I *am* alive and kicking. The lack of blog updates is a direct reflection of the effects the onset of winter is having on me. Winter has brought in that dreaded cold and gloom over the skies and has kicked the sunshine out of me. I prefer to hibernate than move about the slightest.

Most of the past week is up in a blur except for the last weekend, when I got myself to go visit my uncle and his family in Bristol. The trip from Reading to Bristol was quite memorable. The trip took a good two and half hours on the train with me having to switch in between due to a cancelled train route. I spent an additional two hours waiting for trains and another hour waiting for a bus in Bristol. The bus would have taken me right next to my uncle's place had I not been dumb enough to prematurely get off the bus in the middle of nowhere. I offered myself consolation by telling myself that it was dark and that anyone may easily loose bearings on an empty stomach. Luckily, my navigational abilities landed me at their doorstep with another half an hour of walking - which I wouldn't have minded were it not for the chilly air, the laptop and miscellaneous heavy scrap I had in my backpack. I was drained by the time I reached the warm coziness of their home and ended up falling asleep on their large comfy couch a few minutes later.

Despite the hassles in getting there, I had a fun weekend in Bristol. Being at the behest of a family and being smothered by their hospitality cheered me up (not to say that I was depressed prior to that). The little kids injected much needed energy into the environment ? especially the youngest one who seemed to be on a constant high on Speed all day around. I wish I had that much energy to burn. Hehe.

Here is another of my pet projects brought back from the land of the deceased.

This one is called "JavaScript Dhivehi Character Recognition". It was created early 2003 (or maybe late 2002) and made available on bichoo.net. Basically, it lets you draw a Thaana character using your mouse and then it "recognizes" what you have drawn. The purpose was mostly to satisfy my curiosity into artificial intelligence and pattern recognition at the time, however it also showed promises of the beginnings of a future where Dhivehi documents maybe scanned in and processed by a computer to convert it to text just as Optical Character Recognition technology has been doing for English documents. I think this rudimentary application was the first ever Dhivehi character recognition implementation released to the public. More interestingly, this seems to be the only character recognition implementation programmed in JavaScript floating around on the Internet even now.

I spent a bit of time tonight reworking some bits of the code for clarity. The entire implementation is done using JavaScript and DHTML. You are welcome to study the code to see how it works. The code is well commented and maybe a good starter into AI and pattern recognition basics. It uses a single layer single Perceptron model to really simplify things however it is a good enough practical implementation to work for characters drawn on a 10x10 grid. The grid makes up the input data to the neural network. The neural network is hard-coded into the page and has definitions for each character in the alphabet. I do hope you are surprised by the accurateness of the recognition of this little application.

Have a look at it HERE. Let me know if you find it amusing... or not.

My company - Technova Pvt Ltd - is currently working on bringing a full fledged Dhivehi OCR software to the Maldivian public. It will probably be made available early 2006, as a service for customers requiring bulk OCR processing. We shall be releasing Windows, Linux and Mac versions of the software for home and business use around mid 2006.

There are a lot of little "projects" that I start with much gusto; however me being me, I burn out of enthusiasm in a few months. So today, while I was in my happy place I felt this utter need to rejuvenate the orphaned projects and stuff I've created over the years and bring them back to life. This renewed enthusiasm, so far, extends as far as bringing back online the orphaned projects by injecting some vitality into them or in a lot of cases bringing them back from the land of the dead.

So tonight, I started with one of my once most beloved projects known as Blobsy (http://www.blobsy.org/). Blobsy is an MSN Messenger bot framework written in PHP and works with any PHP version 4.3.0 and above. It can run on both Linux and Windows. It was the first PHP based bot to be distributed on the net as far as I know but then again I might be buttering up myself too much. Blobsy got featured on the main MSN Messenger fan sites such as mess.be and msnfanatic.com over the various versions I released. The live Blobsy demo bots had 3000+ people using it before I took them down. I was quite a really happy teenager back then.

What does Blobsy do? It provides a base framework for providing bot services to clients on MSN Messenger chat network. It was meant to do to Messenger chat, what Eggdrop did for IRC. Blobsy provides very flexible methods to extend the functionality of basic framework via what I've called Handlers. So if you want to provide news, phone number lookups, emailing, group chat or whatever else your imagination lets you conjure up with the MSN Messenger chat network, then Blobsy would probably be able to pull it off. Blobsy supports Custom Emoticons and Display pictures as well. The current release versioned B2 beta 5 is compliant with the MSNP9 protocol used by Messenger 6.

Some of you may have used my live Blobsy demo bots which carried the same name (post a comment if you have encountered it or used it!). It had features such as sending SMS to DhiMobile phones easily via MSN Messenger. It also let you see the latest news from Haveeru and Aafathis. It let you lookup phone numbers and addresses on the phone directory. You could also store notes on it so that you could retrieve it from wherever you had access to MSN Messenger. Another Blobsy experience would have been the IRC2MSN bot that I launched sometime late last year or early this year. It used the Blobsy framework to let you see what was going on the Maldivian IRC channels while you were on Messenger. There have been quite a number of Blobsy based bots run by various organizations and individuals around the globe over the years.

However, the usage and support has waned over the past months due to my lack of updating the Blobsy project. I hope to renew the Blobsy project by regularly updating the project to provide for the changes being brought to MSN Messenger. I also plan to relaunch the live Blobsy bots targeted mainly for the Maldivian MSN Messenger users, by providing the old live bot features in addition to a mix of new features such as chat rooms right on Messenger. Imagine the fun!

Drop me a line if you got any feedback regarding the project/code or if you have suggestions for the features of the live bot.

I hate colds and with good reason too. I don't mean to be disgustingly graphic but my nasal passage is being filled with phlegm as I write. Meanwhile, my head now feels like it weighs a ton - leading me to the conclusion that my paranasal sinuses have been filled with lead.

All this started when I risked taking a 20 minute walk to the Students Union building at the University a few nights back with just a shirt and jeans on. It soon turned out to be an unwise decision as 5 minutes into the walk, the wind brought with it bone chilling air and had me shivering in no time. That is the end of risk taking for the month - I've learnt my lesson. Common sense eludes me more times than I would be comfortable with... :S

I went rock climbing last night with a friend who kindly offered to play tutor. It was decided that we would be doing "bouldering" from the various types of rock climbing. Bouldering is quite fascinating since it is done without any ropes holding you safe and thus gives such an adrenaline rush. I stood in amazement as I watched the regular climbers scale the heights with seemingly no effort. They did not even flinch!

Not surprisingly, I had high expectations of myself when I made my first attempt. I was convinced it would be easy as it looked. However, I could not have been further from the truth. Climbing required a sharp eye - looking for place to grip and gain a foothold. It also required planning - organizing the route to take to get to the top in the least strenuous manner. I got the hang of it after repeated tries and much despair. However, I never seemed to get it done the way I plan it out in my head, which was of course very frustrating to say the least. It required fast thinking and decision making which was quite hard to do when I was dangling in the air and doubting the grip my trembling hands had on the holds.

An hour and half later I was in a slump, tired and worn out. My arms and legs were in cramps as I had stressed myself with more exercise than I have had in recent weeks. My fingers, hand and arms are still tense. Nevertheless, I enjoyed rock climbing so much that I have decided to try and make it a regular activity!