Not one, but three new drawings of mine have been added to the Gallery!

• Doomsday — Done with oil pastels, featuring Rhona Mitra from the movie Doomsday, which I am waiting to watch.
• Banlieue 13 — Done with pencils, ballpoint pen and oil pastels, this one is based on the French action movie.
• Pusher Trilogy — Done with pencil and ballpoint pen, this one is based on the Danish Pusher crime movies, written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Recently, I've done quite a few pieces with oil pastels.  The first of these was this drawing based on Aliens vs Predator: Requiem.  Now after I finished that, I was unsure of how to scan it, because I didn't want the pastel stuff sticking to the bed of the scanner.  So I asked Varun to photograph it.  That worked out fine, but the problem is that you won't be able to get a high-resolution image.  The solution is to use a transparent plastic sheet.  I dug out these transparent sheets which were bought several years ago, for use with OHPs (Overhead Projectors)!  I placed that on the bed of the scanner, the drawing on top of that, and was able to scan at 400dpi, like my other drawings.

I will leave you with another image I did a couple of weeks back.  This is the killer (Le Tueur) from the French horror movie Haute Tension (High Tension).

Thought I'd give a quick rundown of the movies I've watched recently.

• Speed Racer — Watched this movie today at Prasad's Multiplex.  A live-action re-imagining of the 1960s anime from the Wachowski Brothers.  Varun used to watch the show on Cartoon Network many years ago, but I never really watched it.  Anyway the current movie is colourful and dazzling, with great visual effects, however I think it will mostly appeal to kids only.  Automobile racing is the only thing Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) knows how to do, and when Royalton Inc offers to partner with Racer Motors to finance his racing, he gets a glimpse of how evil corporates fix races.  Determined to bring down corrupt businessmen, he must compete in a high-stakes race along with the mysterious Racer X.  John Goodman plays Pops, Speed's father — but all through, I was imagining what it would have been like to have Goodman's character from The Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak, in this movie.  At a tense moment in the end, he'd have told Speed "Nothing is fucked, Speed".  When some incompetent ninjas attack Speed and family, he'd have said "Those fucking amateurs".  But then the movie would certainly not have been very kid-friendly!  Anyway, Speed Racer was fun and worth watching in the theatre to get the benefit of the visuals.  7/10.
• Iron Man — This one was also seen at Prasad's Multiplex last week.  Billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is captured in Afghanistan and forced to create a weapon for some arms dealers.  However he secretly builds a crude armoured suit which he uses to escape.  After his return to the US, he perfects his designs and becomes the superhero Iron Man.  This was an incredibly entertaining movie with great visual effects, and I loved Ramin Djawadi's music score too.  It has a great cast (including none other than "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges) and some breathtaking action sequences.  There's a scene in this movie after the entire end credits, and to my surprise, they actually showed it in the theatre.  9/10.
• The Signal — A mysterious "signal" is broadcast over all television, radio, phone and cellular networks and turns people into violent killers.  This is the setting for the movie, which is split into three interconnected segments.  Mya (Anessa Ramsey) and Ben (Justin Welborn) are lovers who want to escape Terminus City, and are pursued by Lewis (A J Bowen), Mya's deranged husband.  This is a very well-written and acted movie, a thoughtful science fiction-horror film.  Apparently, directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry worked on their segments independent of each other!  8/10.
• No Country for Old Men — The year's Best Picture Oscar Winner.  Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes across two million dollars in cash at the scene of a drug deal gone bad, and takes the money with him.  Of course, as the movie's tagline says, there are no clean getaways — and he is relentlessly pursued by the psychotic Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).  There is considerably less dialogue in the movie — a lot is communicated through the direction and editing.  A tense thriller from the Coen Brothers.  Great stuff.  8/10.
• The Big Lebowski — I've seen this movie many times before, but after watching No Country for Old Men I rewatched it.  Jeff Bridges plays Jeff Lebowski a.k.a. The Dude, a lazy slacker in Los Angeles.  In the Coen Brothers' warped world, there exists another Jeff Lebowski (the Big Lebowski of the title) who is a millionaire, and whose wife owes money to one Jackie Treehorn.  Thus begins a great crime movie involving mistaken identity, kidnapping and bowling!  John Goodman plays The Dude's friend, Walter Sobchak, a high-strung Vietnam veteran.  This extraordinary movie has an amazing screenplay and is extremely funny.  10/10.
• Untraceable — A cyber-thriller with Diane Lane as an FBI security specialist trying to track down a mysterious criminal, who traps victims and puts them in Saw-type torture devices — and then broadcasts a feed live over the net.  The more the people who log on to killwithme.com, the faster the victims die.  The premise sounds interesting, but the movie as a whole falls flat.  The dialogue sounded completely artificial and made me cringe at times.  5/10.
• Outpost — A group of soldiers arrive at an abandoned WWII bunker and discover that they may not be alone.  An okay horror movie that is quite atmospheric and well-shot, but ultimately unremarkable.  It just wasn't scary, and spent way too much time in build-up without much payoff.  6/10.
• Inside (À l'intérieur) — A French horror film.  A pregnant woman (Alysson Paradis) is all alone at her house on Christmas Eve, and it is the night before her delivery.  That is when a mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) shows up at her house and threatens her.  It appears that the strange woman is psychotic and wants the baby for some reason.  The movie is one of the bloodiest and most violent ones I've seen — it will blow you away.  Very well done, if you can stomach this sort of thing!  Written and directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo.  I watched the unrated version.  8/10.

