After a long day at your office chair, you start wondering about what you’ve been missing. It has been days since I’ve felt the wind blasting on my hair. My body itches to feel the fluid graceful sway of its movement. In one moment you were rooted to the spot, in the next you have accelerated into a crazy ball of nerves. Yes, it has been days since I’ve ridden my bike.

It must be the ultimate disgrace for a machine of such beauty in movement to waste away in the idyllic shades of our porch. It must have forgotten its glory, patiently watching the hopelessly immobile sprouts in our garden grow to even more deeply rooted plants. Dust silently gathers over its chrome sheen and occasional showers dot ugly pock marks over its elegant frame. Like a fallen Greek hero, he rests inclined inwardly in deep sadness. Perhaps, mourning the loss of the purely sublime beast that suddenly overcomes it. A beast that roars in anticipation of a wild pursuit. Like a born predator it cuts and ploughs the air with effortless ease. Abruptly it would halt perhaps sensing danger. But, the beast never leaves the machine. It just sleeps, lurking in the dark depths of its own psyche. After all, like Mr Hyde who brought out the hidden instincts of the very docile Dr. Jerkyl, the beast was perhaps more primeval of the machine’s dual personalities.

It takes some patient effort to restore the chrome and leather that had faded with time. After all you are just armed with a dry cloth already striped in grease, a sponge and a bucket of soapy water. You have to work with one small area at a time and all the time you could hear another part of you wondering how much longer is this going to take anyways. Finally, I decided it was about time I felt the magic. Keys inserted, I pushed the ignition button, till I could hear the beast growl. It had awoken! With a vengeance its voice resonated from some faraway point. I tried raising its engine a bit, astonishingly it never gave in. Not a sputter, not a whine. It must have been the slumber, I thought. Must have rejuvenated the damn thing!

Moments later, I was gliding through the Thrissur Shornur road. Elegantly marked into four lanes, riding through this newly widened strip of road is a sensory experience. But like all bike zealots would say, it sucks if you do that on a car ;-)

This is an update on game development which has been put on hold for quite some time now. Despite being my definitive passion, it has frequently been pushed to the back burner. My recent interest in photography, since I bought the SLR and short stories are chiefly to blame. Actually, I have received very good appreciation on both. But at the end of the day, the following quote (which is now on my signature line) from John Carmack holds true:

“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.”

Being one of the most brilliant and successful game programmers in the world, there must be some truth in his words. In the meanwhile I have read many, many game blogs. These blogs are specifically written by game developers who describe the development of their projects

Most of the time when I get an idea to design a game, I end up either over-engineering it (purely on paper) or over-researching. In short, there is never a single line of code written. It is like the age-old school boy’s dilemma of whether to skim through the entire syllabus or to concentrate on some sections which are likely to be asked in the exams. It is a dilemma because even if some achieve the former they manage to flunk. In case you haven’t guessed, this is a Wrong Thing. John Romero is supposed to have written one game every week at the prime of his career. There is a reason for placing more importance to execution than planning when it comes to game programming. The primary reason is that there are no established frameworks or fundas when it comes to the game industry like for eg: Enterprise software. Most people seem to have the roll-out-your-own mentality rather than reuse the existing body of work. There have been attempts to create a games knowledge base but it doesn’t ease the pain of clean room development. Most of the time people end up learning it the hard way, i.e. by quick prototyping. It is often impossible to gauge if a game would succeed or not without a prototype. No matter how good you are at game design, it often comes down to how clever or innovative you are in execution, in game development.

Personally, being an indie game developer, my primary means of delivery is the web. Hence I usually end up thinking - “How to reduce the downloadable size or can it be playable on the browser?” This puts severe restrictions on what technology you can use. For eg: consider I am making an Indian Mario-like platform game. Currently all platform games are being made in 3D, hence this game would have to be in 3D. However the download size of the code and all the artifacts like textures and sound clips would add up to several tens of megabytes. This is prohibitively large in India, which is still a long way off from the broadband revolution. In fact the IGF 2005 caps this download size limitation at 25 MB for international markets. Of course, I can aim at other markets. But even in those markets, there are very few who would download a game to play it due to the considerable deliberation involved and concern about viruses.

