Easter holidays went off quite quickly - the five weeks off university that I got surely seemed to whizz past anyway. I attended the MSA Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) 2006 in Bristol from 14th-17th April. The new website for MSA that I worked on got launched at the meeting. The EGM event, which was filled with various activities and spread over 4 days, was quite fun!

It is back to university now and exams are looming right around the corner - starts end of May to be more precise. Grrr. I have got a load of assignments and project works to hand in over the next few weeks as well. Wish me luck

A few photos from past weeks...

It is easter holidays for me at the moment and I seem to have more time on my hand than I can spend engaged in "productive" activities. So, in a moment of boredom this morning, I programmed a Dhiraagu telephone directory lookup application for Windows Mobile based Pocket PC and Smartphones.

The program allows you to search the entire Dhiraagu telephone directory. The directory data comes bundled with the application and allows for quick and cheap directory lookups to be performed right on your phone. The directory includes landline numbers as well as mobile phone numbers. This is like the ultimate phone book! The program should run fine on pocket pcs and smartphones running Windows Mobile 2003 and later.

The application does require .NET Compact Framework to be installed. That shouldn't be a problem to Windows Mobile 2003 SE and Windows Mobile 5 devices as they comes with the framework preinstalled. The application takes up about 8Mb on the device, so make sure you install the program onto a SD card or whatever expansion storage supported by your device. The program can be installed simply copying the provided CAB files onto the device and executing them on the device.

Note: Windows Mobile 5 comes with application locking so that only digitally signed applications are allowed to install and run. You will need to remove this locking mechanism to allow your device to run the directory software. Here is a guide to removing application locking.

Download:
- Pocket 110 v1.0beta2 for Pocket PC (WM 2003/SE, WM 5.0)
- Pocket 110 v1.0beta2 for Smartphone (WM 2003/SE, WM 5.0)

Screenshots:

Feel free to download and spread it. Drop a line in the blog comments if you have any suggestions, comments or just want to thank me (or whatever...)

Enjoy!

I just issued a RC 7 version to Blobsy 2. Grab it at the Blobsy site.

The update simply fixes recent bot sign-in problems that apparently sprouted up after Microsoft made some changes to their Passport authentication system. Blobsy 2 releases up until now relied on hard-coded Passport domain to server mappings to handle various user domain groups. The MS update seems to have changed this and suddenly much of the Blobsy bots refused to sign in, after logging authentication failures in the log files.

The update was supplied by Thioz, who fixed the problem after encountering the problem with his live Blobsy bot. Kudos to Thioz for the update and for letting me know! I haven't been using Blobsy for a little while now, so I was not aware there was a problem in the first place... hehe.

Toodles.

These are programs that I published on my (previous) digital playground at maldivianunderground.net. The site has been offline for ages, yet these two software are something quite a lot of people ask me for. So here they are; the Accent2RTF converter and MLS Converter.

Accent2RTF Converter
Accent and Accent Express have been used for creating Dhivehi documents for quite a while and remains in high use even now. Unfortunately however, the Accent format is not supported in any of the Microsoft Word or OpenOffice versions and an independant converter is needed to convert the Accent prepared documents for use in these software. This is where Accent2RTF comes into play: point it to a Accent (*.acc) file and it will spit out a RTF (*.rtf) file that can be opened and used in any text editing software that supports RTF formats (eg. MS Word, OpenOffice Write). This is the original version as it was first released in 2001.
- Download Accent2RTF Converter 1.0 Installer ( 217Kb, MS Windows only)

MLS Converter 2
Multi Lingual Scholar is a text editing software that has been used for the creation of Dhivehi documents on computers since 1988, I believe. However, it requires MS DOS to run and the software was discontinued in 1998. The use of MLS has greatly decreased since the introduction of dhivehi text entry using Unicode on Windows XP and later Microsoft operating systems. Despite this, there remain a bundle of MLS format files that were created in its time. This converter takes in any MLS (*.mls) file and gives out a RTF file for use in Microsoft Word and all the other various RTF supporting text editing software. MLS Converter was first released in 2001 and updated to version 2 a year later.
- Download MLS Converter 2 Installer ( 221 Kb, MS Windows only)

Enjoy!

I like classical music. It is very rejuvenating, refreshing and energizing. Tonight, I am stuck on Beethoven. Ludwig van Beethoven is the most loved among my classical collection. I find his music very energizing - especially the famed 9th Symphony. My knowledge of music is an utter shame so I know nothing of his music's greatness. However, I can stand witness to the power of his music. The 9th Symphony is the sort of music that plays with my auditory systems and permeates into myself...

The 9th Symphony was Beethoven's last complete composition. Interestingly, he was totally deaf at the time of its composition! At the premiere of this work, Beethoven is said have been so immersed into his own world that he continued conduct after the musicians had stopped playing. The 9th symphony has made appearances in movies (A Clockwork Orange) and cartoons (Tom and Jerry). Someone even went as far as stretching the 9th Symphony into 24 hours! The ninth symphony (download) is in four "movements". My favourite is the second movement - it is the most moving - but the fourth movement is amazing too.

Then again, Beethoven has so many other great compositions. "Violin Romance" (download), "Fur Elise" (download) and "Moonlight Sonata" (download) are among my favourites. (note: the links provided are just free for download renditions that a quick search on Google turned up)

Syncing back to Beethoven now....

The sun granted us a cheerfully sunny day all throughout today. The wind had, meanwhile, taken a break from moving bone-chilling cold air around and let people go out without turning into a popsicle. The day looked so good that I just had to go for a walk - I haven't seen this much sunshine for almost 5 months now! (Err, that and the need to stock up milk from the convenience store up the road. )

Here are some shots from my "walk".