Michael Crichton : Dragon Teeth

I have been fascinated by Crichton's writing since the day I started reading him. And the first book I read was of couse 'Jurassic Park'. The book was not available in my local library for years, so I read it about 6 years after I watched the movie. And I was surprised that only about one-third of the book made it into the movie. The book has more characters, more action, and a slightly different ending than the movie.

So it was clear to me that Crichton was not writing for the screen, although he can, if he wants. He is writing the most realistic version of what could have happened in his fictional world. And I was hooked. Over the next many years, I found out and read every fiction he wrote. Last I read was Pirate Latitudes.

So it was eye-opening when I found out about Dragon Teeth, which also deals with...Dinosaurs ! And it is clear that he wrote this book before he wrote Jurassic Park. Many ideas hinted upon in DG have been refined into JP. It is a fascinating read, not only because of the dinos, but because it is a mix of genres. It is a fictional travelogue, an american wild-west adventure, and a scientific expedition & rivalry all into one. Themes of wealth disparity , race differences and privilege are also touched upon. 

Crichton uses real historical people, Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope , two duelling palaeontologists who were active a century ago, in the plot to highlight all the various ideas in  the field at the time. These people were passionate about this field, they were trying to become the best by finding and naming the most number of dinosaur species. But they were also not averse to stealing each others finds, and causing harm in other ways, to stop or at least slow down their competition.

And into this duel is thrust a privileged young man, a student at Yale, who lost a bet and has to accompany Marsh to a dig site. Having never done a day's hard work in his life, this expedition into the wild west is something William Johnson cannot comprehend. With no respect or interest in the field of palaeontology, William has no idea why anyone would risk their lives to dig up these bones in the unexplored western America. And the journey ends up changing William forever, not only physically, but one can assume, mentally, on a psychological level. The book is about his journey, told in third person, across the many months he travels, gets lost, and finds his way back into civilisation , dragging crates of rocks with him. Useless for most, the rocks are priceless artefacts for the scientific community.

Crichton finds a way to merge two different worlds this way - the long lost era when these huge giants walked this planet, and also the recently lost world of the wild, wild american west. Sitting in the comfort of today's air conditioned homes, readers today would find both of these world equally distant. But we are indebted to these pioneers of palaeontology, who helped humanity better understand the world we now inhabit, for a very short time. 

Crichton also tries to explain the way of life of people back then, he spends paragraphs documenting what people wore, ate and how they spoke out there. For example he describes how photography worked back then. Before the invention of automatic cameras and photographic film, photography was achieved on bulky camera on glass plates. The equipment was faulty, and needed detailed knowledge of lighting, exposure, and the chemical treatment needed immediately after a glass plate was exposed. Today people take photography for granted, every phone sold today, even the most cheapest ones, feature an electronic camera, which automatically adjusts these parameters for the best results. Its had to fathom the first versions of photography, and the immense planning and work needed to capture the simplest pictures.

I don't think writers today write stories like these anymore. The work here is pure fiction, but the narration makes it sound like William Johnson really existed, and really had a life changing experience when he went on this journey. Marsh and Cope were real and they found brontosaurus fossils. The Earp brothers, Custer and  Sternberg are real as well.

Thank you, Michael Crichton. Thank you for taking with you on these travels. You will be missed.

Baar Baar Dekho

Finally got around watching this movie on Prime. With a good story, and better intentions, its surprising how it completely missed its point. Neither of the leads can act, and the dialogue and background music is completely pointless. Despite this, it turns a nice story, blatantly ripping off home Hollywood products.

I specially loved the scenes set in the past and in the future. The Delhi of the nineties, and the Cambridge and London of 2040s. They went to the extreme of imagining what living in the future will look like. A kind of utopia, with automation and AI around, but not too much. The movie brings in Indian melodrama and Indian ideas to a modern family life.

I couldn't help noticing some of the scenes were shot at Cambridge, and the very place Newton and Hawkins walked !

They could have surely have done a better job with better actors, and a crisper screenplay. Then people would have definitely "Baar Baar Dekho"d it.

The shwawarma

I can relate to this:

Technically called the “Shawarmah” by the locals it is God’s gift to the gourmand. Its something like a rolled up arabic bread with stuffing. Nowadays you get authentic Lebanese sandwich at every nook and corner. Back then you only got it in the old market at a few shops run by Iranians, or Indians. Outside each cafe-like setup, there’d be this guy sweating it out in front of a vertical grill. And sizzling away would be a vertical skewer of meat some 2 feet tall and a feet round. A huge chunk of it. The guy would deftly turn it around every few second so it would get roasted by the grill. “Thalatha Shawarma, Dejaj”. When Dad said the magic words, I died and went to heaven. Four sandwiches, chicken. Sweaty griller man would quickly pick up a huge knife and pick and shred off some grilled meat from the heavenly mega-kebab. The aroma still drives me wild…

Read the rest here.

The 21st Football-Acting Games

The Football-acting games is slowly and thankfully winding to its end. And what a spectacular show it was. Some of the best actors from international football teams have put up show a show, they leave actual actors in the dust ! As some might have expected, the top teams, the sure-shot winners have all been knocked out. And out there playing is a new breed of younger actors at the height of their games.

And I still don't get what the fuss is all about. For decades now, its not about how many goals a team can score. But how easily they can convince the referee of a foul play by the opposing team. How easily they can get a free-kick. Or a penalty strike. I am not a fan of the sport, but it has been hard ignoring it since 1997, when Roberto Carlos took that so-famous and un-expected goal from a free kick, 35 metres away from the post. Players have since figured out that with the newer , rounder and lighter footballs, it is better to just control it from a free kick and guide it into the box, then actually sweating it out on the field. Its a game of physics. And acting.

And while India is known for its movie industry, there seems to be a severe lack of actors on the field. While some actors have started playing cricket in the ICL, that is still cricket. India can only have a real shot at FIFA if they decide to take the acting games seriously, and focus on their craft (of acting), instead of actual sports. Or somehow come up with the money to host the games. You see, the host nation continue to receive and automatic berth.

Learn tumble diving from Neymar. Cry like Messi. And look good like that other Portugal player.