This leaves us with basically web based games (or the casual gamers market). Two technologies are poised to cover this market. The first is Javascript and the other is of course Flash. Javascript currently requires a lot of improvement like sound playback, smooth rendering of large area redraws and scalable graphics to be good enough for game development. Flash requires proprietary development tools which are not even geared towards game development. However, these are 2D game technologies and not considered to be competitive or technically interesting domains anymore.

A surprisingly large number of adults play a certain kind of 2D game called computerized board games. Board games are interesting because they are like ancestors of many kinds of computers games like Age of Empires , WarCraft etc. Most of them have elaborate rules and very interesting themes. Traditionally played as a family game, the computerized versions often have an AI player making it suitable even for solitary play.

I stumbled across this by pure luck. In fact, I was trying to design a murder mystery based on my hometown Thrissur, codenamed Pooram. I happened to stumble upon a board game called Clue or Cluedo. It seemed to have the right mix of chance and deduction to suit my taste. In fact, its sheer popularity can be guessed by the sheer number of websites dedicated to it. Pooram is best played in multiplayer mode though I expect the majority of the casual gamers to play it in single player mode. It involves solving a murder mystery in a 3D environment with billboards like Paper Mario. This is the plan and I decided to stick to it. Of course, there was a lot of research. Some of it (about 20%) turned out to be useful. Most of it disproved that 3D might be a bad option. Some of them used a custom 3D engine for smooth zooming in and out, which would have been difficult on a 2D game. But I guess I’ll have to design a prototype to know for sure ;)

I’m trying my hand at fiction after a long time and probably for the first time in this blog. Well, characters, events and places are fictional and the usual legal blah, blah ;)

Decaffeination

Her heavily mascaraed eyes flicked towards me across the cubicle barrier. I made a futile attempt to pretend that I didn’t notice it. Her blank glance meant only one thing - ‘Aren’t you ready, yet?’ A meeting reminder has suddenly started flashing wildly on my computer screen. Just then somebody just slammed shut a printer tray diagonally behind me. Also the distinct soft thuds of a stilettos striding on the wooden floor again far behind me sounds like war drums. The typically inaudible chatter hundreds of fingers frantically tapping computer keys and depressing mouse buttons have suddenly become unbearably loud. A mixed feeling of sickness and growing anger is brewing in my tummy. I realize I have suddenly become perfectly still.

She stands up from her seat in one slow lazy motion. Her usual aloof expression almost certainly didn’t convey intelligence as she presumed. Rather it smacks of snobbishness. This time I don’t make a futile pretence of ignoring her, on the contrary I decide to acknowledge it. To further affirm my stubbornness in this matter, my chin dips slightly lower down my chest and my eyes dart across its breadth of my computer screen like a skilled Bharatanatyam dancer. The 12 page report I need just a mouse click away. Yet, my hand is still waving the mouse like silly as if waiting for a cue. Then suddenly I got my cue.

“We have the weekly meeting now, right?”

“Hmm…. Oh, right. Just a minute, Sonia”

She tries one of her sly smiles which rather disappear in the flashes of her red glossy lips “Can you take the printouts? I’m too lazy to hunt for it”

Damn you why me? - I wonder. “Sure, no problem”

