Who? Me??

Earlier this year, I had blogged about a new Rogue-like game by the name of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Better known as Crawl.

The appeal to this game, is that it’s not a simple grind-based game and it is definitely not meant for n00bs. To them, I would suggest World of Warcraft, which has a simple learning curve, and is currently loosing support due to the ever increasing nerfs to the game dynamics.

The game is not easy, and a n00b can easily die if not cautious. Here are some tips for beginners -

1. Do your research on the races – It helps if you are aware of each races pros and cons. Pick one which suits your style, for e.g – if you are a melee type of person who likes to be at the fore front of a battle, then it would be foolish to select a magic affine race such as Deep Elf, or a stealthy race such as Spriggan.
2. Know your classes – The race + class combination is absolutely essential. Certain classes work well with certain races. A Spriggan berserker is asking for trouble, is it not? Even more disastrous would be a Troll Wizard.
3. Know your skills – There are certain skills which you will be better suited for with your race + class combination. Exercise more of those skills, and become better at them. It helps your attack power and can help you down the largest of the lot.
4. Worship the Gods – There are lots of Gods to be worshipped in Crawl. Select your God wisely, since there are melee-based gods and magic-based gods. You do not want to be a caster and worship Trogg for example, he prevents magic use. Similarly, you do not want to be a necromancer and worship the Shining One who forbids the use of necromancery.

A list for beginners is here.

I personally favor Melee-based characters, but have done good with casters as well. What about you?

The good folks at Google have a great sense of humor. Ever since the launch of GMail on the 1st of April, and the subsequent April Fool jokes, we are always guessing what hidden joke lurks in each of the Google products. Here are some of them that I have found, you can check them out too!

I am also including some of the outputs, which you can try by yourself as well!

Do a Barrel Roll

Search this term in Google search, and watch the fun as the search queries take a tumble, and literally does a barrel roll!

Askew

Search this term in Google search, and see the screen go askew!!

Ascii Art

Search for this, and the Google logo shows you what Ascii Art is all about!

Recursion

Have you noticed that when search on Google, if you do typographical mistakes, Google corrects you by asking you “Did you mean <corrected spelling>”. Try searching recursion on Google!

There are more such easter eggs in Google, but they are time bound (for example searching football during the Soccer World Cup would give you an interested Pagination navigation on Google).

As a bonus, try this out in your Google Reader – up up down down left right left right b a b a (and beware of the ninja!).

Wishing every one of you a very happy and prosperous Diwali.

I remember during my bachelor days, I would get up early in the morning and be all ready. Then my friends and I would meet up in the local ganesha temple (Parleshware mandir). Half the suburb of Vile-Parle would eventually turn up there, and what a festive time it used to be!!

After that, we used to go as a group to all our friends’ house to “sample” the faraal. By the time we used to be done, it would be lunch time and that meant more goodies!!

I have completely switched to Ubuntu at my home. The operating system is so much superior in a number of ways. So when the upgrade from 11.04 (Narwhale) to 11.10 (Ocelot) came, I quickly upgraded. It took some 2 hours to download all the files and upgrade the system, but it was so worth it.

Here’s wishing all of you a very happy Dussera!

May you drive back the demons of stupidity!!

For some reason, I had stayed away from reading Isaac Asimov. Probably because I had seen some of the poorly done movies based on his books. I finally gave in, and started reading Asimov … Foundation being one of the first novels I got my hands upon.

The story is set in the far future (as is true with most Asimov novels), where the world (or the galaxy in this case) is ruled by an uni-polar government. The human race has advanced far and wide across the galaxy, and has inhabited many planets (25 million and counting). Technology has advanced so much that it is making humans complacent, and hence the cause of its own decay.

This macro-view is held by a visionary (Hari Seldon), and he creates a mission to set two different worlds set at the ends of the galaxy to re-build the human civilization after its fall. The story takes us through the different phases any civilization will face in its rise to power. The government structures, the role of religion in controlling the masses, the role of science and trade in conquering other civilizations.

The original foundation trilogy is very well written and Isaac Asimov shows why till this date he is one of the top read authors.

One day, in office, I came across this list, the best sci-fi novels of all time (according to Reddit). I was pleased at first as I browsed through the list … I had read the first two of them … as I went down the list … not one read! I had heard about some of them (relief!, but not more than 2 of them finished reading!!).

Off I went to Flipkart, and started ordering … in that order on the list.

Fortunately, this book was delivered to me last Friday. I sat through Sunday and finished it, almost in one sitting (there was a brief nap in the middle ).

