop? Well, because the bat moves really fast. Right now it is very tough to play the game, forget winning. The computer near about plays a perfect game and I haven't scored a single point against it. The reason being the algorithm driving the game of the computer is stupidly written.
If you want to play the game you can get the executables. You can also get the source code. It has been written in xemacs and compiled using Bloodshed Dev C++. You will be needing the SDL libraries to compile the program. They are provided with the executables.
It took me two nights to finish this program and thus it has not been well commented. I will soon take care of that.

5 point someone

I was reading the book "5 point someone" for the past 3 days. Although it is supposed to be "unputdownable" it took me some days to finish the book, as I had other work (lab / basketball) to do.
The story is pretty good and relates pretty well to our lives. It is a nice joy ride and I really liked it.
Among other things the weather has become hot for the past two days. But right now it has started pouring again. I wonder if I will be able to go and play.

Sudoku solver getting popular?

I had made a sudoku solver a few days back in python. I had submitted it to uselesspython.com. Quite surprisingly it has become pretty popular and at the moment it is at the top of this week's most downloaded programs at uselesspython. Check out its statistics.

Loungevity

We (Me, Sujit, Rahul and Bhatta) had been to Loungevity yesterday. It is a one of a kind lounge in Cochin. You really don't expect to see such plush interiors and a nice crowd. It was a fun evening.

360 site feeds

I rarely use my account on yahoo 360. I just read the blogs of my friends on it.
Anyway, so I came to know that you could put RSS feeds onto your 360 yahoo page. So, I gave the feeds of this blog.
Another thing about yahoo 360 is that, whenever you modify anything on your page you get "star" alongside your name in yahoo messenger.
The interesting part is as soon as I publish a new post on this blog, those changes get reflected onto the feeds and thus on my yahoo 360 page. Thus getting the "star" alongside my name on Y! messenger. Pretty cool.

Player Vs Player

I got the link to PvP (Player Vs Player) from PA a few days back when Gabe announced that PA will be forming a guild against PvP (for World of Warcraft).
I found that PvP was much hilarious than PA and I have become addicted very fast. Here is an example.