You can call it the worst part of the day for a meeting or anything for that matter. At quarter past two just after lunch. Not that a BurgerKing bean burger meal is a particularly sumptuous or satisfying lunch. It just had to weigh down in my belly enough to trigger a mid-afternoon sleep. Not that this drowsy state would affect my performance in this meeting in any manner. In fact, sleep walking would be an ideal strategy to tackle the 15 odd weekly report meetings that I have these days. An impassive reading of the itemized colour coded action points, some vague summary of the tasks performed and a quiet nod to each speaker is all that is needed. No insights, no lateral thinking and god forbid no technical jargon. Paradoxically, being in charge of an IT project the last thing anyone would like to mention in such meetings is anything technical. The ‘tech’ stuff is usually so low level that isn’t worth mentioning. It is at end of the chain, the operational level. It’s not that you would be scoffed at or even rebuked for talking ‘tech’. But it would be quite apparent that it is slipping through the tunnels between everyone’s ears. More importantly it would be a career suicide for an IT consultant like me.

We never needed so many meetings. Originally there was just ONE. It was appropriately on a Wednesday morning. Everyone would promptly appear and we would kick off by reading out the consolidated 4 page report. But then Middle East project became our responsibility and they still wanted the same deadlines. We threw our hands up saying we simply didn’t have enough flack. It was true. Most of us Indians put in around 12 hours a day. We had drawn out things so tight that we would barely make it to the Haloween release. A certain German manager in fact didn’t quite appreciate this. Almost callously he claimed that we were underutilized. Like we were donkeys pulling a chariot when we could have actually galloped like horses. So he felt the best thing would be to track everything. From the code reviews to the lunch breaks. Every single bit of it. Perhaps it made him feel that he finally had the whip. Nonetheless, things were actually not improving in any manner.

The report heavy with graphs slowly loads up on my screen. I’m just a key press away from printing it. I pickup up my dark hardbound notebook in one hand and my extra strong, extra sweetened cup of tea in the other. I will badly need the latter in the next one hour. In fact I’ll actually need 3 such cups. But for now - this will do. This one was freshly brewed a minute ago. A minute ago when I punched the code 53 on the machine for the eight time today. When a Styrofoam cup popped down from within and the machine started whirring loudly. The tiny nozzles above the cup started spurting some liquids and steam in a premeditated sequence. They built up a foam which made delicious noises as it rose to the brim. Without even looking I picked up the cup timed to perfection as the last drop dripped down to the cup. One minute later, I look at the cup now, the foam is still intact. Perfecto, I murmured.

Then I catapult from my seat and press the print button and dash towards the printer. As the pages spew into the tray, my notebook appears like an enormous chainsaw and I’m mentally sawing down one big tree after another. I collect 24 pages of single sided print on bond quality paper for stapling. My stapler makes a vacant click reminding me that it was devoid of pins since last week. Without even thinking twice I pick up the nearest stapler and the deed is done.

All the while Sonia was waiting armed with her spiral bound notebook, office supplied pen and the bloody same aloof expression. She had worn her usual black jumper and black trousers. As popular wisdom goes Black can be quite flattering for women wishing to look slim. Honestly, it hardly helped much on her 150 pound frame. I gave a tiny smile indicating that I’m ready. That smile got amplified, sugar coated, mixed with a hint of a yawn and flashed back to me in bright red lips. I tried to mildly joke something about the recently proliferation of reports. She chortled in her usually highly pitched tone, which almost startled me in mid motion.

“Would anybody from CHIRP apps join us?” she mouthed in her heavily south Brit accent.

“I suppose not. Neither Jennifer or Kiran accepted the meeting request. I guess they have no outstanding tasks this week.”

“Hmmm, I suppose they don’t. But we can still dial them up from the conference room”

I didn’t quite hear her last sentence. I guess her 3 inch heels rhythmically pounding the carpeted floor was drowning it. A short tuft of hair over her forehead kept vibrating in rhythm. Her exaggerated movement came to an abrupt stop. I reached out and punched the lift button.

She kept watching impatiently at the LED display of the lift. I looked though the bright window at the end of the alley. It was a warm day in London today and a perfect time to be outdoors. I could see a group of young identically dressed balle dancers by the streets walking to the nearby park. Some were leaping and spinning with graceful ease. Further across, little chubby English children played hopscotch or sat on seesaws in the park. A pale thin young woman was sitting against a short cherry tree and was half amused by her over enthusiastic chestnut coloured Doberman. Her cheerful face couldn’t hide her longing, but right now, the sun and her life looked bright.