It was funny reading all the football analysis in leading Indian dailies. Young reporters giving sound advice like, this guy should have taken that side. The manager of that team chose the wrong midfielder. For a country which has never qualified for a FIFA cup, India sure has a lot of opinion about how masters should play their game.

But the games occasionally bring back memories. I was in college during the 2002 world cup. And got to observe the symptoms of football fever from close distance. The whole college was divided. Mainly into Argentina and Brazil fans. But also the occasional Portugal, or Germany fan. And as every evening, students would descend, without invitation, into homes of those who had television sets. Again, everybody had loud opinions. And it was the actors who won matches.  The dramatic dives would be laughed at during slow motion replays. How could the referee not call out that acting ?

We used to watch the match on grainy CRT televisions. It was summer, and hot and humid. And being Kerala, there were frequent power cuts. These usually resulted in a train of curses to the KSEB. There were no smart phones, so goals and movements were transmitted via short text messages to those who where travelling. I think there was some betting going on too, but I didn't see anyone losing money. After the matches, there were frequent replays, and excited news readers would relive the games through diction. And the next day, boy the next day, the newspaper would have a second round of explanation. With extra sheets for the games, football-watching-experts would dissect the match carefully, mansplaining how the match could not have ended any other way. Boys would get hold of different newspapers, and be sure to read every article essaying the matches. Sigh.

Now with only a few more games remaining, only the best actors/players are left in the game. The top contenders all being knocked out, it will be fun to watch rookies running the show. We Indians continue to watch it from the sidelines, as the greatest masters of the sport act it out.

I predict an England vs France final. :)

The BSBs are all grown up

Youtube just suggested me a new trending video, thought I would like it.

And I did. It was Jimmy Fallon and BSB performing 'I Want it that Way' with classroom toys.

I was instantly transported to the nineties again.

Over two decades later, the Backstreet Boys keep coming back. They are probably the only pop-artists from that era still releasing music and performing together, from what I hear, to sold out audiences. All grown up, with kids of their own, they can no longer be called a boy-band. It was a little painful for me watching the average 42 year olds dancing on stage. Still crying "babe, babe" into the mike like some teenager would do. But on the other hand, rock bands from the 70s are still peforming their best songs, so why not them.

In wise hindsight, its clear that they were more a product of rigorous marketing, than guys with actual talent. They could sing ,for sure. But they didn't have anything special in their voices. Somebody else wrote their songs. And somebody else produced the music. They just sang. What they had for them, was their looks. And that was what was marketed to the teenage audience of the time. I am sure everything from their costumes to make-up was planned and executed in advance. Each of the boys had a persona, a character they constantly played. Some of them played cute, while AJ and Kevin played and looked like mature ,bad guys. All the hats , and goggle and accessories, they were all part of that persona. Listening to their music, it was impossible to say who sang which part, because they all sounded the same. They played the characters of young boys in love, and that was the product.

But still, their songs have aged well, IMHO. Compared to the awful crap being released nowadays, BSB's music was slower and cleaner. It was designed for repeated radio play. This was before the internet hit us so strong, so people used to still buy music on CDs or listened to FM radio. Their music was also heavily pirated. I lost the pirated audio tape I had from their hit album Millenium. I used to wonder who in India would be sane enough to pay 125 rupees for an original disc of 7 songs, when music produced in India was selling for 30 to 50 rupees.

Over the years, I kept hearing of the band breaking up, someone going solo, but in the end they all stayed together. Some of their recent music has had a change of style ,and cannot compete with contemporary artists. A decade ago I had assumed they would disband in a few years and retire for good. And I think its high time they did retire, because again, they are  no longer boys. But it seems they still have an audience. We have aged along with them. And for us , who cannot digest conteporary hip-hop and dance music, BSB is the brand to follow.

I like it that way.

Id's Wizardy

All Images: ID Software

Over the last 12 years, the evolving realism of Id Software's graphics has set the bar for the industry. Among the games [bottom to top, left]: Commander Keen (1990); Hovertank (1991); Wolfenstein 3D (1992); Doom (1993); Quake (1996); and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001). Click on the image for a larger view.

It's after midnight when the carnage begins. Inside a castle, soldiers chase Nazis through the halls. A flame-thrower unfurls a hideous tongue of fire. This is Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a computer game that's as much a scientific marvel as it is a visceral adventure. It's also the latest product of Id Software (Mesquite, Texas). Through its technologically innovative games, Id has had a huge influence on everyday computing, from the high-speed, high-color, and high-resolution graphics cards common in today's PCs to the marshalling of an army of on-line game programmers and players who have helped shape popular culture.

Id shot to prominence 10 years ago with the release of its original kill-the-Nazis-and-escape game, Wolfenstein 3D. It and its successors, Doom and Quake, cast players as endangered foot soldiers, racing through mazes while fighting monsters or, if they so chose, each other. To bring these games to the consumer PC and establish Id as the market leader required skill at simplifying difficult graphics problems and cunning in exploiting on-going improvements in computer graphics cards, processing power, and memory size [see illustration, Driven]. To date, their games have earned over US $150 million in sales, according to The NPD Group, a New York City market research firm.

It all began with a guy named Mario

The company owes much of its success to advances made by John Carmack, its 31-year-old lead programmer and cofounder who has been programming games since he was a teenager.

Back in the late 1980s, the electronic gaming industry was dominated by dedicated video game consoles. Most game software was distributed in cartridges, which slotted into the consoles, and as a consequence, writing games required expensive development systems and corporate backing.

The only alternative was home computer game programming, an underworld in which amateurs could develop and distribute software. Writing games for the low-powered machines required only programming skill and a love of gaming.

Four guys with that passion were artist Adrian Carmack; programmer John Carmack (no relation); game designer Tom Hall; and programmer John Romero. While working together at Softdisk (Shreveport, La.), a small software publisher, these inveterate gamers began moonlighting on their own titles.

At the time, the PC was still largely viewed as being for business only. It had, after all, only a handful of screen colors and squeaked out sounds through a tiny tinny speaker. Nonetheless, the Softdisk gamers figured this was enough to start using the PC as a games platform.

