A Logical Explanation

my 2 cents about the world around us

Travian – online strategy game.  

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I recently started exploring Travian. Its a online strategy game, or one could only version of  Age of empires and Caesar. Though it is not as graphical or musical as the desktop versions but it has all the other features like the resources, buildings, army, wars. Begin an online portal, there can be hundreds if not more player playing at the same time.

 travian

In travian the player start as a chief of a village. Almost all the villages are same, they have some resource where you can extract wood, clay, iron and crop.  The village center has some building area where we can build new buildings like, granary, barracks, palace etc Typical strategy game stuff. In the travian world you have neighboring villages which is owned by fellow players. You can interact with these players and trade resources. One can also form alliances. And the feature list goes on and on.

 

travian1

Travian is served in many sub domains so that the no of players can be distributed. They also have different servers for different countries. Eg. s1.travian.com, s2.travian.com , s1.travian.us, s1.travian.ca etc.

My village is in s2.travian.com. Its called NicoBar (The land of Nicos.). My nickname kmanicka.

Moving To Wordpress  

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After a long stint with blogger i have decided to move to the Wordpress. Blogger is great for a starter but as we grow we see its limitations.

Wordpress has more flexibility compared to blogger and being open source it has lots of plugins and templates available. Plus the support community is prety large which can help us resolve our day to day problems.

I have choosen BlueHost for hosting the blog. The blog is called Digital Derby.

I will be cross posting to this blog and the new blog for a while. And once the new blog is fully set up, I will leave this blog as is.

www.digitalderby.com


The best blog editing tool so far  

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Just downloaded the new Windows Live Blog Writer. Am not a big Microsoft fan but this shows why Microsoft is so good when it comes to User Interface. The design is sleek and its loaded with features.

The one feature which really got me was the preview pane. I have been using lots of other Blog editing tools but none of them had this. The preview pane actually shows how the blog will look when its posted not just a simple mockup.

The other feature like inserting links, pictures, videos etc are common among all the blog editors. But windows takes it a step further by providing a plug-in framework. Using this framework developers can provide custom built insert options. Whole galary of plug-in have already been created and they are all pretty useful.

One Plug-in which I have been looking was the Code formatter, And here it is in all its glory.

   1:  class MyClass {


   2:      public static main(String[] args) {


   3:          System.out.println("Hello world");


   4:      }


   5:  }





UPDATE : Looks like my blogger theam doesn't like the code generated by the code formatter plugin. It looked nice in Windows Blog writer.

Looking forward to more useful plugins which can enrich the blogging experience. I remember the days when I used to edit the blogs on blogger website. :(. It was one of the biggest turn off during my initial blogging days.



And here is the screen shot of the preview pane.



BlogWritter

Comments not working in iTheam Blogger Template  

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Looks like blogger has released a new feature, where in users can comment on a blog from the same page. They will not be redirected to a separate blogger style page. Full story here.

This is really a great feature. This will make the user experience uniform across the whole blog. The comments section can now gel with the post.

I had actually searched a lot for a blogger templates which has this feature. This feature is readily available in all the Wordpress templates.


Unfortunately this has broken the Commenting feature in the iTheam blogger template I use :(.

To fix the issue I had to change "Comment Form Placement" setting to "Pop-up Window" which enables the old style commenting.

Blogger Dashboard -> {Blog Name} -> Settings -> comments -> Comment Form Placement.

Will try / search for a better fix till then "Old is Gold".

How to create a Windows Service.  

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While working on one of my projects .. I wanted to run background thread in windows. Its pretty simple in linux/unix kind of env.. just append "&" to the command.

To do the same thing in windows.. i had to use a windows service. The article has detailed steps to do the job.

I was testing the example provided in the article. The try to start Notepad as a service. When i started the service i was expecting to see the notepad window. But nothing like that happened. Not sure why.

To test it I created a simple php script which writes to a file.

<?php

$filename = "c:\\temp1.txt";
$fh = fopen($filename, 'w') or die(" Fatal ERROR can't open file");

while(true) {
fwrite($fh,"hi \n");
sleep(100);
}
fclose($fh);

?>

And in the "Application" key of the registery provided the following command

php test.php


Now when I started the command saw the logs in c:\temp.txt file.



Using Gdata apis in Appengine  

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I started digging into Googles appengine recently. Its a great service provided by Google. Now developers like us dont have to worry about the servers.. deployment and other stuff. If we have an Idea we can jump in and start working on it.


As my first project on appengine, am trying to develop a simple which fetches videos from youtube and displays in a page. Its pretty basic.

Nice articles describing it can be found here.

Found a small issue in this article. There is a small hack we need to do to use the Python gdata apis in appengine. This article talks more about it.

This hack is failing in gdata-python api 1.2.1 With the new gdata api instead of doing

gdata.service.http_request_handler = gdata.urlfetch

We should do this

client = gdata.youtube.service.YouTubeService()
urlfetch.run_on_appengine(client)

Lost a day figuring this out. :(

days of java are numbered  

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Are the days of Java and c numbered?

We are seeing a new wave of websites which are offering online application development and hosting.. the prominent being zoho creater. Here is a list of other such services..

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