From what people have been saying about the pit lane exit, it looks like there is absolutely no room for error. A tight curve with concrete walls, and apparently it’s not speed restricted any more, we might a crash over here. Back in Singapore when Rosberg crossed the line exiting the pits in Singapore, the commentators said that at Abu Dhabi he wouldn’t get away with that, he’d hit the concrete.  And how quick is the clean up rate from crashes, how long would the exit be blocked?  Could ruin someone’s race maybe, if they have just made a stop, and then can’t get out again.  It could make for an exciting race.

Unfortunately, for logistical reasons, I wont be able to attend the race. But I’ve still been following every single update related to the race, including practice, and qualifying. The Saturday qualifying has been a stunner for the Red Bull duo Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber on the dramatic Yas Marina Circuit all thanks to Lewis Hamilton’s pace in the McLaren, which performed extremely well for him. Lewis has been looking fantastic all weekend and is starting out in front, so unless something catastrophic happens, I’d be awful surprised if he doesn’t at least finish on the podium, and mildly surprised if he doesn’t finish in first. Hamilton might just finish the season the same way Button started it, that car is on rails!

Lewis has been saying that they have a decent strategy, but he also mentions that after seeing how far ahead they are, maybe they could have gone for a longer stint. I don’t think it really matters to be honest because he seems quick enough to fly into the distance anyway. And guess what, we have a return of Vettel’s moaning about his lack of a KERS button. It’s more understandable if he’s stuck behind a KERS car or overtaken at the start; but moaning about KERS being stupid when it’s just part of the package that makes the McLaren apparently faster at this track is hilarious.

The race begins in less than 6 hours from now, and it’ll be an interesting to look at no matter what part of the world you’re in.

ATI users, you can enable the additional PhysX effects manually by editing the file “Documents\Eidos\Batman Arkham Asylum Demo\BmGame\Config\UserEngine.ini”, and setting PhysXLevel=1 or 2. They’ll run on the CPU.

The demo is driving quite nicely on my configuration and looks really slick. If you haven’t tried it out yet, get the demo at http://bit.ly/87Da1

I started off with a couple of private projects of mine on C, but both got stalled for aforementioned reasons. For those of you who’ve been around this blog of mine, you probably know how much Winamp has fascinated me for years now. That was the first computer software I had ever seen in action, and this was way back in 2003 when I was in middle school. Lately, I’ve working on plug-ins for Winamp, and one amongst those was the light-weight Last.fm scrobbler. Since there were better alternatives, I took that project off my register and it’s not in development any more. I then went on to draft a scrobbler for a friend’s iriver, and that wasn’t too bad either, except for some bug fixes that I could never sort out because of the limited knowledge I had, so that had to be pushed out of the window back then too. But now, I’ll be reviving that too. So iriver owners, rejoice! You have the best and feature-laden Last.fm scrobbler coming your way this holiday season.

As far as the other projects are concerned, I wont be picking up anything anytime soon because of my jam-packed schedule. I was hoping I could finish a simple arcade title for the 360 by the end of summer, but that is still lagging and I have a long way to go till that comes into initial formation. Oh well, if not summer, it’ll be done by September. This will also happen to be the first full-fledged component of my digital portfolio so I’m committed to this. I tried to assemble a team of coders and designers for the same, but it’s difficult to find people my age in India who’d be willing to do such a thing, Getting out of the theory shell and into practicality is a far cry. Well, considering the very unpractical & chaotic education system India projects, who can you really blame?

xbox 360 goodness by somberguy

For masses, E3 2009 started off with a bang set forth by the Microsoft keynote, the two biggest announcements of the same were Project Natal, and Metal Gear Solid coming to the Xbox 360. Project Natal is Microsoft’s very own Full Body 3D Motion Detection technology, that uses a 3D camera, and the SDK currently seems to support face recognition, voice recognition and fully body motion scanning in real-time. Project Natal is something straight out of what you might have seen in Minority Report, and the possibilities with this are endless. Check out the Keynote preview below.

The demo at the Keynote showed immense accuracy, specially while reading the limbs. But I have some major doubts regarding the same in my mind, which I’m sure the folks behind this are madly working to fix, most important of which is bringing down the manufacturing costs. Considering the fact that this is supposed to work with finger movement detection & detection of facial expressions of many people at the same time, the resolution and the processing capability needs to be massive. Come to think of it, finger detection is needs intense precision, and is very highly unlikely, at least for the time being.

Although, it’s just too early for this to hit the streets. With proper software backing, more hardware improvement & add-ons, and as mentioned before, bringing down the costs have a long way to go. For now, one can only say that demoing Project Natal was more of a marketing move. Being given the chance of opening up gaming’s most celebrated public events, Microsoft just had to overshadow competition, and build excitement & expectations that will be carried forward to E3 2010. And they’ve successfully done that. Gizmodo has a great gallery of the entire demonstration and a detailed report available here.