That ought to do it for now!  I have a bunch of other stuff to watch (I got a few Telugu DVDs too, recently!) and I will write about those movies once I see them.

I got a new laptop last Saturday!  This is a HP Pavilion dv2701TX Special Edition Entertainment Notebook PC.

I had been planning to buy a new laptop for a while, since my older one was giving problems.  (By the way, on 24-Apr the new version of Ubuntu Linux, 8.04 LTS, codenamed Hardy Heron, was released.  I downloaded that and installed it on my old machine, and was very happy with it.)  The new computer cost about Rs 45,000 (which is far less than the amount I paid for my old computer two and a half years ago!).  It has an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.67 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM (which I am planning to upgrade later), and a 160 GB HDD.  I love the build quality of this computer, it feels sturdy and the design is very nice.  In fact, I took feedback from my friend Maheshwaran (who runs My Mind Leaks) on this — and he told me that his HP laptop was "used as a pillow while travelling" and had "fallen off a study table", and was still working fine.  Personally I think the 14.1 inch widescreen is the perfect size for a laptop, and that's what I went for.  I love the bright screen on this computer.  Besides all that, the computer has a very aesthetic design (seen in the picture above, which is swiped from the HP website).  In general, no complaints about the computer so far.

The computer comes with Windows Vista Home Premium, and this is what I am using now.  I've read horror stories about Vista (a guy being told that it would take him 130 years to write a CD, very funny YouTube video about programs being incompatible with Vista), but I've had no major problems.  Only minor annoyances.  Here are a few of them below —

• Hogging Space — Vista seems to be consuming a lot of disk space.  I installed a few of the common applications I use and about 10 GB or more were eaten up.  As far as I know this is Vista trying to set "restore points", so logically it should stop with this unless I install more stuff (which I am not going to).  But I don't know how much more space it will eat up.
• User Account Control (UAC) — This is supposedly a feature of Vista that enforces security, but to me it's more of an annoyance — I am repeatedly told that something is an "unidentified executable" and asked whether I want to run it or not.  Dude!  If I didn't want to run it, I wouldn't have double-clicked the icon in the first place!  Give me a break!  I understand that this is supposed to prevent newbie users from running harmful programs, but I doubt how much it actually helps.
• Media Player Classic and UAC — Media Player Classic is a nice little open-source media player that I use.  I downloaded the program and wanted to place it in C:\Program Files like all other programs.  So I go to the relevant folder and then create a new folder, when I am greeted with a prompt that says that I need to give permission to continue!  Then there's one more UAC prompt that comes up.  Keep in mind, that so far I've got a folder called New Folder, so renaming it takes two more prompts!  There really ought to be some kind of Administrator login for Vista.  When I was using Fedora, I was always using the system as the root user.  Linux informs you that this could be potentially dangerous when you log on — but keeps quiet after that.
• Doom Builder and UAC — Doom Builder is the editor I use to make my Doom levels.  This is a great program that works perfectly fine in Windows XP.  Who knew that it would give problems with Vista?  First time I ran it, I got an error saying that I needed msvbvm50.dll which I downloaded and placed in the relevant folder.  Even then, when I ran the program, I got an error that said "Error 75: Path/File Access Error".  A quick search led to a Doomworld Forums post which gave the solution — you have to set the builder.exe executable to run in Compatibility Mode with Windows XP and also set it to "Run as Administrator".  The catch is that UAC kicks in EVERY single time you run the program, and asks you for confirmation on whether you want to run it or not!  While one might say that one extra click isn't much of an annoyance, I question why it is required in the first place.  You'd think something related to Doom would run well with something related to UAC (UAC being Union Aerospace Corporation, the fictional company in Doom)!  However, on second thought, I guess Vista's UAC, like its namesake in the game, is an evil entity!
• The Blue Screen of Death — It seems that no matter how many years pass, the BSOD won't leave Windows.  Three times so far I've "woken up" my computer only to find that it had restarted.  In a very friendly way, the computer tells me that "Problem Event Name" as "BlueScreen"!  You'd think they were actually proud of this!

