Chapters from The Suffering
August 24, 2008 – 4:54 pmThe Suffering is an urban survival horror video game set in secluded Carnate island comprising of Maximum Security Prison, developed by Surreal Software and published by Midway Games. The game has three endings depending upon the course of action taken by the player. Evil, Neutral and Good are the endings a player can achieve. The game basically is set up in Carnate Island where the main protagonist is sentenced for killing his family or so. But what happens to be a straight motive turn out be something else depending upon how you play the game. At the end either you will be exculpated from the blemish of killing your family or you will be held responsible.
The second thing that made me a fan of this game is the villain character design. Dr. Killjoy, Hermes, Horace, Torque’s inner demon, Puritan Girls, WW 2 Colonel and the visions of his family members make it an enriching surreal story. Voice acting for Dr. Killjoy and Hermes is stupendous, I can still feel the deepness and sadism in Dr. Killjoy dialogs.
The last important thing that gripped me to this game was the monster design. Yes, it’s kind of “twist your brain” (David Lynch, anyone ?) and “torment your heart”. It’s unimaginable to predict the very roots of each monster. And always a suspense to know what was the reason behind that monster design. Surreal and twisted imagery.
So here are some of the quotes from this game, yup these are chapter names but serve as quotes too :p
The worst place on Earth
Slumber of the dead
Abbot prison blues
I can sleep when I’m dead
Everything beautiful is gone
Darkest night, eternal blight
Oblivion regained
You’ve mistaken me for someone else
Hate the sin, not the sinner
A lonely place to die
Dancing at the dawn of apocalypse
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind
Who wants to deny forever ?
Death be not proud
Single bullet theory
And a child shall lead them
Last breath before dying
There are quite profanity clad dialogs too. But If you like the concept of this game then do play, its one of its own kind game. Some nice easter eggs too. A reference to Ring, Johnny Cash etc. Hidden goodies like flamethrower etc.
[Short Movie Review] Love Phobia, Eraserhead and Hinokio
August 24, 2008 – 12:51 amLove Phobia (Korean) - Defines what a true love is, avoids the typical cliches in rom-com, end was more than satisfying. Chemistry between both leads was awesome. Story takes a deep turn at the end, quite unpredictable but not for those who like melodrama. A nice movie to instill some goodness around you with your loved ones.
Eraserhead (Hollywood) - David Lynch’s cult classic. Its not a movie but a torturous experience of a man who indulge into various acts without even will. Turn out to be a bad consequences when you do something you aren’t willing to and world takes away everything you wanted to with a insulting smile on face. May be those who don’t like non-entertainment movies shouldn’t touch this one as it stirs a number of emotions, something you will never forget and something you will try to arrange bit by bit. But a must watch for David Lynch’s fan, this is where The Elephant Man came from.
Hinokio (Japanese) - I don’t usually watch animated or movies related to robots. As they all turn out to be nothing more than some silly robot making frens and some other events of sadness and in the end a happy ending. BUT this movie is not like typical ones, indeed you care for every characters. There is an element of virtual reality. A boy who can no longer walk, interacts with the outside world through a robot “Hinokio”. There is one little surprise about Jun (one of the friends), its kinda cute and you will come to know in a amusing way. There are no antagonists in this movie, may be if you can pardon a wannabe le**o gal who is envy of someone in this movie. Who is that someone will be another surprise I left for you to discover as movie rolls.
Wordpress customization - The manual way
August 22, 2008 – 12:40 amIt’s the most longest post which I’m trying to write, including everything I did to setup this blog website in Wordpress. It’s still not now complete but within 2 days I will make it more legible and complete it. It was a long desire of mine to share with you what I learned, so please bear with me. If there are any mistakes or error then please tell me.
We have many plugins around to make things automatic in wordpress. But why would anyone need a manual customization ? Some reasons as I may quote down are:
- Sometime plugins may conflict, your site’s design may get screwed or sometime even worse.
- Sometime automatic method fail. Then should you wait for the developer to fix bug ?
- Why use tiny little plugins for everything ? When you can just do it yourself.
- Plugins do cost overhead, which in turn affect the website performance.
- Using same plugins will not add to the uniqueness of your website
These are just some points that exhort me to do my own custom modifications. Yes it takes time for an average bunny, but thats why I’m writing it here to help you. Let me assure you that it ain’t rocket science, just a bit of determination and you can make your website unique and more efficient.
Here is the listing of customizations I will be explaining, these are divided into Design and Code section, design affects the layout and code is related to the data you wan’t to get or display.
Design:
Basic:
- Add your own custom header
- Replace your own bullet image style
- Add a neat hover effect over the hyper-links
- Adding paginated navigation for longer posts
- Adding a Favicon
Intermediate:
- Use of classes and id to provide separate set of effects for Main content and the Sidebar
- Add a nice border around images
- Remove border from smilies. Also removing additional padding and margin
- Adding your custom CSS read on button
- Image effect on hover without Javascript
- Image swap without Javascript
- Round border for Mozilla Firefox 3 browser without using images
- Creating a nice Feed and Email block with CSS. And for some other enhancements too
- Providing custom share and bookmark icon block
- Custom warning or announcement block
- A nice spoiler block for Firefox, Opera and IE 7 browsers without using Javascript.
- A nice custom made Quote Block.
- Modifying Title of posts to include a cool Calendar image which displays date over it
- Enhancing the Text fields and Text areas for better dynamic impression.
Code + Design:
Basic:
- Enable comment posting on pages and custom display messages if comments disabled.
- Displaying Post Meta
- Displaying custom message at the Main Index Template top
- Displaying most popular posts
- Hiding the pages from Header Navigation Bar using simple code edit
Intermediate:
- Adjusting the position of Search text-field and removing newline between text-field and button
- Displaying Gravatars
- Comment boxes customization. Add alternate colors and unique color for the author of the post. Comment numbering
- Getting 5 recent posts
- Getting 5 random posts
- Replacing smilies with your own.
Two simple tips to secure your Linux box
August 20, 2008 – 4:20 pmThe first tip is regarding password protecting GRUB entries or if you want more then lock the whole GRUB menu. Second tip is regarding what partitions you would like to mount and what you like to remain unmounted and hence protecting your important data from any kind of misuse. OK the second case was not much of a problem until HAL and gnome-mount made every partition to be auto-mounted. Even then I was able to prevent the auto-mount of every other filesystem type but ext3.
Adding password to GRUB entry:
- Open grub via Terminal
- Type md5crypt and press enter key
- Enter the password and press enter key
- Copy the md5 hashed password.
