...Me Unplugged... : Everything else

Oblivious!

Harshawardhan Chiplonkar — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:44:00 GMT

Well, yeah lately I have been oblivious too lots of things. Having indulged in a fetish of subscribing to newsgroups, the number of personal folders is burgeoning to say the least. Of course, its also nearly impossible to read through everyhting that comes in during the day, so the mail meekly comes in, and the rule truthfully shoves it out of harms way into a personal folder, where it will sit till it is summoned. So I have folders counting in excess of 10000 unread mails, though most of them will never see the light of day, and would in all probably be summoned in the event of a search. Touching!

This also actually applies to the emails I receive from the Gaming community in general. But these emails are luckier, I read through almost everything unless of course if it is a call to join a multiplayer. Speaking of which, there are a number of games vying for readerspeak and what best to find them than hit game spot, which inadvertently carries the best reviews. So we have RTS's like Star Wars (Yup, you heard it right, the Empire is going to war), and Rise of Legends. And of course the traditional favourites, the FPS's with Prince Of Persia - Warrior Within, already out on the streets (pun intended), we already have a high bar set for other game big wigs to achieve. And lo and behold we have Gears of War, coming from the great old granddady of game engines, John Carmack. All set for 2006, which is gonna be a real high!

Of course we also have more to look forward to with the imminent unwrapping of the brand new XBOX 360's as well as the already-in-the-works movies on Doom and hold your breath, here is the clincher:

http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/051005a.php

Triple-Academy Award winners Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh ("The Lord of the Rings" trilogy) will serve as the executive producers of "Halo", the upcoming feature film based on Microsoft's phenomenally popular video game reports Rope of Silicon.

On top of that, its also been announced that Jackson's Weta Workshop Ltd. and Weta Digital Ltd. will be creating the creatures, miniatures and visual effects for the film. This agreement marks the first time that Jackson and Walsh have performed these services on a major studio film that Jackson is not directing.

"Halo" will be shot in its entirety in Wellington, New Zealand and the film is currently targeted for a Summer 2007 worldwide release. Universal will handle domestic distribution of the film, and Fox will handle the international release.

Back to more serious stuff

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So .NET Framework 2.0 (a.k.a. Visual Studio .NET 2005) Codenamed "Whidbey" will be unveiled in all its glory on November 7th 2005. Also making its grand appearance will be the much anticipated SQL Server 2005 Codenamed "Yukon" on the same day. Cheers!

I have been keeping myself busy for quite some time now with work on Office "12" and of course, with all the hoopla on what its gonna be like as well as the anticipation about its imminent preview have raised excitement levels high. As always its all hush, hush though I have been wondering how so much info got out on to print! Hmmm...interesting. Just kidding. And of course to all those people who have been asking me and also wondering as to what happened to my code samples, guys and gals hang on, a torrent of posts is on its way...coming soon, veryy verry soooon!

...More

Harshawardhan Chiplonkar — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:01:00 GMT

So lots of water has flowed under the bridge and then there's some more. Had an intense week (or was that two) since I put pen to paper. Gizmodo has been going berserk with my inbox with about 500 new articles already unread. And why not, with all the hoopla in the tech world on boys and their toys! Lots of interesting info on Apple, lots of i-Pod bashing and then they dont even spare a toilet paper giant like Nokia, do they?

Met up with loads of people on orkut, and planning a rock climbing trip the coming weekend with some one I have never met with! Interesting. Also have a Table tennis tournament on the last weekend of this month. This is conincidentally being organised by the same folks, who organised a tourney a couple of months back. That was our first foray into intercorporate Table tennis and thanks to a brilliant display by one of my colleagues, we stand proud with the cup. So a fitting end to an eventful month it will be.

Bangalore has lately seen a spurt of anti-social activities, what with the growing discontent amongst the localites against the so-called-and-considered-wealthy "outsiders" who work in the "gold mine" called IT. Also, with the increasing change of timings to mirror the US work hours, lots of IT folks are falling prey to the erstwhile Robin Hoods of Bangalore. Tsk, tsk.! Bangalore surely is becoming an unsafe place in the dark hours of the night. Recently there was a standoff between the IT majors and the local Government over the apparent apathy of the government bodies to provide, nay even maintain the current state of infrastructure in the city. This city which till some years back was touted to be India's answer to the fabled Silicon Valley is totally in shambles. Poor roads, the slightest of downpours unearths the tarring and the road is in a mess, hideous traffic snarls and equally raucous and a i-dont-care attitude while driving. Surely, with the increasing interest and the recent spurt in the off shoring business that saw many IT majors coming in to set shop in the city should have opened the eyes of the government, but it doesnt look like that. Recently the IT majors in the city threatened to stage a no-show at the much anticipated IT expo in the city, unless the government chalked out a concrete plan with well set timelines to counter the deteriorating situation. Now, here's the most fun part, instead of pulling up its socks and retaliating with a well chalked out improvement program, the local govt, actually took the verbal volley back. They made the scathing remarks that the firms which had been given shelter in this city, had in fact done nothing in terms of giving back to the city, and also, alleged that these very firms had adopted a anti Kannada stand (kannada being the local language, and here i mean a stand against the locals). And the verbal diarrhoea continued with lots of local NGO's staging protest rally's against the IT folks and the like. Thats one thing I like about democracy (and I am not belittleing India by any chance). Its so easy, with the whole freedom of speech and all those diktats, that if you dont like something, you get a group of people who agree with you and get on the streets and force everybody else to agree with you in the process. Of course, in that situation, who cares about the millions of dollars of business lost on that day! Democracy where art thou?

