I am missing home today. Home as in Maldives - the people, the sun, the blue sky, the humid air, the lagoons, the sea, the beaches and wind...

A friend of mine sent me this video ad of Maldives titled "A little bit of Maldives". Apparently it is currently being shown on BBC and used for tourism promotion in the European markets. The video is a little bit over-the-edge, with shots mostly of the sculpted landscapings from the resorts and paints a dolled-up image of the country. Despite that, it still is good to watch the sunny beaches and idealize the homeland. The images trigger warm feelings of nostalgia. Plus, the ad carries a catchy tune which does a good job of lingering around in the crevices in the head, ready to pop up in mid thought - especially on these winter mornings.



Enjoy!

I got elected into the Central Committee (2006) for the Maldivian Students' Association (UK) beginning of this year. It does come with a bit of work load, especially since the MSA website comes under my care now. I am working on revamping the site soon in an concerted effort to make it more useful for prospective and current Maldivian students in the UK, after all, the website acts as the center of communication for MSA activity. I am also trying to push for changes and activities that I think will help towards making MSA a real success story.

Quite a few seem to view MSA as a redundant establishment; as just another front of influence by our beloved government. It may be or may not be the case, however, what I do know is that it is a tool that can be manipulated for achieving good. There are a lot of difficulties the students face here. Everything from getting visa to finding accommodation has obstacles and difficulties littered along the way. Students are now required to spend about 2 weeks in Colombo in order to get a student visa for entry into UK. What the government has done to alleviate this hassle is not known by many - including the Minister of Education who recently visited the UK and met the students. The lovely Minister informed us all that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been asked and hasn't responded on the matter. So, hello Mr. Foreign Ministry and hello Ms. Education: can you please get these things sorted out before the world expires? I can understand there are more pressing matters which is precisely why I understandingly said "before the world expires" - that should give ample time, I hope.

There are a lot of areas that MSA can make itself useful. For example, new students are often fresh off the sandy beaches and are parting the safety net of family and friends for the first time. Thus, as can be expected, quite a few of the students also have to battle with the differences in culture. Apart from handling the silent but nonetheless prevalent racist attitudes, students also have to digest and find a solution to having a good time with the fellow British colleagues who on routine finish up day at university and then retire to alcohol for solace. In addition to obvious culture shocks, most of the students coming have never lived alone, never cooked, never managed a budgeted life etc. A student association can definitely help in preparing and offering help to students to settling in - from buying utensils, books, clothes and other gear to hunting for food and whipping up healthy, edible concoctions. It would do great benefit to build and maintain a healthy support group for all students, new and old. I know a bit too many students who freaked out at the behest of the world separating them from their loved ones. Not all who arrive have family/friends already in the UK to call and ask for help when needed. A familiar face, a familiar story and a familiar language does seem to go a long way in offering comfort. The MSA can facilitate a lot for the experienced students too. Part-time jobs, internships, holiday work and scholarships can all be facilitated by MSA. These are little things of importance that the association can achieve and should strive to offer.

By now, a few of you would probably jump up and say "but MSA is only a tiny student body run by students - in their own time". Yes! So what?s MSA to do? Organize yearly meetings and leech money from whoever would be kind enough to spare a few cash notes to be put into the good use of arranging "bilehmeerukohlevvun" as we Maldivians are so used to back home? A glance at the MSA constitution shows many an objective proudly listed. If there is a constitution outlining a modus operandi and goals to achieve, then it should be followed otherwise the objectives might as well all be replaced by the single word "naacharangy".

Lastly, I must note an interesting development this year. The government (Maldivian of course!) has "blessed" the MSA with the responsibilities of managing 9 Rosemont Avenue- a government owned house used for Maldivian student boarding and as an MSA activity hub. There hasn?t been proper (if any at all) maintenance done over the years, leaving the house in utterly poor conditions. The house is truly in an unholy mess. I sympathize with the students living there. Of course, all of this is justified by giving out the rooms in the house at a discounted rate. However, is that enough when the house breaks several UK housing rules? It doesn't even adhere to the fire and safety regulations. Jeez! Many students have raised their concerns over the matter and as everything political everywhere, a committee was created to "investigate". The committee has now compiled a report along with a prioritized list of renovations that would hopefully make the building decently habitable. This is all fine and dandy, but the funds for renovations has to be obtained from the government. Hopefully, there will be no difficulty this time, just as the Minister promised.

Now that vented out a few (MSA) things on my mind, I must say that I hope this year will be a very productive year for the association and the student community.

Today is supposed to be the birthday of Maumoon Abdul Gayyoom, who happens to be known by many popular aliases such as The President of Maldives, The President, His Excellency, Zaeemu, Al-Usthaaz (or rather *the*usthaaz), MAG, Maanu, Maumoonu and lately more famous under the monikers The Dictator, The Oppressor and Golhaaboa. I am sure you all know him. First and foremost, let me wish him: happy birthday Maumoon!

I have to admit that Maumoon is probably one of the most interesting figures in Maldivian history. I am impressed by what he has achieved - though I shall take liberty in not being too specific in what I think he actually achieved. He has suppressed (and thus defeated) all opponents for 27 years. He has ruled (and manipulated) the populace of a country for longer than I have been alive. His oratory and literary abilities have captivated much of the population. His presence is respected by many. He has maintained a solid image to the world. He even managed to get a writer to immortalize him by beautifully sculpting a impressive image of himself in a book titled "A Man for all Islands". The name of the book, chosen by him of course, goes a long way in hinting at the sort of person he is. All in all, he seems to have played most cards right.