Of course on the positive side the OS looks very nice and the "Aero" interface is glossy and pretty.  Let me try this out for sometime, and then I will see if I can set up a dual-boot option on my computer (Vista plus Ubuntu Hardy Heron).  My only worry is that they didn't give a Vista DVD with the computer, so if something goes wrong, I won't have a way to reinstall the operating system (which I paid for, mind you!).  I have the Windows XP CD that came with my older computer though, so let me see how things go.

Well, a long time has passed since the last post, so I just thought I'd put in a few words now.  I've been quite busy at work the last few days (as it's appraisals time) so could not find the time to post much over here.  Yes, there are a few things which I've drawn and some video footage I've filmed.  Those will be posted eventually.  I've also watched a number of movies recently, in various languages: completed the Pusher trilogy (Danish crime movies), watched Ils (Them) (French horror), [REC] (Spanish horror), re-watched Banlieue 13 (last time I watched an English dubbed version, now I watched it in French), Kite (Japanese).

By the way, two of my recent drawings are based on a couple of these movies — one is Pusher Trilogy and another is based on Banlieue 13.  Today I also did a quick drawing of Rhona Mitra in Doomsday, a movie which I really want to see.  I will be putting all this stuff up eventually.

Campus Recruitment Season has started at TCS Hyderabad, and this Saturday and Sunday I went to Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering and Technology as a HR Panelist.  Had a very good time — I did 52 interviews totally over the two days.  (Overall, around 350 students appeared for the recruitment process and 95 finally got selected).  I'll be going to a few other colleges too.  Most notably, I've planned to go to my old Engineering College, Sree Nidhi Institute of Science and Technology, in July.

As you might expect, it wasn't just interviews I was doing over these two days.  No, I managed to do a few small drawings too.  This is what I did on the first day —

That evening, I watched the movie Cloverfield, which is about a monster attacking New York City and the whole thing being shown from the point of view of a video camera.  Inspired by that, I did this drawing the next day —

The next drawing I did is simply some random shape.  Not "shape" as in Michael Myers, The Shape from Halloween, this is just random shading —

Fortunately, Monday was a holiday and I was able to relax a little.  Took that opportunity to throw some colours onto the 300 drawing in GIMP.  I used different brush settings this time, and the result is interesting —

A small note.  When I went into our Recruitment Cell that morning, I found that they had one computer running Fedora 6.  I tried a "standard" password and was able to log in as root.  I bet you'll be able to log in to many computers in office with that password, or variant (no, of course I won't write what it is here)!  This type of stuff is the topic of the latest post on our company's internal blog, by Karteek.

I experimented with my computer again.  Like I mentioned earlier, my hard disk has been giving problems and I reinstalled operating systems a couple of times (Ubuntu, Windows XP and Linux Mint dual boot).  Last weekend, myself and Varun had gone to Chennai to visit my cousin.  There, the Mint installation started giving trouble, so I wiped the MBR so that only Windows XP was active.  However, that started giving trouble too.  So this weekend, I planned to get a new hard disk.

But, I was a bit late in contacting a shop so I think the new disk will be bought next week only.  In the mean time, I decided to wipe the hard disk, and again install Linux only.  Varun is using Fedora 8 for his Final Year Engineering Project, and I decided to try it out too.  So last night, I moved any important data off the hard disk, formatted it, and installed Fedora 8.

The Desktop

Having used Ubuntu and Mint, it was no problem for me to get comfortable with Fedora (as someone mentioned, one doesn't actually use an OS, one uses applications).

I love the default desktop theme though — it is called "Infinity" and the desktop wallpaper changes colour with the time of day.  Above is a screenshot of my desktop at 11 AM.

The next shot was taken at around 7 PM.  The colour on the right is greyish in the early morning, becomes aqua in the morning, kind of purple in the evening, and as it gets later, becomes darker and more desaturated.  Click on the images above for larger versions.

