Harsh J

@having fun with microblogging, status-blogging, whatever twitter is.

Though am not totally addicted to it, its good to post short thoughts or replies at Twitter. I still find the place a bit weird to browse through but I’m beginning to get a hang of it, unfortunately not while I’m mobile. I think that’s the best point of Twitter, a scribble pad to post upon as you travel.

Twitter - Cause birds "tweet"?

I’ve had many nice ideas, thoughts and such while travelling but never have I cultivated the so-said good habit of carrying around a small notebook to scribble them upon. I find that quite odd to do, non-wash-proof kind of odd. Twitter, however, with the advance of the mobile devices into every man’s pockets, promises to help cultivating the same habit in a digital way. I need to setup the texting feature and give it a spin, and also try some gprs methods while am at it.

On my desktop I use Ping.fm for “tweeting”, as they like to call it, and I use it along with Bitlbee. Nice integration into one single irssi IRC interface. Ok I got a bit off the topic there, admitted. I’m turning quite the jargon guy here I notice, but I can’t really help changing that back, but yes I can dumb stuff down a bit maybe.

So, more tiny updates at my Twitter account - QwertyManiac

I’m sure there has been a lot of incidents where you have cursed your most recently acquired game, be it anything from a silly to annoying bug, the lack of a feature that would have made playing more heavenly for you or even something as small as better detail on some object on screen.

Now what if the game were open source, to the fullest extent rather than just the “Extend”. You don’t like the character’s tail, you contribute an idea in form of a feature-request or by getting into the development yourself. So do million others. Together you can, over time, form a completely different game than the one you were being unsatisfied with!

Yo Frankie! - An open source game in active development.

The usual way of extending a game would be to add in map and skin packs while letting the functionality of the entire game remain constant. What if the game evolves with time, adding in new moves, more pick-ups and extras, and more elements to the game, such as weapons or collectibles?

Though these are present in some of the games alive today, it would be greater if the game were or went open-source, opening the game’s code to a world of never-before imagined possibilities and also getting in tons of optimization over time. Of course, building a game big enough like the heavyweights we have today requires the work of a large active team behind it, but once done with its release, getting in additions to the code would we amazingly easy were it supported by a good version-tracking system!

Playing such a game would mean endless hours of fun, repeated every couple of months for a completely different experience while still remaining the old charms that a player liked. New innovative concepts implemented by avid code-enabled gamers would add in more and more goodies, much like how Compiz-Fusion is today, an idea being born a day and implemented almost as fast.

Yes there would be a point where it would hit a roadblock and this is where the next game development has to begin. Ideas found in the older version could be tried out across a multitude of other genres, and what a learning experience would it be for creating that “ultimate” game many always dreamed about!

I hope some biggie in gaming gets onto this OSS bandwagon, with atleast a half-baked title cracked open, and pretty soon, since the game market is losing out on ideas really, and thats cause ideas are limited to them in the closed confines they live in.

You’d say what of the OSS games we have today, and I’d point at their evergrowing success till date. No game has ever been given a cold shoulder and kicked out of existence, right from Nethack to Nezuiz. Though this post was inspired by a particular game known as Yo Frankie!.

This new Tags feature in WordPress 2.3 is confusing me. While Categories are linked as URL/tag/name, the tags are linked as URL/tags/name. And it makes NO difference at all.

What is it all about anyway?

Finally put in a new theme “The Journalist” by Lucian Marin after months of Blue-K2. This theme was recently featured on WordPress.com and is fantastic at its simplicity and minimalism!

I had to modify a bit of the CSS to help support the switch-over from the colorful Blue-K2 I had here earlier (The colors being those “Download” or “Favorite” boxes you’ve seen around, perhaps.)

Also converted a few images to Grayscale and added them for a little more eye gloss than the default theme had. Hope you like this theme, cause I find it pretty readable and wide.

Post any problems, comments on what you feel is not good and other things if you have the time.

Got exams upto 19th.
Check out the new movie (& music) page. It isn’t fully customized yet, but I’ll do it eventually.