First, hey decided to see if they could recreate on a PC the gaming industry's biggest hit at the time, Super Mario Brothers 3. This two-dimensional game ran on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which drove a regular television screen. The object was to make a mustached plumber, named Mario, leap over platforms and dodge hazards while running across a landscape below a blue sky strewn with puffy clouds. As Mario ran, the terrain scrolled from side to side to keep him more or less in the middle of the screen. To get the graphics performance required, the Nintendo console resorted to dedicated hardware. "We had clear examples of console games [like Mario] that did smooth scrolling," John Carmack says, "but [in 1990] no one had done it on an IBM PC."

After a few nights of experimentation, Carmack figured out how to emulate the side-scrolling action on a PC. In the game, the screen image was drawn, or rendered, by assembling an array of 16-by-16-pixel tiles. Usually the on-screen background took over 200 of these square tiles, a blue sky tile here, a cloud tile there, and so on. Graphics for active elements, such as Mario, were then drawn on top of the background.

Any attempt to redraw the entire background every frame resulted in a game that ran too slowly, so Carmack figured out how to have to redraw only a handful of tiles every frame, speeding the game up immensely. His technique relied on a new type of graphics card that had become available, and the observation that the player's movement occurred incrementally, so most of the next frame's scenery had already been drawn.

The new graphics cards were known as Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) cards. They had more on-board video memory than the earlier Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) cards and could display 16 colors at once, instead of four. For Carmack, the extra memory had two important consequences. First, while intended for a single relatively high-resolution screen image, the card's memory could hold several video screens' worth of low-resolution images, typically 300 by 200 pixels, simultaneously, good enough for video games. By pointing to different video memory addresses, the card could switch which image was being sent to the screen at around 60 times a second, allowing smooth animation without annoying flicker. Second, the card could move data around in its video memory much faster than image data could be copied from the PC's main memory to the card, eliminating a major graphics performance bottleneck.

Carmack wrote a so-called graphics display engine that exploited both properties to the full by using a technique that had been originally developed in the 1970s for scrolling over large images, such as satellite photographs. First, he assembled a complete screen in video memory, tile by tile--plus a border one tile wide [see illustration, "Scrolling With the Action" ]. If the player moved one pixel in any direction, the display engine moved the origin of the image it sent to the screen by one pixel in the corresponding direction. No new tiles had to be drawn. When the player's movements finally pushed the screen image to the outer edge of a border, the engine still did not redraw most of the screen. Instead, it copied most of the existing image--the part that would remain constant--into another portion of video memory. Then it added the new tiles and moved the origin of the screen display so that it pointed to the new image .

Scrolling With the Action: For two-dimensional scrolling in his PC game, programmer John Carmack cheated a little by not always redrawing the background. He built the background of graphical tiles stored in video memory [left] but only sent part of the image to the screen [top left, inside orange border]. As the play character [yellow circle] moved, the background sent to the screen was adjusted to include tiles outside the border [see top right]. New background elements would be needed only after a shift of one tile width. Then, most of the background was copied to another region of video memory [see bottom right], and the screen image centered in the new background.

In short, rather than having the PC redraw tens of thousands of pixels every time the player moved, the engine usually had to change only a single memory address--the one that indicated the origin of the screen image--or, at worst, draw a relatively thin strip of pixels for the new tiles. So the PC's CPU was left with plenty of time for other tasks, such as drawing and animating the game's moving platforms, hostile characters, and the other active elements with which the player interacted.

Hall and Carmack knocked up a Mario clone for the PC, which they dubbed Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. But Softdisk, their employer, had no interest in publishing what were then high-end EGA games, preferring to stick with the market for CGA applications. So the nascent Id Software company went into moonlight overdrive, using the technology to create its own side-scrolling PC game called Commander Keen. When it came time to release the game, they hooked up with game publisher Scott Miller, who urged them to go with a distribution plan that was as novel as their technology: shareware.

In the 1980s, hackers started making their programs available through shareware, which relied on an honor code: try it and if you like it, pay me. But it had been used only for utilitarian programs like file tools or word processors. The next frontier, Miller suggested, was games. Instead of giving away the entire game, he said, why not give out only the first portion, then make the player buy the rest? Id agreed to let Miller's company, Apogee, release the game. Prior to Commander Keen, Apogee's most popular shareware game had sold a few thousand copies. Within months of Keen's release in December 1990, the game had sold 30 000 copies. For the burgeoning world of PC games, Miller recalls, "it was a little atom bomb."

Going for depth

Meanwhile programmer Carmack was again pushing the graphics envelope. He had been experimenting with 3-D graphics ever since junior high school, when he produced wire-frame MTV logos on his Apple II. Since then, several game creators had experimented with first-person 3-D points of view, where the flat tiles of 2-D games are replaced by polygons forming the surfaces of the player's surrounding environment. The player no longer felt outside, looking in on the game's world, but saw it as if from the inside.

The results had been mixed, though. The PC was simply too slow to redraw detailed 3-D scenes as the player's position shifted. It had to draw lots of surfaces for each and every frame sent to the screen, including many that would be obscured by other surfaces closer to the player.

Carmack had an idea that would let the computer draw only those surfaces that were seen by the player. "If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach," he says, "you can almost always do something better."

So he chose not to address the general problem of drawing arbitrary polygons that could be positioned anywhere in space, but designed a program that would draw only trapezoids. His concern at this time was with walls (which are shaped like trapezoids in 3-D), not ceilings or floors.

For his program, Carmack simplified a technique for rendering realistic images on then high-end systems. In raycasting, as it is called, the computer draws scenes by extending lines from the player's position in the direction he or she is facing. When it strikes a surface, the pixel corresponding to that line on the player's screen is painted the appropriate color. None of the computer's time is wasted on drawing surfaces that would never be seen anyway. By only drawing walls, Carmack could raycast scenes very quickly.

Carmack's final challenge was to furnish his 3-D world with treasure chests, hostile characters, and other objects. Once again, he simplified the task, this time by using 2-D graphical icons, known as sprites. He got the computer to scale the size of the sprite, depending on the player's location, so that he did not have to model the objects as 3-D figures, a task that would have slowed the game painfully. By combining sprites with raycasting, Carmack was able to place players in a fast-moving 3-D world. The upshot was Hovertank, released in April 1991. It was the first fast-action 3-D first-person action shooter for the PC.