One customisation I made is to decrease the font size a couple of notches.  You will also notice that I am logged on as root — I didn't actually create any other users since it's a hassle to go back to a higher-privileged level in order to make system changes.  So I'm always the superuser.

A few Fedora 8 Installation Tips

I ran into a couple of hitches while installing, and a bit of Googling solved the problems.  I'm documenting them below —

• While booting from the install DVD, the system froze up at a point.  It'd print out the startup console messages, and when it got to Running /sbin/loader, it'd simply hang.  What you have to do to fix this problem is, reboot, and when you get the startup menu, don't simply click on the "Install" option.  Press Tab, and you'll see the startup parameters (something like vmlinuz=initrd.img).  Just add these parameters immediately after that: floppy.allowed_drive_mask=0 clocksource=acpi_pm and it'll work.  As I understand, the system is probing for a floppy drive on my laptop which doesn't actually exist, so it just keeps waiting.
• When you reboot the system after installing, it will hang up once more when starting sendmail.  The solution to this is pretty simple, just unplug your network cable when starting up.  After startup, connect it back and enable your network devices.
• I wrote about making DNS settings persistent earlier, under Ubuntu.  Here, I couldn't find the dhclient.conf file (maybe I wasn't looking hard enough).  So, I simply brought up the network interface and entered the DNS settings correctly, then went to the /etc/resolv.conf file, verified that the correct nameserver IPs were there, and made it read-only!
• Another thing I needed was to play DVDs, MP3s, my Xvid files and other media.  I wanted to install the trusty and all-powerful VLC media player for this.  You just have to enter two commands in a Terminal window as root.  First, enter rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm, and after that, type in yum install vlc and that'll do the trick.

Further Plans...

Once I get the new hard disk, I will initially be making it a dual boot system with Windows XP and Fedora 8.  This is because Varun may need to use my computer to demonstrate his project at college.  After that is over, I will probably remove Fedora and install the new Ubuntu 8.04, named Hardy Heron (link points to the feature list in the Hardy Beta which was released recently).  This will be released on 24-Apr-08 and the features look awesome!  The next version of Ubuntu (planned for Oct-08) is called Intrepid Ibex.  When they reach K, it'll be interesting to see what they call the release — it's tough to think of adjectives starting with K!

I wanted to write about this last week but didn't get around to doing it.  Nine Inch Nails released an album called Ghosts I-IV towards the end of Feb-08.  There is something unique about it though — the album is released under a Creative Commons License, which means that it is free to distribute.  Also, the first volume of nine tracks can be downloaded from the Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV website.  The music is all instrumental stuff and is very good.

Of course, that inspired me to do a drawing last week.  You can click the image above to view the full picture.  I also filmed video footage of that.  Good thing I didn't edit and upload it last week itself though (I did the Year Zero thing last time), because a couple of days back, the Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts Film Festival was announced by none other than Trent Reznor himself.

This is an expansion of the Ghosts project, where the band is inviting anyone to create visual accompaniments to the music of the album, and put them up on YouTube.  I love the "open source" philosophy behind the album and this film festival, so I completed the video yesterday and entered it into the festival.  You can click on the image above to view the video on YouTube.

That's not all.  With the Ghosts album, they included several extras (a set of desktop wallpapers, a PDF with photographs, etc).  I thought I would give away something too, and so created a high-resolution desktop wallpaper out of my drawing.  There's a standard as well as a widescreen version, and both are downloadable from the drawing page linked above.

I've uploaded a new video to YouTube today.  Have a look at this —

Click on that image above, or here, to view the video.  This one shows me drawing the album cover of Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails.  The drawing was done with oil pastels on paper and took me only 8 minutes to draw, and I've further increased the speed in the video, so that I could use the song "The Beginning of the End" from that album in it.  Below is the actual drawing I did, and you can click on the image below to see a larger version —

According to the "Year Zero" Alternate Reality Game, the cover represents something called "the Presence", which is the ghostly hand that you see in the centre of the picture, which appears to be coming down from the sky.  The reason that drawing took me only 8 minutes to draw, is that I had precisely that much time left on the DVD I was recording on.  I had recorded myself drawing something else — another Nine Inch Nails drawing!  I have the raw footage with me, it is yet to be edited.  Once that is done, I will put up the video, but for now, here's a preview —

That, is a drawing based on the new Nine Inch Nails album, Ghosts I-IV.  There's a lot that sets this release apart from other NIN albums.  Essentially, this album is a free release, which means you can download and distribute it without worrying about breaking copyright law.  Trent Reznor, the creative force behind NIN, has released this under a Creative Commons License (great man).  Read more about it here [Wikipedia], here [Slashdot, where I first heard about it] and here [the official site, where you can download the album].  Coming soon: my video and the drawing, and I'll also have something a bit extra.

Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons and coloured by John Higgins, is in my opinion the finest graphic novel of all time.  Originally published as a 12-issue comic book series from 1986-87, it was later collected as a close-to-400-page book.  Suffice to say it's an incredible book, and it was one of the first things I bought with my first salary (more info here) after having read it already.

Anyway, a movie adaptation of the book has been in the works for several years.  Somewhere in 2005 director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) got involved, but that project fell through.  Several months later we found out that the movie was actually happening — at a different studio (Warner Bros) and with a different director, Zack Snyder.  Snyder made the awesome 300, and my faith in the movie adaptation only kept increasing on seeing the images of the sets constructed for the movie.  Snyder even made a post on the official movie blog that he himself drew the storyboards for the entire film (that's some 2000-plus images).  Sometime back, it was announced that filming had officially wrapped, and the movie was now in post-production.

And here we are today, one year away from the release of the movie (it will be released in the US on 6-Mar-09).  To celebrate, Snyder posted the first look at some of the characters from the movie (apparently, he posted at 11:55 PM, which has significance in the book)!

The above picture shows Jeffrey Dean Morgan as "The Comedian a.k.a. Eddie Blake".  There are five character pictures that Snyder has posted — The Comedian, Nite Owl II, Ozymandias, Rorschach and the Silk Spectre.  Have a look at the relevant page here.  In my opinion they did a fantastic job in translating these characters from the book for the movie (look-wise atleast).  I don't think it could be done any better!  One hopes the script (by Alex Tse based on a script by David Hayter) will do justice to the book.  At any rate, I thought these pictures were incredible (notice, he hasn't shown what Dr Manhattan looks like yet, now that should be something to see!) and I look forward to seeing a trailer sometime soon!

Director Gautham Menon makes small appearances in his films.  I put together a small image with his appearances in four of his movies —

• Kaakha Kaakha (2003) — Gautham plays a police officer named Vasudevan.  There he is on the right of the frame.
• Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu (2006) — He doesn't actually have a role in the movie, but he appears in the background as a dancer during the song "Manjal Veiyil".  He's in between Jyothika and Kamal Haasan in the picture.
• Pachaikili Muthucharam (2007) — I didn't notice this the first time I watched the movie, but spotted it only later on.  During the song "Kaadhal Konjam", there's a brief shot with the family on a bus.  The guy on the right of the frame, with his face partly obscured is Gautham.
• Vaaranam Aayiram (2008) — This movie hasn't been released yet (May release it seems), and I have no idea what it's about.  But it seems that Gautham has a bigger role to play in this movie.  There are two pictures I've seen on the net — the one above, and another one with him playing a guitar.

I haven't seen his other movies (Minnale and Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein), so I don't know whether he makes appearances in those films too.  I went through my DVD of Gharshana but that is an inferior remake of Kaakha Kaakha, and as far as I can tell, he is not in that movie.

Speaking of Gautham Menon, here are a few video clips I came across on YouTube recently (thanks to a friend posting links on his orkut page) —

• Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu Visual Effects — this clip is really cool and shows off a number of visual effects shots that EFX did for the movie.  I never realised there was so much effects work done for this movie!  Take the above pic for example — Kamal Haasan was actually hitting a wooden log which was later replaced with an image of the actor!  There's also this Behind the Scenes clip but I didn't find this as interesting.
• Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu Deleted Scenes 1 and Deleted Scenes 2 — seems to be very raw footage but interesting.  All this stuff is cannibalised from the DVD of the movie.
• Pachaikili Muthucharam Trailer 1 and Trailer 2 — these are old but I'm linking them anyway, as I like the trailers and love the songs.
• Vaaranam Aayiram Trailer — Yes!  Gautham Menon's upcoming movie (May 2008) starring Surya, Sameera Reddy and Divya Spandana.  Trailer doesn't indicate what kind of movie it is (though, IMDb lists it as a thriller!), but the movie looks good anyway.  The music is again by Harris Jayaraj and the song used in the trailer is called "Adiyae Kolluthey".  Someone has been nice enough to put up this video with just that song and a montage of pictures from Surya's movies.  The song is very nice!

I'm looking forward to watching Vaaranam Aayiram, though I don't know whether it'll be released in Hyderabad.  But do have a look at the trailers above, all are good stuff.