The thing about sci-fi novels is that when the author is writing the book (this one was in 1985), he has very less idea of what the future would be like. The rate at which things are changing is too fast, even for the imagination of the author. This is where Orson Scott Card dazzles. He has managed to forecast a future where public opinion can be swayed (and controlled) by digital media, space training facilities, colonization of other planets. While this might have seemed a bit far out back then, these days most of these things are very much achievable.

Ender’s Game is about a young child’s (Andew Wiggin) struggle against a system pitted against him to graduate and eventually save the human civilization from an alien species. I think Starship Troopers has taken some inspiration from this movie. Ender (or Andrew) is a born genius who thrives well under hostile circumstances. So the powers that be decide that for Ender to really sparkly, he has to be thrown into fire. And he is tested, again and again. This book is not about a boy who beats them all, its about someone who beats them, then gets burnt out … but beats them anyway so that he can rest.

There is an Ender in all of us. The tired feeling that we feel when we get burnt out … that’s Ender’s state of mind through out the book. It’s also about prevailing over that and continuing in classic human fashion. There are sequels to the novel, but what I like most about this book, is the attitude with which Ender attacks each problem. Do read the book.

If you are just starting out on Ubuntu, then the forums are a good place to search for your doubts. You are not the first person stuck with some problem or glitch. Millions of people out there have faced them, and overcome them. The forums are the intrepid user’s best friend.

I have completely shifted bases to Ubuntu for my home system, one of the teething problems I had was using a Microsoft Livechat headset with Ubuntu. The headset is USB based, and Ubuntu does require some tweaking to start using the headset.

This is what you need to do -

1. Open a terminal, and type
   

   sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

2. At the bottom of the file, make an entry
   

   blacklist snd_hda_intel

That’s it! Now simply restart your machine so all the modules get reloaded, the headset will now work.

About the blacklist.conf file

The blacklist.conf file is used to indicate to the system of which modules to ignore. Sometimes, multiple modules are addressing the same device, and that ensures that the device will not work. So, the blacklist file is used to indicate which module to be ignored.

The internet is virtually an infinite source of inspiration, great news, stupidity and entertainment. I thought that I might share some gems which are either relevant to me, or which I think you might find interesting.

• It’s been a month that I have been a father of two, oh, we are going to name him Malhar!
• Hilarious sledging of Delhi boys, by a Madrasan (damn, that post has generated 2.3k comments in a week!)
• My organization got funded last week, by the very firm which funded some awesome products such as Facebook, Bittorrent, etc.
• The Big K from CrazyEngineers embarks on a Journey of a Lifetime

Oh, in case you are wondering what the heck is Blue Nothing, it’s a term I read in one interesting novel on Social Engineering (and it’s evils). The internet is the Blue Nothing!

No, I don’t drink and raid

I recently have taken a lot to playing World of Warcraft during my free time (I think this also reflects pretty well on the blog ). I also have bought a good powerhouse of a desktop, and had dual booted it with WinXP and Win7. The problem with Win7 is that I have the 64-bit trial distribution and it hangs a lot, it has driver issues. The problem with WinXP is that its WinXP

I am not that much of an operating system nazi, but the machine slows, down, the wireless network card that I am using is not fully utilized (WinXP sucks when it comes to driving the wireless interface!!). All in all, when it comes to playing an Online RPG, the environment does not deliver it’s 100%. Thus, I tried to give Ubuntu a try.

• I already had the 11.04 distro with me, so the first thing I did was update all the repositories, include the third party repositories, and install Wine. Wine stands for WINdows Emulator. You can read more about Wine here.
• After Wine, I went for installing Winetricks, which is a third party software. It’s used to easily streamline commands via a wizard which otherwise I would have been forced to use the console.
• Somehow the Wine commands that get integrated into the shell (the right click menu of your explorer) are a bit different from the wine that got installed. So at first the program refused to run giving some obscure access management errors.
• So, refusing to be let down, I went and searched for third party alternatives. You can skip this step, and definitely do not install the Crossover Games application because its just a trial, however, the PlayOnLinux (POL) application is recommended here, since after installing that, at least the icons of the .exe files will be visible
• However, when I ran the Launcher.exe of World of Warcraft via the custom command console (by right clicking on it and selecting Open with Other Application, and then simply typing wine in the command box)
• That’s it. Now the World of Warcraft launcher will run, and the game runs seamlessly

Since the game does not use the latest DirectX drivers, instead it replaces them with its own set, the textures and the games will be slightly different. I noticed a different texture for the water in WoW for example. But otherwise, the game is perfect for running. The network card works better, so I get a faster ping rate.