Around this time, fellow programmer Romero heard about a new graphics technique called texture mapping. In this technique, realistic textures are applied to surfaces in place of their formerly flat, solid colors. in green slime in its next game, Catacombs 3D. While running through a maze, the player shot fireballs at enemy figures using another novelty--a hand drawn in the lower center of the screen. It was as if the player were looking down on his or her own hand, reaching into the computer screen. By including the hand in Catacombs 3D, Id Software was making a subtle, but strong, psychological point to its audience: you are not just playing the game--you're part of it.

Instant sensation

For Id's next game, Wolfenstein 3D, Carmack refined his code. A key decision ensured the graphics engine had as little work to do as possible: to make the walls even easier to draw, they would all be the same height.

This speeded up raycasting immensely. In normal raycasting, one line is projected through space for every pixel displayed. A 320-by-200-pixel screen image of the type common at the time required 64 000 lines. But because Carmack's walls were uniform from top to bottom, he had to raycast along only one horizontal plane, just 320 lines [see diagram, Raycasting 3-D Rooms].

Raycasting 3-D Rooms: To quickly draw three-dimensional rooms without drawing obscured and thus unnecessary surfaces, Carmack used a simplified form of raycasting, a technique used to reate realistic 3-D images. In raycasting, the computer draws scenes by extending lines from the player's viewpoint [top], through an imaginary grid, so that they strike the surfaces the player sees; only these surfaces get drawn.
Carmack simplified things by keeping all the walls the same height. This allowed him to extend the rays from the player in just a single horizontal 2-D plan [middle] and scale the apparent height of the wall according to its distance from the player, instead of determining every point on the wall individually. The result is the final 3-D image of the walls [bottom]. Click on image for larger view.

With Carmack's graphics engine now blazingly fast, Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Hall set about creating a brutal game in which an American G.I. had to mow down Nazis while negotiating a series of maze-based levels. Upon its release in May 1992, Wolfenstein 3D was an instant sensation and became something of a benchmark for PCs. When Intel wanted to demonstrate the performance of its new Pentium chip to reporters, it showed them a system running Wolfenstein.

Wolfenstein also empowered gamers in unexpected ways--they could modify the game with their own levels and graphics. Instead of a Nazi officer, players could, for example, substitute Barney, the purple dinosaur star of U.S. children's television. Carmack and Romero made no attempt to sue the creators of these mutated versions of Wolfenstein, for, as hackers themselves, they couldn't have been more pleased.

Their next game, Doom, incorporated two important effects Carmack had experimented with in working on another game, Shadowcaster, for a company called Raven in 1992. One was to apply texture mapping to floors and ceilings, as well as to walls. Another was to add diminished lighting. Diminished lighting meant that, as in real life, distant vistas would recede into shadows, whereas in Wolfenstein, every room was brightly lit, with no variation in hue.

By this time, Carmack was programming for the Video Graphics Adapter (VGA) cards that had supplanted the EGA cards. VGA allowed 256 colors--a big step up from EGA's 16, but still a limited range that made it a challenge to incorporate all the shading needed for diminished lighting effects.

The solution was to restrict the palette used for the game's graphics, so that 16 shades of each of 16 colors could be accommodated. Carmack then programmed the computer to display different shades based on the player's location within a room. The darkest hues of a color were applied to far sections of a room; nearer surfaces would always be brighter than those farther away. This added to the moody atmosphere of the game.

Both Carmack and Romero were eager to break away from the simple designs used in the levels of their earlier games. "My whole thing was--let's not do anything that Wolfenstein does," Romero says. "Let's not have the same light levels, let's not have the same ceiling heights, let's not have walls that are 90 degrees [to each other]. Let's show off Carmack's new technology by making everything look different."

Profiting from improvements in computer speed and memory, Carmack began working on how to draw polygons with more arbitrary shapes than Wolfenstein's trapezoids. "It was looking like [the graphics engine] wouldn't be fast enough," he recalls, "so we had to come up with a new approach....I knew that to be fast, we still had to have strictly horizontal floors and vertical walls." The answer was a technique known as binary space partitioning (BSP). Henry Fuchs, Zvi Kedem, and Bruce Naylor had popularized BSP techniques in 1980 while at Bell Labs to render 3-D models of objects on screen.

A fundamental problem in converting a 3-D model of an object into an on-screen image is determining which surfaces are actually visible, which boils down to calculating: is surface Y in front of, or behind, surface X? Traditionally, this calculation was done any time the model changed orientation.

The BSP approach depended on the observation that the model itself is static, and although different views give rise to different images, there is no change in the relationships between its surfaces. BSP allowed the relationships to be determined once and then stored in such a way that determining which surfaces hid other surfaces from any arbitrary viewpoint was a matter of looking up the information, not calculating it anew.

BSP takes the space occupied by the model and partitions it into two sections. If either section contains more than one surface of the model, it is divided again, until the space is completely broken up into sections each containing one surface. The branching hierarchy that results is called a BSP tree and extends all the way from the initial partition of the space down to the individual elements. By following a particular path through the nodes of the stored tree, it is possible to generate key information about the relationships between surfaces in a specific view of the model.

What if, Carmack wondered, you could use a BSP to create not just one 3-D model of an object, but an entire virtual world? Again, he made the problem simpler by imposing a constraint: walls had to be vertical and floors and ceilings horizontal. BSP could then be used to divide up not the 3-D space itself, but a much simpler 2-D plan view of that space and still provide all the important information about which surfaces were in front of which [see diagram, Divide and Conquer].

Illustration: Armand Veneziano

Divide and Conquer: "Doom treated [the surfaces of the 3-D world] all as lines," Carmack says, "cutting lines and sorting lines is so much easier than sorting polygons....The whole point was taking BSP [trees] and applying them to...a plane, instead of to polygons in a 3-D world, which let it be drastically simpler."Click on the image for a larger view.

Doom was also designed to make it easy for hackers to extend the game by adding their own graphics and game-level designs. Networking was added to Doom, allowing play between multiple players over a local-area network and modem-to-modem competition.

The game was released in December 1993. Between the multiplayer option, the extensibility, the riveting 3-D graphics, and the cleverly designed levels, which cast the player as a futuristic space marine fighting against the legions of hell, it became a phenomenon. Doom II, the sequel, featured more weapons and new levels but used the same graphics engine. It was released in October 1994 and eventually sold more than 1 500 000 copies at about $50 each; according to the NPD Group, it remains the third best-selling computer game in history.