The lift opened with a ring. As the doors slid open, a tall slender formally dressed black Brit rushed out. He was momentarily confused which way to turn. He chose right and decided to run. Sonia stepped in almost immediately. I dragged myself in. She lifted her manicured fingers all the way up to button 14. Thanks to the extra 3 inches she didn’t have to try too hard.

‘Kapil, going home for Diwali?’

I could almost feel the nausea now. ‘No’, I replied.

‘Hmm… why?’, she enquired

In a low voice I replied, ‘Not that many leaves left actually’

‘Bummer. Don’t worry, we can celebrate it over here this time.’

I looked at her face hoping she was joking. Hell, she wasn’t! After all it isn’t quite surprising actually. She looked unmistakable like any other Punjabi girl. Except perhaps for her bobbed silky looking hair dyed in psychedelic colours. Except perhaps for her near perfect south Brit accent. Except for her childhood, which perhaps had fleeting trips to Punjab once in a year, which would now be more of a repulsive memory of a poverty stricken country.

Of course she wasn’t an Indian. She wouldn’t know what it is like to be home at Diwali. More importantly she wouldn’t know what it is like not to be home at Diwali. An ignoramus. A cross cultural freak. A word that’s stripped of its etymology. Pathetic!

I tried to smile. She smiled back, this time more meaningfully. Did she actually peek into the mind of Kapil Sharma for a moment? I cannot say. Perhaps she did. Perhaps she did look a bit pretty now. She had wide telling eyes. I had forgotten.

The lift pulled itself to a halt. As I stepped outside I heard a familiar voice to my left. It was my project manager, Hari. Meticulously dressed in a cream pinstripe shirt and black blazer, he was slowly pacing about the walkway. To a casual observer, he could be seen as loudly talking and gesturing to an invisible person, almost like a lunatic. But, a thin wire dangling in front of him is the sole proof of his sanity. He must be speaking via his hands-free to his offshore project manager over a teleconference. His voice is barely audible but one can sense that things are not quite happy there.

As I walked the wire seemed more like a leash around Hari’s neck. The mobile he held in one hand seemed to have firmly held its other end. It seemed to have slowly tightened its grip on Hari, till his thickly mustached lips moved and muttered something out of sheer compulsion. He never saw me. I turned and realized Sonia was already entering the meeting room.

I entered the tiny room with a circular table and few plush plastic chairs. I handed over Sonia’s copy of the report to her. I placed my black notebook and tea on the mahogany table just next to her. I opened my notebook and leaved through the notes of all my earlier meetings. I found a blank page and scribbled down the date at the upper left corner. As I’m about to write, I’m now aware of a familiar feeling in me. I’m still wondering - which meeting is this?

In this seemingly infinite Web
Oh! young browser thou slips
In the middle of a thousand trips
Realising what was just
The apparent reality of pages
Is nothing but a veil of certainity
404 alone is the absolute reality
-Arun

So a visitor to your website mistypes a URL, what does he see? A nearly blank page with ‘404 error’ emblazoned over it? At least that was my case until I decided to do something about it.

So many great tutorials have been written on creating a 404 Error page. The best in my opinion is at SacramentoWeb. However, the solution the author has proposed leads the user to a search box already filled with a value by second guessing what the user tried to search for. I was looking for a 404 page that already has those results below the search box.

After some research, I finally hacked up some PHP code. The result can be already seen on my site and looks quite impressive. I mean I was quickly addicted to misusing the feature by performing random searches e.g. for hollywood stuff on my site I would try typing !!!