Anyway, to celebrate the day I decided to share the horoscope of the man himself. I do not know the accuracy of the birth details used to generate the report and thus I do not claim this to be a valid astrological representation of him. All I can vouch for is that this is a professional software-generated astrological report in its original form and that it makes for a very interesting reading. Jump to page 29 of the document to begin reading the chart interpretation texts.

Click here to download the horoscope report for Maumoon Abdul Gayyoom.

I was rummaging through my backup disks when I stumbled across this PDF document that I produced in 2003. It is called "Dhivehinnaai Portugeesun" and is a digitized version of a similarly titled series of articles that was featured in the "Faiythoora" journal published by the National Center for Linguistic and Historical Research (NCLHR). It was authored by "Khaassa Musheer" Naseema Mohamed from the Center and details the interactions between the Portuguese and the Maldivians through the years 1479 to 1650 in Maldivian history. I thought I'd share it since this undoubtedly would be of much use to anyone looking for such material.

This series was contributed for distribution at the Book Fair 2003, organized by the NCLHR. It was part of a presentation I made at the fair and was used to demo how even old Dhivehi MLS documents maybe converted to modern formats. Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format was chosen to show how Dhivehi can be used and displayed in this (mostly) universal format to be used for distribution as a step in embracing the digital revolution. I was hoping that this would encourage production of Dhivehi e-books and e-documents. The document was converted from the original MLS format to Rich Text format using a converter application that I had released on my then technology playground at bichoo.net. The Rich Text format file that was produced was then imported into Acrobat and the necessary pictures scanned in and inserted to prepare the final document. The font(s) used were embedded into the PDF document so that viewers do not need to have any special Dhivehi fonts installed.

Anyway, I hope someone finds this useful!

- Click here to download DhivehinaaiPortugesun1-3.zip (3.5 MB, Zip file).

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.

Now I know quite a few people would wet themselves on hearing of the dirty things one can do to Dhiraagu. I also know quite a few people would risk actually trying what I am about to narrate, so here I begin with a disclaimer.

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Disclaimer: The information presented in this article is mostly for entertainment purposes and whatever educational value it may posses must be the result of some exotic butterfly flapping its wings under the canopy of the Amazon. At no time do I recommend you or any circus animals attempting these and consequently, I take no responsibility for your actions.
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If you are a dialup user on Dhiraagu Dhivehinet then every time you dial-in you get an IP address assigned automatically. An IP address is sort of a unique identifier for your computer on the internet. I was setting up an internet dialup connection to Dhiraagu on a friend's computer a few years ago when I wondered what would happen if I were to specify my own IP address in the settings rather than let Dhiraagu automatically assign me. If things were set correctly at Dhiraagu, what I was about to do should not be possible. However, I decided to try it out anyway, hoping that they might have mucked it up.

I decided I would attempt using the IP for the Dhiraagu proxy server, i.e. assign myself the same identity as the web proxy operated by Dhiraagu. As you might already know, all WWW traffic flows through a proxy server if you are a Dhivehinet customer, therefore the proxy server knows what you browse, when you browse and can totally keep tabs on you. Similarly, by assuming myself its identity I should be able to see what the real proxy sees. I should be able to grant myself the same power! Sure enough, as soon as I dialed in with the forced IP, the connection status icon at the bottom of the screen lit up. The received packet count in the connection status window kept on increasing endlessly. I was getting bombarded by the web traffic coming into the proxy! I had successfully assumed its identity. I then disconnected and I sat there with a wicked smile painted on my face, imagining the possibilities this opened up.

Few minutes later, my fingers were flying over the keyboard furiously as I wrote a quick ?n dirty proxy server software. Its purpose was to act as a proxy, logging all the data it receives. I could have done a kazillion fun things to add to that but I resisted the temptation. An hour or so later, I had the proxy program working as I wanted and so went back to dialing in. As soon as my connection got established, the program started displaying the various requests coming in from users on the Dhiraagu network. Less than a minute into the dialup and my program crashed due to overflow. There was too much data! I reprogrammed bits to fix the issue and went back on, logging data for about 5 minutes before disconnecting.

I opened up the log file created by my program and analyzed the various connection attempts. By the end of going over the log, I had another reason to be quite amused. The log indicated that about 75% of all requests I had intercepted was for pornographic websites. This was proof that much of the Maldivian internet users used the internet for porn!!

Anyway, this "flaw" gives rise to a whole set of opportunities. I could impersonate any server on Dhiraagu. I could become one of their FTP servers and start logging username/passwords. I could become one of the web servers and start serving rogue web pages. I could become the email server and log username/password as people attempt to check mail. The possibilities were almost endless...

I have mailed Dhiraagu several times over the years regarding this issue but never received a reply. Sadly, this was still working about 6 months ago according to a friend who tried it. However, it may have been fixed in the recent endeavor by Dhiraagu to improve the security in their networks.


UPDATE (11-09-2005):
I just received a log from "Fatty" of Digitial Squid that re-confirms what I revealed in the article. Thanks Fatty!

Below is a screenshot of the captured traffic in Ethereal where I have placed a "http" filter to list only the web traffic. On the right side, it shows the various websites people are browsing and on the left of that is the associated IP address requesting that particular page. It is interesting to note that 53 percent of the requests are for porn

For the technical lot who are keen to see the actual Ethereal capture, HERE is the log that Fatty provided me with.