February 2007 Archives

As most of you already know I have decided to quit yahoo and venture outside:)... Before I join my next company I am taking a short break and visiting delhi etc with wifey:). In the meanwhile I want to kick start my baby project idea for a game. I want to utilize my free time to develop a game. The idea is grand but I need people to work with me on it. I don't know if it will ever be complete but I hope the experience to be a learning one and essentially start me off on a track where I finally want to go.

So in short if you are interested in game development not just as a developer but even as an artist( most needed) or you know anyone who would be interested in trying it out in his/her free time do let me know. I will probably opensource it if I can get a basic concept done. The third phase of my career begins now and lets see where it goes:)

Last few days I had been playing a bit around with my website and redoing stuff on it. I moved my blog to MT @ bhasker.net/moved from coppermine to gallery2. In the process I spent time going through all the snaps that I have uploaded over the last 3-4 yrs and realized that most of the snaps are well of personal nature and really mean only something to me or a couple more people.

As a result , I removed a lot of albums and am going to be removing a lot of snaps as well. In the process I also realized that what I really need are two different galleries one for personal stuff and one for random photography that I would do from time to time.. I have decided to keep bhasker.net/photos for personal albums etc and move all random snaps that I take to flickr..

You can find my flickr gallery@ http://www.flickr.com/photos/gromhellscream/

We had an absolutely wonderful valentines day! Spent most of the day shopping for stuff we had decided that we want to get each other. The day started with us heading all the way to chickpet and buying myself a Nikon 70-300G series lens which I have wanted for a long time and the aeroshow reminded me why I need one... No point having trying to shoot stuff like planes with a 28-105mm. In most of the snaps the planes look like a small spot of dust on an empty sky.

Then rest of the day was spent running around to get my wife her gift. We switched between 2-3 items she wanted before we finalized upon getting her what I had decided at the start. Yesterday I got her a piece of jewellery for the first time:) A gold chain to go along with a small pendant she had got as a gift during our wedding.

Finally at around 8 in the evening we went for a quite dinner at Magnolia ( my wife's favorite chinese restaurant in koramangala. Overall an amazing fun day despite all the running around:)

We had a nice family outing this saturday with my wife's family joining us on a full day at the aeroshow!... I must say I was kind of skeptical about how it will be but it turned out to be an amazing event.

We spent most of our time watching the display rather than the exhibition... The exhibition had some interesting stalls but nothing that could beat watching the planes flyby...The display started with a show by 3 cheetah helicopters doing some nice maneuvers as well as showing how commandos can be picked up from a spot using a hanging net !...

After that we saw various displays of fighters ranging from LCA/F16/Gripen/FA-18/Sukhoi 30/Mig 29 and the most important the Mig 35 being displayed outside of russia for the first time. All the time though aruna was bothered about only one display which was the Surya kiran group. She was disappointed when they didn't perform in the morning but when she came to know that they will be performing in the afternoon she was ecstatic. We watched the afternoon show from like the front line as I wanted to be as close as possible to the runway so that I could see the planes land and take off...

Some of the highpoints of the show were when the Sukhoi did a vertical climb from 500ft all the way to almost 15000ft. Almost all the planes shown were capable of similar stuff to slightly various degrees. The LCA held its own and did some really nice maneuvers like rolls/vertical climbs etc..

But the best part of the day was watching the surya kiran group perform. As my wife had described it was a pleasure to watch such precision flying...9 fighters flying at a distance of 5 meters from each other in formation. Further some of the maneuvers they performed were amazing to watch eg the Starburst maneuver where all 9 descend vertically and then split off in different directions as they are about 500ft above ground.

Overall an amazing experience and probably 2yrs from now when the show comes back we will be back there to watch:) Snaps to be uploaded soon!

Well been playing around with movable type templates a bit more and now you can digg/bookmark my blog entries by clicking the digg this / bookmark this links at the bottom of each blog post.

I was just wondering if i could use Yahoo! pipes to provide forked off feeds from my blog to divide by categories/tags etc. But then I was just playing around with Movable type and I realized that it already partitions your blog in multiple ways...

eg, If you are interested in reading only the entries in the category Gaming. You can fetch them via

http://www.bhasker.net/blog/Gaming

If you are interested in a tag Gaming, it can be fetched as follows

http://www.bhasker.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=Gaming&blog_id=1

Further it even allows the user to create a rss feed off a tag. If you goto the url above then you will see a link to subscribe to the feed on the right side.

Going ahead I intend to aggressively categorize and tag my posts. So, in case you as a reader are only interested in certain categories feel free to make use of the above features to get a selective list of my blog entries.

It seems massively multiplayer gaming is finally coming of age in India. I have been playing one for the last 2+ yrs namely World of Warcraft and secretly hoping that someday blizzard will launch india servers. I was just browsing through some stuff and saw that sify relaunched a korean game A3 in india sometime back and as of yesterday you can download the client via games on demand service on indiagames.com.

The game is subpar at best from what I could see. But what is interesting is the business model MMORPG's are taking in india. Compared to the US and Europe where most people are charging monthly subscriptions for the game, Chinese prefer to pay as and when they play. Eg prepaid gamer cards which are sold for certain number of hours of play. Thats the model in which WOW is working in China. You go buy a gamer card, register an a/c and play for as long as the card lasts. Most of Wow gamers in China play from gaming cafes. It seems most people entering the Indian market are also looking at a gamer card model instead of a pure subscription model.

The next 2-3 yrs look to be really interesting with gaming taking off in a big way in India. Especially with some serious money being pumped into it namely XBOX360 launch, UTV buying stake in indiagames, reliance launching its gaming portal Zapak.com with Zapak tv and gaming events being organized through the country. SKOAR 2007 just happened in Delhi from Jan24-Jan26th organized by the Jasubhai digital media group publishers of SKOAR the gaming magazine in India.

Also reliance seems to be pushing zapak.com a lot they are planning on launching Zapak gamer Cafe's as well as launching some MMORPG's in india.

In short, we have some very very exciting times ahead:)) One thing to look forward to would be the launch of XBox live service in india.

Its been a 3 yrs or more since I started blogging on livejournal . Its been good fun but I thought its time I moved my blog to my own website which I have had for over 3 yrs... Yes I have been lazy since the last tool I used for phpNuke which to my disappointment is a pain to manage and is clumsy and looks boring.

After a long time I decided to publish using MovableType and all I can say at this moment is that it was easy as hell to setup.

There are a lot of things I want to do like all the snaps of marriage which never got blogged about/honeymoon/london trip etc etc.. Hopefully I would be able to get myself to blog about all that and more.