Travian is a browser game where your objective is to grow a village. You can build a large amount of buildings, train an army and raid / attack / reinforce villages, join an alliance and more.
In order to do the above, you must level up your resource fields to increase resource production or level up certain buildings in order to train specific infiltry or calvery. There are three classes to choose from when you first create your account, Gauls, Romans and Teutons.
The Gauls are defensive players and primarily create defensive units, horde resources and upgrade their village. The Romans are a combination of both, but take a long time to level up buildings and produce men. The Teutons are the offensive class, they are the strongest attackers and have weak defenses. Teutons are apparently not beginner friendly, but I’ve yet to have any problems with them.
If you’re interested, I strongly suggest you try it out. I’m playing on an Australian server because my friends at school do, but there are servers all around the world for you to play under.
If you are having trouble with your work, why not ask for help? The beauty of the internet is that it is an excellent way of connecting people; it’s just a matter of getting connected to these people, if that makes sense.
That’s the exact purpose of this article, to help connect you to poignant study resources. I’ll cover the following topics:
Programming Resources
Writing Resources
Organisational Resources
Other Resources
I was really hoping that I could get some good resources for mathematics, but there really aren’t too many good ones out there that I am aware of. For math help, consult your maths teacher or Google.
Programming Resources
You (hopefully) would have already known of these, but I’ll just reiterate their existence, just to make you all warm and fuzzy and faithful there are heroes working behind the scenes committed to saving your behind.
Dream In Code: (www.dreamincode.net) Dream In Code is a programming and web development community. Becoming a member there unlocks a wealth of programming information, including tutorials, snippets and prompt answers to questions from experts like myself in the forums. Registration is completely free.
MSDN: (www.msdn.com) MSDN (or Microsoft Developer Network) is a site devoted to the documentation and help of programmers using Microsoft languages, API’s etc. Their library is excellent, documenting pretty much everything related to Microsoft development, and offer support and communities for Microsoft Developers.
Java API Specification: (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/) An invaluable resource for Java developers. It provides documentation about all the classes and methods in the Java Framework.
Cheat Sheets: (www.dreamincode.net/forums/showtopic17947.htm) Dream In Code offers eight cheat sheets (at the time of writing) for programming languages. Print them out, and read them in your spare time.
Writing Resources
Good writing skills are a must in every aspect of your life. Improving your writing skills means improving your vocabulary, spelling and presentations. Here are some good ones that I am using.
Special thanks to “Blogging For Dummies” by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley for some of the links below.
Google Definitions: (www.google.com) In the Google search box, prefix the letters define: to your query and type the word you’d wish to get a definition for (e.g. define:poignant). This is a great way of improving your vocabulary without having to dive through a dictionary.
RhymeZone: (www.rhymezone.com) Type a word into a search box and instantly get a list of rhymes for that particular word. You can also get synonyms, definitions, and many more options that I’m sure will be of interest to you.
Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus: (http://thesaurus.reference.com/) Simple, easy to use site that gives you immediate suggestions for synonyms and antonyms.
Bartlett’s Quotations: (www.bartleby.com/100)
Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data—i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion. - Jean Baudrillard
Every intelligent being likes an intelligent quote. Spruce your work up with interesting quotes to inspire you to write about a specific topic, or whatever else you can think of.
Organisational Resources
At primary school, we all learnt about the You Can Do It program. It consisted of four keys, Confidence, Persistence, Organisation and Getting Along. I can only help you with the third one, the rest I’m still having trouble with.
Remember The Milk: (www.rememberthemilk.com) Remember the milk is an online to-do list. It is very, very neat, and I suggest you try it out if you are currently writing on the back of your hand to remember stuff.
PDA’s: PDA’s are awesome. You can take them anywhere, and even primitive ones have schedules. You can even draw pretty pictures with the stylus.
Other Resources
Copyright Law: (www.copyright.gov) The Copyright Law website explains what you can use in your work without breaking the law when using images or text from other sources. It teaches concepts such as fair use, etc.
Some schools/teachers won’t accept work from Wikipedia, but I’m sure you know about it already. If none of these resources are applicable to your course of action, Google is your friend. Happy studying, and good luck!
This article was featured in the </dream.in.code> Back to School Special - August 08 newsletter.
I’ve been eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Google Knols system, quite simply because I thought it would be a good idea to get information on a subject defined by many people.