Choosing a college is hard, specially when you have decided what you want to do with your life. Video games have always fascinated me, and that’s the line I want to get into. Working on a future Unreal Engine for Epic Games has been something I’ve had in mind ever since I finished high school. That particular road would have been tough if I were to stay in India and study at colleges I had to choose from. Considering the kind of intense extra effort the field of my choice needs, conventional college methodology is no way to do it. I am sure that if I were to stay in India, I’ll always have one or the other deviation. Over the past six months, I’ve closely observed the college students’ life away from home, and it hasn’t really done much of change how I feel.

Unreal Tournament Ad by ~Ampre

Going in to Royal College, UAE, I know I’ll be cut off from a whole lot of stuff I am into right now. But that is the necessity of the hour. My lifestyle needs a massive overhaul, and I’m sure I’ll be getting that over there. All the negative PR that UAE has, at various instances, put me in two minds, but there has been a certain reason that has mentally backed me up. So, my battle for achieving what I want is ongoing with the system. The formalities and the loan application procedure has been frustrating, and tiring. And the damn thing still isn’t even half way through. I can only wish the loan application goes through smoothly. Considering how various bank officials have reacted to my queries regarding the same, I can only wish such primitive thinking would die out.

I miss you my three angels, and I cannot wait to be with you.

The process for registration of voters and then consequently, voting, has to be made easier. Not just the reason being for the same as it would make things easier for everyone, but also the fact that it can be done and it’ll work in everyone’s favor in more ways than we can think off. That is exactly why you have more people voting in to stupid reality shows than in the Government’s elections. You don’t have to stand in the sun, you don’t have to bother about getting shot, you don’t have to do all the senseless thinking about where you’re supposed to go vote, or you don’t have to physically travel somewhere to find out whether you have your name on the voter’s list, and registering as a fresh voter would be a breeze too. The thing about using online services in India, even in the 21st century, is that, be it banking or paying your taxes, or booking train tickets, or something related to Government operations, is that no matter how much you think your work will be done online with ease – at some point of time, you’ll have to involve yourself physically and directly. The reason for the same is cited as security issues. There is the fact that to get things done without a security hitch, you’ll have to get involved personally. Is there a way out of it? Of course. If you’re using the optimum methodology, and gold-standard tools, it’s not so difficult after all.

The following steps can be taken to make the process of voting easier and convenient for those in cities and towns.

• Digital profiling of everyone over the age of 18 providing them with some kind of an identification. PAN cards can be expanded, and made more detailed. There’s no need of any other format. The PAN card, like any ordinary debit card, can contain all required information of the particular person, and it can be used at multiple channels as a source of identification including but not limited to just the elections. When it comes to costs for making sophisticated PAN cards on a massive scale, I’m sure many of our undeserving politicos can live without carcades with a dozen vehicles and personal security that they get from the tax payers’ money. It’s high time our taxes were put to better use.
• The PAN card part deserves another mention in the process of it’s initial registration process. In various cases, PAN cards can be made by forged support documents and voter count can be faked. The one and only way of tackling that is shelling out corruption, and making the whole process of registration more automatic, thus lowering the possibility of human interference where it’s not needed.
• Conducting the elections on the same day everywhere.
• Using specially designed computers instead of electronic voting machines that are connected to a single national server which will store the votes once casted instantly no matter where it is being done, and then keeping count and providing live feed of the preliminary results consistently, keeping the whole thing as transparent as possible. Such computers can also provide real time video help to those who need it, and with a camera on the computer, the voters can be kept under scrutiny and also, a voter support channel will remain open to help anyone who needs it.
• Those based abroad with dual citizenships can be asked to register themselves at the embassies in the countries they are currently residing at a month before elections, so that they will be allotted a username and a password, that they can use on an NRI voting portal on their own computers at home or at work and cast their votes without having to come back to their constituencies in India. The same can work for those who’re in India and aren’t sure they will be able to go to the kiosk to vote on the day of the election.
• The election commission should maintain a proper and very detailed & transparent database of everyone who’s contesting the elections, and make it a high priority deal to ensure that it’s publically available to everyone who needs to know about their would-be leaders. Even though the same is done to some extent right now by NGOs, it is not enough. For example, everyone knows the reality behind the facts and figures on the personal financial profile that these contestants give out to the election commission. Rigorous reviews of the same needs to be done with a constant vigilance.

I’m sure that the aforementioned points, if thought upon by the authorities and the details worked out well enough, would smoothen up the process and motivate more and more people to vote and give them a chance to sincerely involve themselves in the enrichment of the country’s democracy.