The finish line

In the mid-1990s, Carmack felt that PC technology had advanced far enough for him to finally achieve two specific goals for his next game, Quake. He wanted to create an arbitrary 3-D world in which true 3-D objects could be viewed from any angle, unlike the flat sprites in Doom and Wolfenstein. The solution was to use the power of the latest generation of PCs to use BSP to chop up the volume of a true 3-D space, rather than just areas of a 2-D plan view. He also wanted to make a game that could be played over the Internet.

For Internet play, a client-server architecture was used. The server--which could be run on any PC--would handle the game environment consisting of rooms, the physics of moving objects, player positions, and so on. Meanwhile, the client PC would be responsible for both the input, through the player's keyboard and mouse, and the output, in the form of graphics and sound. Being online, however, the game was liable to lags and lapses in network packet deliveries--just the thing to screw up a fast action game. To reduce the problem, Id limited the packet delivery method to only the most necessary information, such as a player's position.

"The key point was use of an unreliable transport for all communication," Carmack says, "taking advantage of continuous packet communication and [relaxing] the normal requirements for reliable delivery," such as handshaking and error correction. A variety of data compression methods were also used to reduce the bandwidth. The multiplayer friendliness of the game that emerged--Quake--was rewarded by the emergence of a huge online community when it was released in June 1996.

Looking good

Games in general drove the evolution of video cards. But multiplayer games in particular created an insatiable demand for better graphics systems, providing a market for even the most incremental advance. Business users are not concerned if the graphics card they are using to view their e-mail updates the screen 8 times a second while their neighbor's card allows 10 updates a second. But a gamer playing Quake, in which the difference between killing or being killed is measured in tenths of a second, very much cares.

Quake soon became the de facto benchmark for the consumer graphics card industry. Says David Kirk, chief scientist of NVIDIA, a leading graphics processor manufacturer in Santa Clara, Calif., "Id Software's games always push the envelope."

Quake II improved on its predecessor by taking advantage of hardware acceleration that might be present in a PC, allowing much of the work of rendering 3-D scenes to be moved from the CPU to the video card. Quake III, released in December 1999, went a step further and became the first high-profile game to require hardware acceleration, much as Id had been willing to burn its boats in 1990 by insisting on EGA over CGA with Commander Keen.

Carmack himself feels that his real innovations peaked with Quake in 1996. Everything since, he says, is essentially refining a theme. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in fact, was based on the Quake III engine, with much of the level and game logic development work being done by an outside company.

"There were critical points in the evolution of this stuff," Carmack says, "getting into first person at all, then getting into arbitrary 3-D, and then getting into hardware acceleration....But the critical goals have been met. There's still infinite refinement that we can do on all these different things, but...we can build an arbitrary representational world at some level of fidelity. We can be improving our fidelity and our special effects and all that. But we have the fundamental tools necessary to be doing games that are a simulation of the world."

Media wars

One can’t turn on the television nowadays. Its full of crap. Nonsense. News, but with the heat turned up full, it hurts. I don’t watch own or watch the TV anymore, but they do have TVs running in public areas. And everytime I watch it, I am reminded why I decided to dump the idiot box.

 

Turns out , there are some new players in the ever growing media wars. New news channels. And one only need to watch 5 seconds of their coverage to understand that they are no worse than the drug peddler on the street. The screen is full of bold texts, shouting out the same thing over and over again.  The same footage is replayed until it gets cemented in your head.  They quote a lot of people, he said, she said..but very little fact. In fact, they have reported incorrect or outdated news many times in the past.

 

 

 

And now I see the same thing happening down south, in the coverage of a trending news topic. The case is not yet in court, but the media have already announced their verdict.

 

 

If this is the fact, then the fiction part is even worse.  TV serials and reality programming have flooded channels, with multiple repeats throughout the day. I hear the focus has now shifted from saas-bahu serials to ghosts and black magic !

 

And while things are a little better on youtube, lots of new programming and original content there, things are going darker there too. The same media companies have taken to online video channels and spread there.

 

 

I long for the day when a calm news reader simply read the day’s news with minimal expression. I think they still do that on doordarshan, have to check. I long for those simple television programming from the 90s, where really talented artistes came together to tell a story. Sigh !

 

Remember Winamp ?

 

Today I came across a little older article, documenting the demise of Winamp. Remember Winamp ? Awww..man. During the last decade , it was the default MP3 player installed on every Windows machine ! With billions of skins , visualizations and other add-ons, it made every other MP3 player look lame. There were skinning tools, which could be used to create custom skins from photos. There were even tools to automate and control Winamp via bluetooth connections. And then, Web 2.0 happened. And portable mp3 players (cd/usb). And at the end..affordable smartphones. People no longer turn on their desktops to listen to music. They just get it online, and stream it via modern HTML5 browsers. Can’t believe its been more than15 years since Winamp came out.

It was fun going back in time, and sad reading about how mis-management tool Winamp down.

 

Puttaakee puttakkee, karimeen puttaakkee

 

I miss the 90s again. Those were fun times.

India’s obsession with crimes committed by software engineers

 

A long overdue and awesome article has come up on Bloomberg. About the media craze behind ‘techie’ crimes in India. Specially, in Bangalore. It also hints to the kind of resentment the locals have towards ‘techie’ outsiders

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prachi Das was murdered on a Monday. The killer, a friend of her husband’s named Basudev Jena, showed up at her apartment in Bangalore on March 2, 2015, in hopes she would help him with his debts. Jena hadn’t meant to hurt Das, he later told the police, but he lost his temper when she refused to lend him money. He tried to tear away her necklace, and when Das screamed he cut her throat. The landlady stopped him in the hallway as he tried to flee, his shirt stained with blood.

In India, print newspapers thrive as if it were 1995. They’re numerous and energetic, and they rush to the scene of a good story. Das’s murder was a sensation, and each publication did what it could to distinguish its coverage. The Indian Express dwelt on the meaning of a carton of ice cream found melting near her body, and the Times of India floated an alternate theory of the crime, speculating that Das had screamed because she saw a rat, leading Jena to panic. But all the papers agreed on the overriding importance of a single, seemingly inconsequential detail: Both Jena and Das’s husband were software engineers. Or, as the profession is known in India, they were techies.