People write articles about whatever they feel like, it really seems like a good idea. I think I might start contributing; depending on the time I have. Thing is, I didn’t even know the site was open until I stumbled upon it whilst reading Google’s privacy policy.
Enough chit-chat, experience it yourself: http://knol.google.com/
You’ll be reading all about bathing cats in no time.
Tonight I finally decided to pick up the last piece of the programming puzzle and put it into place. The game I started on the holidays and didn’t finish as I focused my coding another projects, is called Helplessly Outnumbered. Because, that is exactly what you are.
Your objective is to pilot a mysterious green ‘thingy’, and dodge lots of faster red ‘thingies’. I was going to add lifes and items but I believe the game is fun enough without, and that they will only add confusion. A high-score table does sound like a good idea however.
I’m truely amazed at how easy it is to develop 2D games in XNA, this is my first game with it and it didn’t take very long at all to make (when I was actually developing it).
goosh.org is a Google interface that performs search operations in a unix-like shell. Goosh runs off the Google AJAX API and is coded in JavaScript. When you first see this, you’ll probably think, why would anybody even want to use this? This is why I blogged about it, to show why I use it. Last time I checked I was categorized under anybody.
Firstly, I use it because it doesn’t keep changing the site every time you perform a search operation. That means no timely navigation through all the pages in the history or spamming of the back button in your browser, all you need to do is scroll up.
I believe it has kept to its goal quite well in an attempt to replicate a UNIX shell, it supports tab completion for commands, such as web, images, settings, etc, typing ls (the command to list files in the active folder in the shell; very similar to the DOS command dir) will show the list of options you have to search with, appending cd (change directory) to the front of these options will… do exactly the same thing as, well, not appending the cd.
Hypothetically you could even write simple scripts for this interface (every command is entered like this in the browser window: http://goosh.org/#images); don’t ask me how to keep the scripts executing commands in the same shell in a simple manner, because the only way I can think of doing it is through a WebBrowser control in .NET (over complicating it). I also like how you can set the search results count by simply typing settings results 10.
I encourage you to give it a spin to get familiar with it. It’s not eye-candy, but in my opinion search was never meant to be eye candy. Prior unix experience is not nessesary.
I haven’t blogged recently, and that is because I like to blog when I have something the readers can see or try, but I have just started a couple of projects recently. Another thing I am proud of is my Binary Clock on MySpace reaching 270+ members, something I didn’t anticipate as MySpace is stacked full of ’nuff nuffs’.
If you have been following my Twitter, you’ll know that I have downloaded XNA Game Studio 2.0 a couple of days ago (Microsoft’s ‘Managed’ DirectX). Within days, I have managed to create a 2D game where you move a ball around the screen and avoid other balls flying around the screen. I tailored it to what I wanted, which probably has reason why it is so addictive to me. I’ve got the holidays to work on it, so that should be a lot of fun.
On the side I’ve been making an ASP.NET site that removes sites from a blocked list for Squid (a proxy server). It went well, except for the final yet most important feature, the ability to restart the Squid service from the ASP.NET page, which I have epic failed at doing.
Wednesday I spent the whole night studying for a maths test. Awesome way of wasting a night, but it helped a lot in the test imho. Today, I got my mid-year report on my schooling. Passed all subjects over a C grade. Averaged B in maths. I’m pretty happy.
I’m not sure what goals I should set for these holidays, I think I’ll do some body building, obviously Programming and playing games and I’ll probably end up playing Basketball out of habit. I hate going places when I have a whole two weeks to do whatever the hell I want, not what society wants. A great fucking change if you ask me.
Some other work I’ve completed recently is my MSDN Linker project. Its primary purpose is to ease linking to MSDN, it’s useful for people like myself that are constantly linking newbies to MSDN. You can read about the MSDN linker on my other blog (Satan Eats Cheese Whiz) here.
The source code has been released under the LGPL for those interested in viewing the source code.
Anyone that has used another operating system (Mac, Linux, Unix, etc) probably has an opinion in this ongoing battle of the weiners. Can’t we all just keep our opinions to ourselves sometimes (expecially opinions of those reiterated by hackers everyday)?
You can’t do anything on the internet without being critisized by the way you use your computer. Why not use GIMP (an open-source image editor)? I’d prefer to use Photoshop. Why not create cross-platform applications? I enjoy using the .NET framework more than I would enjoy developing cross-platform.
