Maldives as a nation has progressed on the net, albeit slightly, over the years. We've seen various web presences come and go and various projects pop into existence and then grow while most fizzle out and die soon after.

I am interested in compiling the history (the story!?) of the Maldivian presence on the World Wide Web. So I invite and urge everyone to drop a comment and share:
- what your earliest memories of the Maldivian internet presence are
- what your favourite Maldivian websites have been
- what web projects did you find useful, impressive...
- what government websites you visit(ed) regularly and/or find useful
- what commercial websites you visit(ed) regularly and/or find useful
- which community projects you participate(d) in or are aware of
etc

Thanks!

Note: Shaahee had an effort underway earlier this year to compile the history of usage of computers and the Internet in the Maldives into a book. He is now planning to open up the project as an open, web-based collaboration effort. The project should be having a public launch pretty soon...

We are aware of the world around us as being composed of three spatial dimensions. Theoretical physicists of our time however have been dabbling with theories that postulate reality as being composed even higher dimensions. Einstein named "time" as being the fourth dimension in his "special relativity" theory. Later, "string theory" took up the number of dimensions to 10 and "M theory" pushed it up to 11. Imagining higher dimensions can be a bit unwieldy without walking through the steps that reach the higher dimensions.

I found a neat narrated animation at Imagining the Tenth Dimension website that starts from the 0th dimension and builds up to the 10th dimension with demonstrations of how it may apply and how we may perceive it. Check it out

I've been tied up past few days developing a new website for the Maldivian Students' Association-UK, as well as developing a new website Content Management System for Technova.

The new website for MSA is now online at http://www.msa-uk.org/. The website has a few more content updates to be done and is awaiting the member registration/management system to be put in place along with a few "community" tools to be also tied in.

MSA will be holding their Annual General Meeting(AGM) in London in just a few days. If you are a Maldivian student in the UK, you are welcome to pop into the MSA base anytime 22nd-24th Dec and join the activities.

According to a friend in Male', our online Radheef was featured on this week's "Fahimagu" programme by Television Maldives. I would like to thank them for appreciating the work!

The Radheef has been getting some attention lately and several people have mailed us with suggestions, comments and notes of appreciation. We understand that font rendering is messed up on some browsers and the list-as-you-type feature isn't going down too well with slow connections. Few people have requested that the radheef be made "open" so as to allow updates and corrections. There will be updates to the Radheef the coming few weeks to remedy many of the issues and also to apply a few enhancements. If you've got any suggestions or comments do drop a comment and let me know.

The Maldives Airports Company has rolled out a website (http://www.fis.com.mv/) where real-time flight arrival/departure information is available. It's about time they did that and I am sure many people will find it very useful.

I wrote some code yesterday for Nattu, who is currently developing a new website for Haveeru News, to get the data from the Flight Information Services (FIS) website and display it on the Haveeru website. Haveeru has access to an XML feed of the data with more fields available than that shown at the FIS site. The script I wrote implements a class that parses the XML file and provides easy access to the flight information via the class properties.

Sadly, the XML feed is not (yet) available to the public and so today I modified the code so that it works by scraping the publicly available data on the FIS website. The code implements an object called "flightinfo" that can be used in any of your PHP applications and the data displayed as you please. I've included a demo sample file as well.

- Download the flightinfo script

I've been feeding my curiosity in Quantum Computation with works from the great pioneer in the field - Prof. David Deutsch. It is not that I like computers but because that the ideas behind quantum computation are so fundamentally profound and far-reaching that I just can't not keep an eye on it! Read up David Deutsch's paper Physics, Philosophy and Quantum Computation for a synopsis of the promises of quantum computation and the implications of quantum constructor theory. There are a couple of other interesting papers available on his site.

If you are all-excited and orgasmic about it and can't wait to bite your teeth into it then check out the "Introduction to Quantum Computation" lectures by David Deutsch. As the page says, you should be able to follow it easily if you understand what a vector space is and what eigenvalues of a matrix are.

An embryo, just a lump of meaningless goo, growing in size as the cells multiply. Few weeks on and there appears something that finally crosses the hazy boundary between weird-goo-clumps and human fetus. Yet as a fetus, it only just vaguely resembles the human form. It does not even have a brain - the brain circuitry develops slowly. Then one day soon the cognitive processes slowly start kicking in despite the senses being not all developed yet. The senses start coming on one by one as the organs develop and the neural pathways to the cerebral cortex become established.

When the sense of touch comes, it feels big! As big as it wishes to perceive. As big as an endless entity. The untuned, uncalibrated sense of touch does not have a set of measuring units developed for defining distances. There is nothing to take as a reference. When the auditory system comes on, it is a confusing jumble of "noise" at first. It is unable to really make out anything intelligible. Nevertheless, as the neural links develop soon it begins to distinguish differences and begin labeling them - diff 1, diff 2... In later life, it adds meaning to these differences: diff 1 may become top and anti-diff 1 becomes bottom, diff 2 may become left... and so on.

The sense of touch and sense of hearing are now both active and the brain is left in a new playground. It shoots off to seek differences and the touch and sounds are unified and relations established. The brain maps the sounds to a projection in "space" in terms of the 3-dimensional space from the sense of touch. However, it may well be that the differences it makes in this primitive step is just another meaningless segmentation and classification of sensory signals...

When the baby is finally born and the seclusion in the womb ends, it sees the light of the world. A whole new and revolutionary change begins. The brain attempts to tie in sights, sounds, touch, odors and taste into a harmonious melody. Locomotion finds new possibilities and the visual system kicks into constant overdrive. As the human grows further, the sensory signal combinations all get attached meaning - direct and/or abstract - till finally, you are able to effectively read the junk I just wrote and (sort of) make sense of it all yet remain in a bewildered state best described with the letters WTF!!