“TECHIE’S WIFE MURDERED” read the headlines in both the Hindu and the Bangalore Mirror. “TECHIE STABS FRIEND’S WIFE TO DEATH” ran in the Deccan Herald. To read the Indian newspapers regularly is to believe the software engineer is the country’s most cursed figure. Almost every edition carries a gruesome story involving a techie accused of homicide, rape, burglary, blackmail, assault, injury, suicide, or another crime. When techies are the victims, it’s just as newsworthy. The Times of India, the country’s largest English-language paper, has carried “TECHIE DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT” and “MAN HELD FOR PUSHING TECHIE FROM TRAIN”; in the Hindu, readers found “TEACHER CHOPS OFF FINGERS OF TECHIE HUSBAND” and “TECHIE DIED AFTER BEING FORCE-FED CYANIDE.” A long-standing journalistic adage says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” In India, if it codes, it explodes.

The epicenter of techie tragedy is Bangalore, a city in the southern state of Karnataka that bills itself as India’s Silicon Valley. Bangalore has more startups than any other city in the country and is home to Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle, in addition to big domestic information technology companies such as Infosys and Wipro. More than 10 percent of Bangalore’s 10.5 million residents work in tech, giving journalists plenty of unfortunate events to sensationalize: “ASSAULT OVER BANANA SPLIT: 3 TECHIES HELD”; “DEPRESSED BANGALORE TECHIE INJURES 24 IN SWORD ATTACK SPREE.”

The resentment implicit in techie headlines occasionally spills over into actual violence

When I visited the city in September, the Bangaloreans I met fondly recounted their favorite techie stories from the local press. One involved a couple whose nanny secretly rented out their baby to street beggars. Another featured a software engineer who pretended to be an astrologer to trick his wife into confessing infidelity, then bludgeoned her to death with a religious idol and, for good measure, called in bomb threats to the airport pretending to be the husband of an ex-girlfriend with whom he hoped to get back together.

Reddit users recently observed that the “Indian techie” has become like the “Florida man” meme in America: an archetype of incompetent criminality and hapless violence. But in India, the techie is also celebrated as a symbol of the country’s ascendancy in the global economy. “In a society where there are no heroes, techies are the only heroes,” said Mohandas Pai, a venture capitalist, in his corner office on the top floor of a building near Bangalore’s central park. “A techie is a person you look up to with great respect,” he said, adding that the media’s sordid stories “are just sensationalizing.”

Even if that’s true, the coverage resonates with readers. The resentment implicit in techie headlines occasionally spills over into actual violence. On Sept. 12, riots broke out across Bangalore after a court ordered Karnataka to share water with a neighboring state. Thirsty mobs targeted the well-kept Oracle office, which had to be evacuated, as well as eight Infosys employee buses, whose passengers were forced to walk home under a hail of stones.

Technology was supposed to deliver India from poverty, but in Bangalore it’s also deepened the division between rich and poor, young and old, modern and traditional. As the city has grown richer, it’s also become unruly and unfamiliar. If the tech worker is the star of the Indian economy, then the techie is his shadow—spoiled, untrustworthy, adulterous, depressed, and sometimes just plain senseless. (“TECHIE WITH EARPHONES RUN OVER BY TRAIN.”) In one occupational boogeyman, Bangaloreans can see their future and their fears.

Hundred Feet Road runs through Indiranagar, a once-quiet neighborhood that’s now the center of the Bangalore tech scene. It feels as if someone diverted a highway through a shopping mall. Shops and restaurants crowd the sidewalks like spectators at a parade, and rooftop pubs crank their music to drown the clamor from the street. People complain that Bangalore’s traffic is the worst in India, and the eight lanes of Hundred Feet Road often come to a standstill as drivers, trying to get somewhere as quickly as possible, make it impossible for anyone to get anywhere at all. Only the cows, headed nowhere, enjoy the right of way.

Across from an Adidas shop, Chiranjiv Singh, the former development commissioner of Karnataka state, lives in a small but verdant plot—a sliver of the wilderness he found when he moved there 40 years ago. The land was a coconut grove then, and a few tall trees still lend his home their shade. The birds and monkeys have stopped visiting, though, and Singh, a soft-spoken Sikh with a long and coarse beard, expects he will leave soon, too: “I don’t know how long we can continue here because of all this noise.”

Bangalore gridlock: Natives bitterly complain about the role of techies in crippling the city’s infrastructure.

Photograph: Kuni Takahashi/The New York Times via Redux

Bangalore used to be known as the Garden City. It was a medium-size, middle-class metropolis in one of the few areas of India that didn’t broil in summertime. Colonial bungalows nestled among flower beds, old trees, and pristine lakes. “I have discussed the subject of Bangalore with persons in other parts of India and have found that 90 out of a hundred dream of settling down in Bangalore, after retirement,” the novelist R.K. Narayan wrote in 1977. Another nickname for the city was the Pensioner’s Paradise.

Bangalore’s makeover began in the 1980s. Previously a center of textiles, aerospace, and electronics, the city became an outsourcing hub as undersea fiber-optic cables made it possible for U.S. and European corporations to offshore IT work. Texas Instruments opened a software-design center there in 1985; Infosys, an omnibus software and services provider, went public in 1993; and three years later a local coder invented Hotmail. By the turn of the century, Bangalore had established a reputation for coding quality software at low cost, and corporations hired the city’s engineers en masse to guard their systems against the Y2K bug. Bangalore inspired Thomas Friedman’s 2005 best-seller on globalization, The World Is Flat.

From 1981 to 2001, Bangalore doubled its population, to 5.7 million. The invaders had a name. “We had a new occupational category emerge: the IT engineer,” said Balaji Parthasarathy, a professor at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore. IT engineers brought a lot of benefits. Real income grew much faster in Bangalore than in other parts of India, and the city became the country’s main link to the economies of the West. “We have more connections with Silicon Valley than with Delhi,” said Pai. “Bangalore is India’s only global city.”

But the IT engineers lived differently from the pensioners and other longtime residents. They spoke English, not the native Kannada, and lived in gated condominium towers with pools and fitness clubs rather than in traditional bungalows. They worked in amenity-rich office parks, shopped in designer malls, ate at Western chain restaurants, and socialized in posh microbreweries. And their strange habits were chronicled by the booming local press.

