The Dhiraagu e-Directory service as of today lists 421,198 entries (made up of 370,880 mobile numbers, 35,403 landline numbers and 14,915 island/resort numbers). Compare that with the 338,371 entries (made up of 305,198 mobile numbers, 24,423 landline numbers and 8,750 island/resort numbers) from October 2008. That works out to what seems a very impressive growth (mobiles 22%, landline 40%, island/resort: 70%) in the past 3 month period, especially given there is an economic crisis underway!

Anyway, here's the data as a Tab-Separated Values (a.k.a CSV) format file that can be opened in Excel, OpenOffice or imported into Access or any other database.

- Download edirectory_2009-02-04.zip (6,397 KB)

Enjoy!

This winter is turning out to be quite a remarkable departure from the past 3 winters I've experienced here in the UK. Last year's winter was pretty tame with there being, from what recall, only very light snow fall a few days out of the entire winter. Contrast that with the past two days of nearly continuous snow fall giving everything around a white covering. According to the news reports, it has been the worst, most widespread snowfall in the UK in 18 years! Also, apparently this is all consistent with global warming.

Anyway, I like that there's a bit of snow. The pretty white topping takes a bit out of the gloomy UK winters...

As you may already know, this year is being celebrated worldwide as the International Year of Astronomy. The effort, an initiative of the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO, intends "to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery". And now, thanks to the hard work from the newly formed Maldives Science Society (MSS), Maldives will be joining in too.

MSS has organised for Dr. Kavan U. Ratnatunga, a Sri Lankan astronomer and Senior Research Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (US), to travel to the Maldives and deliver a presentation. His presentation titled "The Universe as viewed through the Hubble Space Telescope" will center around the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a topic he is very much qualified to lecture - he has worked at NASA and has authored numerous research papers on various analyses and investigations of Hubble's snapshots of the universe.

The presentation is scheduled for 8:30pm - 11:00pm, 11th of February at the MCSE Seminar Room, Male'. If you are in Male' and interested in science and astronomy then it probably will be worth your while to attend the presentation. More details of the event are on the MSS Facebook event page and I presume updates will appear on the MSS website as well.

I commend the guys at MSS for putting so much of their time and their own money into making this event a reality. I hope they can make arrangements to participate in atleast some of the IYA cornerstone projects. The IYA Galileoscope project, which has developed a high-quality low-cost telescope kit, holds a lot of promise for MSS to make it possible for the public, especially kids and teens, to truly experience the universe through the lens of a real telescope. I, for one, had tears well up in my eye the first time I saw the rings of Saturn up close on a telescope... how will you react?

Here is a major update to the Thaana Conversions class for PHP 5 that I have been maintaining. This new version adds two new functions convertLatinToAscii() and its counterpart convertAsciiToLatin(), which transliterates text to and from the latinized/romanized Thaana form. That means you can pass on text bits like "miadhakee reethi dhuvahekeve" and have it converted to "މިއަދަކީ ރީތި ދުވަހެކެވެ".

This feature would facilitate Thaana websites to add cool and interesting new features like, say, offering to display a news article in latinized Thaana if the user does not have the required fonts installed and/or cannot install the Thaana fonts!

Info

The Thaana Conversions class for PHP provides a number of useful functions for the conversion and transliteration of text between various Thaana representation formats.

Functions exposed

- convertUtf8ToUnicodeIntegers()
- convertUtf8ToAscii()
- convertUtf8ToEntities()
- convertEntitiesToUnicodeIntegers()
- convertEntitiesToUtf8
- convertEntitiesToAscii()
- convertUnicodeIntegersToUtf8()
- convertUnicodeIntegersToEntities()
- convertUnicodeIntegersToAscii()
- convertAsciiToUtf8()
- convertAsciiToEntities()
- convertAsciiToUnicodeIntegers()
- convertLatinToAscii()
- convertAsciiToLatin()

Requirements

PHP 5

License

This script is released under the Open Source MIT License, allowing its use in both personal and commercial applications as long as the copyright and license permission notice remains intact.

Usage

<?php
// Load the class
require 'thaana_conversions.obj.php';

// Initialize the Thaana object
$thaana = new Thaana_Conversions();

// Example: Converting latin to ascii
echo $thaana->convertLatinToAscii('miadhakee haadha reethi dhuvahekeve.');

// Example: Converting ascii to latin
echo $thaana->convertAsciiToLatin('miawdwkI hWdw rIti duvwhekeve.');
?>

Download

- Thaana_Conversions.zip (v0.4, 4.8KB)

Enjoy

I received two feature requests in the email since I released the Thaana Transcoder late last month and both asked for the same thing; Unicode input text transcoding to Accent compatible ASCII output. It just so happened that the feature requested was something that I had actually programmed in, more or less, but left out in the public 1.0 release because I wasn't sure anyone would need it. So here is a new release with the said feature included and also bundles in a minor bug fix.

Info

Thaana Transcoder is a Windows-based tool that performs the often much needed conversion of Thaana text written in Accent, Faseyha Thaana, MS Word version 97 (and older) to and from the modern Unicode standard used by MS Word XP/2007 and OpenOffice.

Download

- Thaana Transcoder 1.1 Installer/Upgrade (185KB, MS Windows)
- Thaana Transcoder 1.1 Executable only (79.7KB, MS Windows)

I am deeply disturbed and saddened by the growing number of innocent casualties in the profoundly inhumane and insane war currently being waged between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

This is my protest against the Israeli siege of Gaza, their use of disproportionate mass-casualty weapons and their crippling sanctions in Gaza. I fail to see how such action is conducive to attaining a lasting solution. The most probable outcome we could expect from this course of action, perhaps, is for it to breed anger and even hatred amongst those affected - something we all could live happier without. This is also my protest against the exploitation of the civilian population and dwellings by Hamas in their military activities against Israel.

As a firm pacifist, it appalls me to see the eagerness towards violence, by both these groups of people, as a means to solve their disputes and disagreements. It appalls me that both parties continue the violence despite the growing fatalities and injuries. It appalls me that the world powers have let the situation continue to deteriorate without stepping in.

My heart goes out to all those people caught up in this conflict...

Thaana Transcoder is a Windows-based tool that performs the often much needed conversion of Thaana text written in Accent, Faseyha Thaana, MS Word version 97 (and older) to and from the modern Unicode standard used by MS Word XP/2007 and OpenOffice. This program hasn't been thoroughly tested and there is bound to be bugs and errors. If you do encounter such a bug or have a feature request, please drop me line.

Quite a few people have asked me for such a program over the years and I used to point people over to an online tool I had made available a few years ago but it is no longer alive. As ever, it wasn't until I had a real necessity for such a program a few days ago that I got around to writing a brand new version.

Download

- Thaana Transcoder 1.0 Installer (184KB, MS Windows)
- Thaana Transcoder 1.0 Executable only (78.8KB, MS Windows)

Enjoy