A solar eclipse will occur on 1 August 2008 with quite a few cities being treated to a full eclipse.

Maldives scrapes the edges of the penumbra and hence is in for a view of a partial eclipse. However, only those islands to the north of Thaa (Kolhumadulu) Atoll will be able to see it and the northern-most atoll of Haa Alifu (Thiladhummathi North) Atoll gets the best show. The eclipse starts at 16:48 MVT and ends 17:23 MVT, with mid eclipse at 17:06 MVT. Remember that looking at the sun without the proper gear can and will damage the eyes, even during an eclipse. Sun glasses and used X-Ray paper aren't effective and should be avoided. The best way to view the eclipse (I would recommend) is to make a pinhole projector - it is cheap and easy to make and allows several people to view it at the same time. I urge Maldivian science teachers to take initiative and expose kids to the phenomena by arranging a group viewing of the event!

For those of us unable to view it and feeling left out (including me ), there is a planned live webcast of the view of the total eclipse from an observatory in China.

More info about the eclipse can be found at the NASA Solar Eclipses page. Find out if the eclipse is visible at your location using the interactive map tool found here.

I had mentioned Bodufenvalhugey Seedhee in a recent post and posted a link to a photo of his now abandoned house in HDh. Makunudhoo. I found a short mobile video I had taken of the place and thought I'd share it. His "teleportation well", which supposedly connects directly to Kaashidhoo Kandu, is seen towards the end of the video.

MultiSSH is a command line SSH client written in PHP that is able to conduct an interactive session on multiple SSH servers simultaneously. It is pretty handy if you have similar tasks to be run on a bunch of servers and want to control all of them simultaneously via one interface. Servers to connect are specified via a text file containing tab-separated listing of remote IPs and the username and password for each. Alternatively, if all servers have the same username and password, it can be passed as an argument when the script is run. It supports sending control characters to remote terminals through special commands.

I wrote this originally for a client project but since it got binned later, I thought I'd throw this into the public.

Usage:
multissh.php <iplistfile> <defaultuser> <defaultpass>

Requirements:
- PHP 4/5
- SSH2 extension for PHP

Download MultiSSH 0.1 (Zip, 3KB)

My third year project at uni (this year) involved investigating the application of Stochastic Diffusion Search to the problem of real-time web search by designing and implementing such a search engine in software. It certainly was interesting work and though the project had been completed successfully, there are a few things I wish I had explored and experimented with a bit more. I have another major project to tackle for the last year of my M.Eng degree in AI and Cybernetics which begins next month.

Anyway, here is a short presentation I had given based on a research paper I had to submit on my work as part of the course. I hope you find it interesting...

Radheef for Facebook, the little Facebook application that displays random words from the Radheef on the Facebook profile, has reached its 200th user. It took the whole of three months since its launch in February 2008 for it to get there! :S

- View the application's About page on Facebook

Most Maldivians are by now familiar with the drama unfolding in Makunudhoo. It has been on the news a lot and has been blogged about a lot but photos haven't been very forthcoming - well, except for a blurred image on Haveeru Daily and a photo stolen from my Flickr stream published on Miadhu News. So here are some images of the historic Makunudhoo School where Man and Jinn live side by side and study side by side, though not always in harmony as has been revealed. The school may replace the island's currently most famous landmark: the residential ruins of the infamous Bodufenvalhugey Seedhee (known for various supposed supernatural feats such as "walking on water" between islands, "helping" the infertile conceive etc) including its "teleportation well".

And yes, in case you wonder, it is ridiculous to believe this is a battle between invisible Jinn and humans, especially when there are good explanations.

Enjoy... stand awed.

I am hooked... to WorldWide Telescope! I love Google Sky and am an avid fan of it, but this new software from Microsoft Research kicks it all up a notch. WWT gives access to images of the sky from various different databases including the DSS optical, infrared and even the WMAP microwave imagery in a really slick, smooth interface. I've spent a good few hours today browsing through the sky, literally, and reading up.

Here is an image of the Orion belt I snapped from WTT. These three stars are part of the Orion constellation and are among the most prominent and easily identifiable stars in the skyscape. In fact, any Maldivian who has ever looked up at the night sky should recognize them. It is one of the first star constellations that I had learnt of and was a source of great wonder when I was a kid.



And here is an image of the planet Mars - the (almost) unmissable bright red dot in the sky. Many Maldivians seem to have a special relationship with Mars - as demonstrated by a habit of falling for the Mars sunrise-from-west doomsday fantasy hoax and the Mars as-large-as-Moon hoax. I think it might be appropriate for all those people to see the planet up close.



It is amazing that through modern technology, merely equipped with free software like the WWT or Google Sky (and its web version), that anyone of us can now zoom on these and other objects in the sky and enjoy a whole new level of awe and appreciation of the world around us...