The word “techie” first appeared in newspaper headlines in the 1990s simply because it was shorter than “software engineer.” Readers loved the stories, and editors soon went out of their way to assign them. “The news value of anything to do with a techie seems to be more,” said B. Pradeep Nair, the news editor of the Hindu, in his office, as that day’s edition was being put to bed. Media consultant Imran Qureshi recalled a story he covered 15 years ago about a married couple in Chennai who were producing child pornography. That in itself wasn’t scandalous enough to make the story a sensation. “It became a headline story because the man happened to be an IT professional,” Qureshi said.

Today, Indian journalists apply the word “techie” to anyone remotely connected to the IT industry. Some headlines imply that techies are more important than other people, such as “TECHIE AMONG THREE BURNT ALIVE IN GARUDA BUS MISHAP.” Other stories tell of incidents so minor they seem to exist only so the journalist can use the word. The Herald recently reported on a techie who had stepped on a “brittle footpath slab” and suffered “swelling in his leg.”

The close scrutiny makes the techie seem alien, like a strange specimen in a cage. “When we use ‘techie,’ it is a bit of a local-vs.-outsider thing,” said Ravi Joshi, editor of the Bangalore Mirror, in his newsroom. “It is basically the profession that does not belong here.”

One afternoon in Bangalore, my Uber driver, Chethan J., invited me to join him in the front seat of the car. (Many Indians use a single name, or mononym, sometimes with an initial.) We were in the center lane of one of the city’s busiest roads, which meant, of course, that we weren’t moving. Chethan is 22, with thick black hair and a mustache grown long at the tips. Thinking to myself, When in Bangalore, do as Thomas Friedman does, I asked him for a driver’s-eye view of tech workers. Chethan’s mood darkened. “They are coming and destroying our culture,” he said. Industry boosters are fond of saying that each tech job creates anywhere from 3 to 10 support jobs in the city, but Chethan had no affection for the engineers he ferried around all day. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics and joined Uber only when he couldn’t find a better-paying job. “The locals are servants,” he said. “All of Bangalore is going bad.”

The tech boom that was supposed to profit the city has made daily life harder. Bangalore’s population has doubled again since 2000, buckling the local infrastructure. There are more than 6 million vehicles, and the average driving speed in the city center is below 6 miles per hour, meaning it would be faster for everyone to jog slowly than to drive. During the initial IT boom, the portion of Bangalore’s population living in slums doubled. Blackouts became daily occurrences, and road-widening projects destroyed parks and trees without decongesting the streets. Money flooded in, but the lakes dried up—of the 900 the city once counted, fewer than 200 are still considered “live,” and most of those are filled with sewage. In October, thousands protested in the streets over plans to build a multibillion-dollar elevated bypass connecting the Bangalore airport to the city center. Demonstrators argued the project would benefit the jet-setting elite but do little to help poorer residents who spend hours every day in gridlock.

“They’re always before the system. It makes them behave like a beast, almost”

Frustration was palpable all over Bangalore. A kindly older man named Vijay Thiruvady, who leads tours of the botanical gardens and Cubbon Park, the city’s largest remaining green spaces, rued the failure of the IT industry and government to coordinate the growth. “The tech boom has completely changed the city. They’ve ruined it,” he said, as we sat in yet another traffic jam. “I’m going to use a strong term,” he warned, before cursing another motorist as “a stupid fellow.” Then he resumed grousing about techies.

“With the coming of the techies, you can see the traffic, you can see the road rage, you can see the problems with infrastructure, you can see trees being cut everywhere,” said Narayanan Krishnaswami, a reporter with the Times of India. “For a lot of people, that is a repudiation of what the city used to be. And they trace it back to the cause of the prosperity, which is the tech sector.”

One of the main appeals of the newspapers’ techie coverage is schadenfreude. “When a techie falls, everyone is secretly happy,” said Joshi, the Mirror editor. Techies arriving from across India are assumed to be more interested in the Western lifestyles of the modern workplace than the local culture of their new city. They tend to live away from their parents, drink alcohol, spend money freely, travel abroad, keep strange hours (because they work on the schedules of U.S. and European clients), and choose “love marriages” over traditional arranged ones.

Someone who suspects tech workers of immorality would find plenty of grist in the newspapers, where techies are frequently killing their spouses and having affairs. Such stories sometimes implicate the victim in his fate. An article might note, for example, that the parents of a woman whose techie husband killed her had disapproved of the marriage, or that a techie killed himself after a “trivial” argument with his wife.

Taken together, the stories can read like morality plays. They assuage a reader’s envy by suggesting that a tech worker’s material wealth conceals a deeper poverty. “If a techie can commit suicide or kill his own wife,” said Sahana Udupa, a social anthropologist who previously worked as a journalist in Bangalore, “it says something about the stress, something about the depression, something about their loose morals.”

I thought it unlikely that tech workers were genuinely troublesome, so I visited the Bangalore police headquarters to ask for an official perspective. Bureaucracies in India like to unfurl themselves before visitors, and the police commissioner on the first floor referred me to an additional police commissioner down the hall, who referred me to a deputy police commissioner on the fifth floor, who was so thrilled by my visit that he paused our interview midway to take my photo with his phone. His name was M.G. Nagendra Kumar, and a few years earlier he had studied crimes involving software engineers. He concluded that the techie “lacked the general thinking of other common people,” he told me. “His mind works like a computer machine.”

Kumar said the techie’s long hours in front of a PC could make him dangerously impatient: “He wants life to go at internet speed.” At a busy intersection, a techie wouldn’t wait for the signal. “Only techies are the deceased in road accident cases,” Kumar said. And at home, a techie might grow angry and violent with a wife or family member who didn’t follow commands automatically like his computer. At this point, a police inspector named Kanakalakshmi (also a mononym), who’d been sitting quietly beside me in Kumar’s office, spoke up. “They’re always before the system,” she said. “It makes them behave like a beast, almost.”

India’s largest IT companies, including Wipro, draw young workers whose ways are often at odds with local tradition.