Just today I received this link in an email and man, was it so disturbing, I cant sit still in my chair after reading that. Check it out http://sbcbrutes.blogspot.com/ (and for the ignoramuses, read the blog from down up to get the complete story).

Clear confident and Concise

Now where did I read that, of course, Windows Vista, theres loads and loads been written on what Vista can and cannot do. With all the reams of print going in on the visual delights, it was still a mystery owing to the poor graphics cards we have on our workstations (why do you need a good graphics card on a workstation anyway?). So it was only yesterday that a colleague procured a media center out of the local lab with a ATI Radeon 5200, that we finally rested our doubts and switched into believers. Amazing!

Office 12

This is the mystery package that is gonna hit the IT world sometime in mid 2006. What with the PDC demos,and the ongoing Alpha program, word is already out on the streets as to what Office 12 will and will not have, but mark my words, dont count on any of those until you get your hands on the actual product. My verdict, there's been nothing better, but then thats what everybody in the literate world said when Win XP came out or for that matter, what Adam said when God created woman. (Oh yeah i know, Eve came first!)

Watched a Bertolucci film lately "Stealing Beauty". There are just two other movies of that guy that I have watched, "The Last Emperor" and "The Last Tango in Paris". Gawd, there's something about this guy, he has genius written all over his movies. Hats off!

Last time it was AoE3, but times have changed and so I have moved over to Quake 3 network multiplayer. Awesome, fun, this game beats any body hands down with the level of detail, and the pace of the game. Ultimate fragfest.

C ya till next time!

Musings...

Harshawardhan Chiplonkar — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 04:38:00 GMT

Its been quite some time since I consciously dug out time to write something here. The past couple of months have been a helluva time. I started with getting the feelers on office 12 and then the whole bunch of technological challenges that throws up. Most of my time has been spent just getting to know the "stuff under the hood" and then some. The PDC was one big event this year from a technological perspective. This year saw the unvieling of Office 12 suite of products along with the much awaited Avalon, Acrylic and the WinFX showcase. But of course there have been reams and reams of HTML being churned out on everything post PDC.

Then on a more realistic front was the threat posed by Katrina and Rita - the current celebrities. Katrina was an eye opener on what happened and waht could have been done to prevent the debacle. But as always, when calamity strikes, human nature comes to the fore and we see astounding acts of heroism and selflessness from unexpected quarters. I was fortunate to have witnessed this in the recent cyclonic floods in Mumbai. With the water level rising upto 2 storeys, the situation was frightening, and yet the effervescent spirit of the die-hard Mumbaikar (as Bombayites fondly call themselves) kept hem afloat!

September is a month that I have grown to love. Giving me two opportunities to celebrate first with my birthday followed closely by my wedding anniversary. This time around was a bit special since it was my first anniversary. Celebrations galore!!! It was a lovely weekend which was whiled away reminescing on memories of our college days. Ecstatic.

I have been painstakingly trying to get the Office 12 beta working on top of Longhorn and its been hoodwinking me everytime. Aw well, atleast I have the satisfaction of seeing them in action as well as taking up the challenge to troubleshoot. With lots of work happening with .NET as well as the impending release of the much awaited .NET vNext, I thought it a good opportunity to start learning the ropes for that. With loads and loads of new features as well as new idealogies, its turning out to be quite an interesting ask.

On a lighter note had dekko of the AoE3 demo, with astounding graphics I personally feel the game play has slowed down a lot. Then of course there was the much raved about F.E.A.R - designed to chill we folks had the misfortune of the game crashing on us owing to poor hardware. Tsk tsk!

More coming soon....

Justtoomuchtohandlerightnow

Harshawardhan Chiplonkar — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 10:47:00 GMT

Exactly....too tied up with loads of stuff. Looking at getting my own home, so thats stealing most of my waking hours. The rest am sleeping. need to break out of the habit of sleeping everyday [sic]. Man wish I was born on Krypton. Wondering if theres any alias for addressing such wishes!

[S]

/Harsh