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

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I have also started tagging my bookmarks on Technorati. I suggest anyone who browses often always faces the problem of transferring their old bookmarks. Also, the problem of bookmarks growing much larger than one’s screen height is also a problem

My browsing habits have become more extensive over the last couple of days. Actually, it has just caught up with the times. I mean, we are talking about a generation who has 1324 contacts in their social networking mini-site (i.e. their profile page in a site like www.orkut.com). I have supplemented my news reading with RSS feeds from most major news sites including Hindu. Other than Slashdot.org, I now also frequent Digg and reddit.

All this is thanks to the amazing open source browser Firefox. Unfortunately for 75% of people out there, Firfox is just a browser that has tabs. But few things which Firefox does, I can’t live without is

• Blocks all kinds of ADs and tremendously speeds my browsing experience.
• Having keyboard shortcuts for everything speeds it even more.
• Takes me straight to ‘Printer friendly’ pages, so no more paging around
• Shows all the downloads in the statusbar

… and much more. Of course all these is because of the extensions

It is so much exciting when websites have sprung up based on simple but strong concepts rather than the all encompassing portal based sites of the dot com days. It is probably what everyone is calling Web 2.0 these days. I welcome this change. Personally, I think has helped budding entrepreneurs like me bring ideas to market thanks to full fledged open source web frameworks like Rails. I have been trying to study Django and Turbogears out there due to my interest in Python (or rather my reluctance to learn Ruby after multiple half hearted attempts).

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One of the most disturbing questions most game developers face is whether Video Game is an art form or not. Of course, by Video Games I’m also including computer game and console games.

A very well written essay on this can be found here Video Games as Art by clysm

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My 75th post! (or so says my Wordpress engine), a big thank you to all those who have visited my little space on this sea of information. Is it now due to move to Wordpress 2.0? I’ve read all the enhancements and me don’t think so

With more and more projects like Basecamp and Gmail, the application space within a browser is limited only by ones imagination. If AJAX sounds greek to you, probably you might not have heard about all the excitement behind it. Basecamp is already net’s most favourite Project Management tool. And you would really need to get out of that rock if you haven’t heard of Gmail.

As a budding game developer I’m quite frankly petrified by the alarming growth of such web based apps (this includes Flash based and Javascript based apps). These days I’m sceptical if a gamer would download a zip file or (shudder) an EXE file and go through the installation to just try a game. All the while when there are many of your favourite games like Pac-man (-clone) and Lemmings already ready for you to play. Well, I guess hard-core gamers would be put off by the slow interactions within a browser, but playing speed might just be a question of time.

Anyways, I’ve decided to try my hand at some cool javascript coding. Right from the moment I discovered the game at E-Scribe I found it quite addictive. I just had to finish coding it. In fact, it must have actually taken me less than 5 hours to code, design artwork and test (in 3 browsers - IE, Firefox and Safari !!!) meanwhile sippping tea over endless discussion in the foodcourt ;).

For the impatient the game below is ready to play, so try it online, try it now

Rules

The objective is to arrange the some jumbled numbers into numbers in increasing order. At each step all you can do is click on a number. As a result all the numbers to the left of the number including the number will be reversed.

For example, if the current list is 2 3 4 5 1 6 7 8 9 and you reverse 4, the result will be 5 4 3 2 1 6 7 8 9. Now if you reverse 5, you win.

Play here, now!

“Reverse” in your website?

Simple! Just copy paste the following code in your site

<iframe src="http://www.arunrocks.com/downloads/reversegame/reverse-js-game.html"
width = "420" height="100" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">
</iframe>

Please give due credits. The code is release under the GNU General Public License

Learnings

This section would be of interest only to Javascript developers
Some interesting lessons learnt whilst developing this game are:

• IDE: Mozilla Firefox is an excellent platform to develop JavaScript apps thanks to the DOM Inspector and clickable JavaScript console
• Presentation: End output is very professional and customizable. This is due to usage of CSS which very effectively separates presentation from design. For eg: I can make any number of “skins” for this game. Also traditional game art resources such as fonts are already present “out of the box”
• Paradigm: Out of the box event handling model need some getting used to, especially for new programmers. This is especially true for timer code which I would expect most games to use extensively.
• innerHTML: innerHTML is not fully crossplatform. It is very useful for debugging hence was often used in alert boxes. Use for node creation use DOM functions such as createElement or appendChild
• Animation: This was one of the primary reasons I wanted to turn the text based game in E-Scribe to a graphical one. It was no clear which digits were being swapped. Rather than go for a full blown fading/translating animation, I opted for a simple blink. As a result the gameplay is faster and more responsive.

[tag]Programming, Javascript, Game, DHTML, DOM, innerHTML[/tag]

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