Photographer: Altaf Qadri/AP

Kanakalakshmi produced two spreadsheets. The first listed 139 cases since 2010 in which a software engineer had been accused of a crime; the second listed 297 cases, excluding petty thefts, in which a software engineer had filed a complaint. Neither sum really suggested a crime wave in a city with more than 1 million tech workers, and it was hard to make sense of the statistics. The translation from Kannada to English had rendered many case descriptions unintelligible, and the spreadsheets seemed to exclude certain cases I’d read about in the papers while listing others twice.

It was nevertheless interesting that the most common complaint by far was a spouse alleging mental and physical harassment (in some cases, the police use the word “torture”), often in connection to a dowry dispute. The clash between the traditional expectations of Indian culture and the demands of modern professional lives doesn’t only shape the relationship between techies and the rest of the city, it also plays out in tech workers’ private lives. “Social liberalization hasn’t kept pace with economic liberalization,” said Asha Rai, a senior editor at the Times of India. “The values they imbibe at the workplace and when they travel are in conflict when they come home.”

I wasn’t attacked by sword, pushed from a train, force-fed cyanide, tortured, or otherwise harmed by any of the techies I met in Bangalore. I was introduced to coders, startup founders, investors, and engineers, including a group that was building a moon lander for Google’s Lunar X Prize competition. A robotics specialist from IBM named Aswin Subramanian gave me a tour of Whitefield, a tech district, in his race car and then invited me to his home, where he played Yanni songs on a keyboard. (OK, perhaps there was some torture.)

Techies in Bangalore extol a strain of utopianism similar to that found in Silicon Valley. “Eventually everything will be solved by tech,” said Mukund Jha, the co-founder of Dunzo, a concierge app that lets users hire a runner to carry out almost any task for a few dozen rupees—less than a dollar. At the moment, a Dunzo runner was fetching him a coffee from Starbucks; he’d also used the service to repair the cracked screen of his iPhone and install pigeon nets on his balcony at home. Customers have used Dunzo to retrieve lost phone chargers, deliver birthday cakes, purchase toilet paper, and check whether a shop is open. “Once you get started, you get hooked to it,” Jha said. “On a good day, you can get anything you want within 10 minutes.”

Dunzo is incredibly useful in a city where completing simple tasks grows harder by the day. But the app also indicates how technology further cocoons the privileged from the rest of the city. Dunzo’s founders say they hope their app will trickle down to the masses, but they’ve targeted early builds at the elite. “We haven’t seen a single request which is non-English,” Jha said.

Although tech has offered millions of young Indians a ladder out of poverty, there’s also concern that it will soon eliminate jobs instead of creating them. At IBM, Subramanian was designing robots for use in automation. (He recently left the company.) Dunzo is working to build artificial intelligence that would eventually replace much of its operations staff. Wipro and Infosys, the IT companies that most symbolize Bangalore’s tech industry, replaced 8,200 human jobs last summer with software. Tej Pochiraju, the managing director of Jaaga Startup, which bills itself as India’s first co-working space, said the divide between engineers and laymen would only accelerate. “As things get more and more automated, technology and techies will become more godlike,” he said.

In a New Year’s letter to his employees, Infosys Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sikka wrote of “the tidal wave of automation and technology-fueled transformation that is almost upon us”—a choice of words that sounded more apocalyptic than utopian. A few weeks later a techie was murdered by a security guard on Infosys’s campus in Pune, about 500 miles northwest of Bangalore. The Hindustan Times warned about “a growing list of IT workers kidnapped, molested, raped, or killed on campus.” Although unrelated, Sikka’s letter and the crime coverage shared a certain anxiety: Tech could guarantee neither job security nor personal safety. The techie, the hero of the Indian economy, would never be as safe as he seemed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miss the music of the 90s

 

I was born in the eighties, and grew up during the 90s in India. Those were the best days of my life. Undoubtedly. And I have always missed those wonderful days, now more than ever. Its surprising that growing up, I felt that a good plush job in a stable industry and living in the city was the way to live and aim for. Having lived both these lives, I can confidently say that no amount of money can buy happiness, and that innocence of childhood. And the simple joy of the 90s.

We were a middle class family growing up in a small town, far away from city influences. We were not poor, but every expense was closely scrutinized and justified. Frugality was the code word at home, the only code to live by, after integrity. Terms like pocket money and 'casual shopping' never existed in our dictionaries. We did not have cable TV at home, opting to settle for the free-to-air doordarshan national television channels. We only saw 'fast-food' in some television programs , or the occasional hollywood movies we watched (after screening by adults) on our trusty old VHS player and CRT television. I had a cycle, a Hero Ranger, probably the only luxury I could call me own. And riding it, I felt like I owned the streets. Its amazing to now realize that such a simple life is all one needs to be happy.

Today, however, there is an attempt to 'buy' happiness. New clothes every week, new phones every few months. A new car every few years. Eating out, endless movies at the multiplex and hours at a stretch at malls. Not to mention, all those booze and smoke people take in.

People find my simplistic lifestyle akeen to that of a hermit. But the truth is, I am trying to live today the way I lived 20 years ago. A simple, controlled life with only the bare essentials, and nothing more. Time and time again I catch myself watching and listening to good old indipop music of the 90s. Even the best pop-star of today cannot come close to the quality of those 90s era music. After much nagging, dad finally bought us a portable audio cassette player. Otherwise knows as a walkman. It was to be used only during school trips, otherwise never to be carried outside home. And it was on this little machine that I listened to Euphoria, Colonial cousins, Silk route, and Lucky Ali. English music meant Michael Jackson, Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, and Miss Spears. Truth is, I have never bought a piece of music legally in my life. Nobody did. The sharing economy was pretty strong in those days. We would swap books and music cassettes regularly at school, something no body does these days. We would buy one of those blank audio cassettes (TDK) and take it to the local video library or repairman with the list of song we wanted, and he would get all of them recorded on that for a very small fee. The quality of the recording would be awful, but it was music to our ears. None of that 5.1 channel, mp3 AAC variable bitrate nonsense. Just good old analogue tape. Music countdown shows were a rage back then, they usually played during the evenings or just after the news, in 30 minute slots. I could never understand what was the basis of that top 10 selection, was it music sold ? or popularity ? What was the way to measure popularity ? Did they do any surveys ? But one thing was sure, the top 10 music was the only ones we knew of. So they automatically became our favourites too.

Here is some music I still listen to from those days.