You can’t like VB.NET (although everyone secretly does), as the movement to the .NET framework made legacy VB developers cry. It’s cool to use LAMP servers (Linux Apache MySQL and often PHP), because.. they all work great on Windows and Linux. But if you use a Microsoft technology, Blasphemy!
Mac’s are ok from what I’ve seen; my brother uses one. They aren’t cheap, but they are excellent for a regular computer user and do most of the important stuff. <sarcasm>Its lack of ways to make the system unstable obviously makes it crap</sarcasm>. Windows is much like a person. Stubborn at times, eventually it dies and gets sick when you view those porn sites.
Linux on the otherhand, touch one setting and X11 doesn’t start anymore. Alter one setting and pressing a certain character on your keyboard will make the system unstable until you press Ctrl+Esc (it’s been a while since I used it, forgive me if that is an irrelivent keystroke). Every Linux user is elitist, you need to compile things from source to remain cream of the crop and choosing the correct package for your system is difficult when you’ve got over 350 distributions to choose from.
MySpace vs Facebook. Google vs .. THE WORLD. With the face of the Internet constantly changing, the only way to compete with the bigger companies is to tell them that my product is better then yours because it has x amount of new features. So all the boys and girls migrated to Facebook for the winter, then found out they could make a Flickr account, Twitter account, YouTube account, and the list goes on and on, and you’re left thinking, when is this… crap going to end?
When will I be able to read information on the internet, without having to click to some site that has a flashing background, popup ads, popunder ads, telling me that registration is fast and free, and you can do whatever the fuck you wanted if you’d register. I don’t know about you guys, but I hate having to sign in and out of websites, it is even more annoying when your username is taken and you need to change your favourite credentials just to make a database happy.
Somebody needs to implement something like the .NET passport in the popular websites (other than just the Microsoft websites), it would be good option in the signup page my opinion. Oh wait, then everyone would cry, because the .NET passport is owned by Microsoft. We can’t have ownership! IT MUST BE OPEN-SOURCE. Please release the database information, open-source. KTHXBAI.
Homework is a part of life we are all stuck with, bringing the torturous grueling pain of schooling into the place we are supposed to enjoy being at. Recently, I have been snowed under trying to get over 2500 words for ten starters and endings to stories for English (of which I have managed to complete).
We are then given another English assignment, which ’should be completed tomorrow’, and is an analysis on a Simpson’s episode we watched in class. I can tell you now, it is nowhere near finished. In Maths, I am given a task that should have already been completed, to calculate the cost to paint the room. Half done.
In SOSE we are given questions to do with the laptops, with global warming as the topic, and we are told at the last minute to get a poster done by tomorrow also. How the hell am I expected to do all this?
There seems to be a lack of communication between the teachers on how much homework is acceptable, and how much a student can have at any point of time, it is getting beyond rediculous and deteriating my mental health.
There once was a day where I thought Silverlight (or WPF/E) would be more than adequate for my needs. Silverlight gave me the option of programming in .NET (a version stripped so bare of any functionality it makes me sick). But I can now say, Silverlight is absolute poop compared to WPF for browsers (XBAP).
I mean, what kind of text box control doesn’t give the option of text wrapping? Only a Silverlight text box control of course. It irritates me that Silverlight is so limited due to Cross-Platform. Give me a break. If XBAP were to be made cross-platform, they’d have done a decent job, because I was expecting Silverlight to be just like this.
My love for XBAP does come at an expensive price however. Only users using .NET 3.0 will be able to execute the application in IE, and those using .NET 3.5 will be able to use it in Firefox also. At the moment, only those who develop applications would have .NET 3.5 running Visual Studio 2008, the download for 3.5 is huge (unless it has been distributed through automatic updates, which I don’t know about)! And then there is the cross-platform issue associated with it. But then, this option is often always considered and it is considered normal for software to only work on Windows.
I really can’t get enough of the spell check option text boxes now have, there have been JavaScript implementations but I really like how it ties into the framework nice enough for me to bother blogging about it.
Travian is a browser game where your objective is to grow a village. You can build a large amount of buildings, train an army and raid / attack / reinforce villages, join an alliance and more.
Homework is a part of life we are all stuck with, bringing the torturous grueling pain of schooling into the place we are supposed to enjoy being at. Recently, I have been snowed under trying to get over 2500 words for ten starters and endings to stories for English (of which I have managed to complete).