I took the flight operated by Maldivian on the way back to Male' from a little holiday to Fuvahmulah and Addu atolls last month and logged the flight path using the GPS on my phone. I finally had a moment today to pass the track log to Google Earth and look at it inside the program's great 3D visualization of the globe. And it looks atleast as cool as I had hoped!

The journey was logged from boarding to landing, from the Gan International Airport in Addu Atoll to Hulhule International Airport in Male' Atoll. To log the flight path, I used the free and very capable OruxMaps application for Android on my Google Nexus One phone (which was put in flight mode throughout). The track log was exported from OruxMaps as a GPX format file which can be read easily by Google Earth. The free application TourMaker helped convert the GPX data to KML code for a nice Google Earth "tour" of the path, which then I tweaked by hand a little bit to fit my liking.

Anyway, check out the video of the tour I made below. I am putting up for download, the raw GPX data (which contains latitude/longitude, timestamp, altitude, bearing and speed information) and the Google Earth KMZ files I made (one showing the flight path with altitude and the other a tour).

- Gan to Hulhule flight: GPX GPS log (Zip, 54KB)
- Gan to Hulhule flight: Google Earth tour (Kmz, 40KB)
- Gan to Hulhule flight: Google Earth track (Kmz, 37KB)

There are over a billion people across the world that are in perpetual hunger, starving to death. Being hungry for these people is not the same as what we experience when we've missed a meal or two or had very little food. For these people, they are forced to bear with the hunger day in day out, without a clue to when they could have some food - ANY food. Their body burns through the fat reserves, if any, they might have till there is no more and fails to function: death. The World Food Programme estimates that 10 children die from starvation every minute. 1/6th of the world already live in constant hunger and that's something we the more fortunate should be sad about - really really sad about.

What is equally sad is that hunger exists not because there is not enough food in the world. Food production has outpaced the growth in population and there is a surplus of food across the world. While there are many reasons why there is hunger, the problem can largely be attributed to unequal distribution and poverty. Unequal distribution results from political and economic obstacles that control the flow of food from food producers to those in need. Poverty, especially extreme poverty, means that people who really need it cannot afford to buy food or grow food. Natural disasters, political instability and wars push the financially challenged to poverty and starvation. People are dying of hunger essentially because they are too poor to stay alive.

Maldives, where there is so little food production, where almost every single food item we consume is imported, is an especially fragile society. Were there to be a war (and not necessarily within the country) or any other event that breaks down the import mechanisms, we'd all join the billion starving just as Maldivians have in such past events.

Help put pressure on governments to end hunger. Donate towards feeding the starving. Do what you can to help end poverty. If you are looking to get inspired, read up on Norman Borlaug who is credited with saving a billion people from starvation thanks to the high-yield, disease resistant variety of wheat that he engineered.

Hope none of you has to ever face chronic hunger.

I am now in the Maldives, back in my home city Male', and will stay put for a few weeks while I tick off a few things on my to-do list...

The Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA) standard which allows non-Latin alphabet to be used as domain names has been around for a few years and many of the top domain registries do support IDN registration now. ICANN, the corporation responsible for the management of the domain name system, also recently approved the creation of country-code top level domains in non-Latin alphabet. Hence, countries can now use top-level domains in their own language. Egypt, for example, now has adopted "‏مصر" as an option in addition to the usual Latin-based top level domain "eg".

The IDNA standard, along with the recent ICANN approval, means that there is now a framework allowing domain names to be written entirely written in Thaana. Before one gets too excited, there are a few issues to be aware of though. First, unfortunately the use of fili (diacritics) in the name seems to be not supported by IDNA (I've yet to read up to see whether this is an issue with the current implementations of IDN or something inherent in the IDNA standards). So, any domain name will be just a jumble of Thaana letters for now. I had to choose the address "ޖ.com" instead of "ޖާ.com" because the latter is unsupported. Second, for us to be able to have fully Thaana domain names, the government has to first adopt a suitable top-level domain (perhaps "ދވހރއޖ" or "ރއޖ"?), get ICANN approval and then wait for licensed Maldivian domain registrars (only Dhiraagu as far as I am aware) to start accepting registrations under the new top-level domain. This might seem quite pointless but given the increasing number of Thaana-based websites, I think we are soon going to see an explosion in the number of websites with domain names in Thaana.

Let's see how it all goes...

It has been sometime since I've seen a public MSN Messenger bot based on Blobsy, a PHP-based Messenger bot framework I developed a couple of years ago. So I was quite surprised to see the Thailand-based Lady Yang bot when its developer informed me about it recently.

The bot, billed as "Lady Yang - The Gay Cupid that help you find friend or lover" on its site, makes interesting use of the Blobsy framework by adapting it to build a dating chat bot. The main function of the bot seems to be its "matchmaker" mode, which requires users to enter some details about themselves in order to assign an "animal" to match the user's personality. Users can then search for matching users that have the same "animal" as themselves.

This is certainly a departure from the usual applications that I've seen Blobsy put to use! Good luck to the developer.

A few years ago I wrote a PHP-based Thaana text rendering class while investigating solutions to the problem of displaying Thaana text in web browsers on various devices. The class dynamically converts any given Thaana text into a formatted image of given dimensions and type. The use of images to display Thaana means that the information can be viewed on a large variety of devices and does away with the demand for the device to support Thaana fonts. On the flip side, the use of images does mean that this approach has higher bandwidth and data transfer requirements than text.

Features

The class makes use of the powerful image manipulation services provided by the GD library to create images from text and hence inherits the wide of features it offers. However, since the GD library does not (or atleast did not, back then) support right-to-left scripts and does not offer line wrapping to fit text within a bounding box, custom code had to be written to handle the unsupported text direction and formatting. The class also supports use of any Thaana font, made possible by GD support for loading TrueType fonts.

Applications

This piece of code was briefly put to live use around 2004 on the (now defunct) MUnet.net's Radheef service. More recently, it has been put to great use by Muraasil.com to display Thaana on their mobile service so that user's can read news in Thaana on mobile devices, including Windows Mobile-based phones and the iPhone.

Demo

Give it a go and play around: Thaana text rendering demo.

I am not releasing the code publicly just yet...

Muraasil, the new Maldivian web start-up, has a Dhivehi article by Rhipha on my Thaana Common Fonts Research project.

- އާއްމުކޮށް ބޭނުންކުރާ ދިވެހި ފޮންޓް ތަކާއި ބެހޭ ދިރާސާއެއް