Here is a quick summary of what to do for any template to display these results:

1. If you haven’t modified your .htaccess file, then open it and copy paste the following as your first line

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404

2. Copy index.php from your template and rename it to 404.php in the same directory

3. Remove all sections dealing with posts or comments. Roughly the lines between < ?php if ( have_posts() ) and ``

4. Copy the following line to the first line of 404.php. This is to help search engine spiders indicate that this is an error page.

header(“HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found”);

5. You can write pretty much anything in this page. Or you can download my 404 page from here

6. Thats it!

Check out the results, I’m sure you (and your visitors) would be able appreciate the improvements in the browsing experience.

In my MBA days, sleep was considered a luxury. There were often too many group assignments and pre-reads to complete that 24 hours in a day seemed to too less (or rather unfair). In those days, you would find disheveled guys moving about the hostel hallways like zombies not in search of human blood but the nearest water cooler. The would either go back and bury their heads in a heavy tome-like textbook or sit in front of a PC and move the mouse pointer frantically about the computer screens. Some of us managed 4 hours of sleep while some had infrequent hour long (power-)naps. Most of us were quite convinced that there was a monumental amount of work unnecessarily piled up on us. So when there was a weekend or a party coming up, all the frustration seemed to be vented out there in the form of exaggerated expressions of celebrations. Indeed, anybody witnessing such an event would have misunderstood us as a bunch of gaol birds on a parole.

An Anomaly

But in the middle of all this, there was a guy whose waking hours shockingly resembled that of normal (non-MBA) people. Let’s call him Jeevi (loosely translated to Malayalam as creature). Jeevi has his dinner with everyone else at 8 pm in the evening. Nobody even notices him quietly slipping into his room after that. By 8:30, he is fast asleep. Jeevi is rarely seen in any of the birthday bumps celebrations that start appropriately at 12 midnight. In fact, everyone made most out of the opportunity when Jeevi’s roommate’s birthday came up. As it was customary, the roommate also receives the royal treatment at the rear end.

Everyone thought Jeevi was an oddity or some sort of anomaly. He seemed to finish all the assigned work to him like the rest of us. He was in fact having a very good academic record. He had a decent social life (despite being quite an introvert). All this felt somewhat weird and ridiculous to our minds. The question bothering us was - ‘Where did he get all that time?’ Harry Potter fans among us wondered if he processed a ‘Time-Turner’. Sci-Fi geeks propounded if he had a Time-Warp device. Whatever he had, Jeevi was always surrounded by an air of mystery around him.

Where Truth Lies

It is said that everyone loves a big fat lie. It often doesn’t matter whether it is the truth or a lie. It is just how often you hear it. Most of us lived in the myth that we never had enough time to work or study. While, in fact, we found ourselves mostly crippled by inaction because we were simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. Some experts call this Procrastination. It often happens to the best of people such as celebrities. Perhaps by the time you reach a top-notch B-school you are a bit of a celebrity yourself. Your tolerance for failure becomes really low. You wouldn’t want to do a shoddy job or rather embark into a territory you are least comfortable with. So you try to dodge at best or lay low as much as possible. But that is only as long as the deadline is not close. When the D day arrives, the inevitability of the deadline strikes you. It is then that your apparent productivity soars and the actual work starts getting done.

Most of also believed in another myth that we wasted a lot of time which could have been utilized for academic work. People tried hard to break their gaming addition or outings to squeeze more time out of the 24 hour cycle. But sadly the fungibility of time was another myth . This excellent article by Aaron written like a HOWTO debunks this myth. In fact, most of the MBA assignments required some degree of creativity which one is not prepared to give at all times. Also it is extremely boring (if not depressing) to be with books all the time. Personally, I took studies as just “one of the things” I had to do at college. And trust me, it works.

It would be unfair to generalize this to all management graduates. Some of them manage the course and extra curricular activities quite well. But they still live the lie and never forget to complain about the lack of time. But, as examples like Jeevi shows us so clearly that after all Einstein was right. Time is always relative to the observer ;)