Introducing.... ScienceMaldives!

ScienceMaldives is one of my latest pet projects. It is a collaborative effort that saw its beginnings in January 2006 and features Muthasim and Adnan in the driving seat, in addition to myself. The work is currently still under development and is scheduled to be officially launched on 1st March.

The aim of the venture is to nurture and support the development of science and science education in the Maldives. We want it to be a resource for students in various stages of education as well as a resource for the curious non-students. We will be publishing articles, how-to's and providing/facilitating answers to specific questions that any of you may have. It is also aimed at being a means of access to material - journals, news, research papers etc from around the world. Additionally, we wish to promote research and application of science in the Maldives through increased awareness and education. Despite the name, it is not our intention to stick entirely to pure sciences and therefore we welcome the applied sciences and social sciences as well.

The ScienceMaldives wesite is mostly blank for now as we are working on the content at the moment to be readied for our official launch. The site also contains a discussion forum targetted at engaging our users in intellectual debates and as a means of obtaining answers to questions. The forum is already active with quite a few members aboard and many ongoing discussions. We hope that the site and forum would be better able to serve the needs of the Maldivian populace than similar foreign resources.

This effort is a strictly not-for-profit operation and we will be relying on the participation and content contribution by our visitors and users to achieve and maintain ScienceMaldives a reliable and rich source of information. Educators are encouraged to contribute articles as we wholeheartedly believe such deliverance of knowledge would help build a more educated and enlightened society in the Maldives. If you are interested in contributing to our efforts, please do drop me an email.

We do carry big dreams and hopes for the future of the venture. If things workout well, we intend on publishing a newsletter/journal in the Maldives. We also hope to cultivate practical forays into science by organizing and executing science fairs (which is something which the government has conveniently abandoned in favour of having more singing competitions per year ). These strictly remain long term goals for now and we are concentrating on compiling the website into a notable resource for all science lovers in the Maldives.

The ScienceMaldives site is located at http://www.sciencemaldives.com/ . Join the forum and start posting at http://www.sciencemaldives.com/forum/

Blobsy 2 ( beta, rc6 ) has been made official today. The release brings together a number of minor updates from various cvs commits over time as well as a few major feature additions by a few other developers. The release comes after a long time of inactivity in the project but hopefully marks a rekindling of more intense development work to keep up with the changes coming with Windows Live Messenger rollout.

Change log
- Upgraded to support MSNP10, MSNP11 and MSNP12
- Personal Status Message support
- Added Challenge Response Generation Object (chl.obj.php)
- Fixed SB WLM8 compatibility bugs
- Fixed SB MSG headers bug
- Removed redundant configuration file entries
- Added Unicode encode/eecode functions
- Fixed MSNFTP bugs and added multiple simultaneous File Transfer support
- Modified MSNP2P functions
- Updated UserRelated to utilise $msn functions


Go to Blobsy homepage

Here is another of my pet projects brought back from the land of the deceased.

This one is called "JavaScript Dhivehi Character Recognition". It was created early 2003 (or maybe late 2002) and made available on bichoo.net. Basically, it lets you draw a Thaana character using your mouse and then it "recognizes" what you have drawn. The purpose was mostly to satisfy my curiosity into artificial intelligence and pattern recognition at the time, however it also showed promises of the beginnings of a future where Dhivehi documents maybe scanned in and processed by a computer to convert it to text just as Optical Character Recognition technology has been doing for English documents. I think this rudimentary application was the first ever Dhivehi character recognition implementation released to the public. More interestingly, this seems to be the only character recognition implementation programmed in JavaScript floating around on the Internet even now.

I spent a bit of time tonight reworking some bits of the code for clarity. The entire implementation is done using JavaScript and DHTML. You are welcome to study the code to see how it works. The code is well commented and maybe a good starter into AI and pattern recognition basics. It uses a single layer single Perceptron model to really simplify things however it is a good enough practical implementation to work for characters drawn on a 10x10 grid. The grid makes up the input data to the neural network. The neural network is hard-coded into the page and has definitions for each character in the alphabet. I do hope you are surprised by the accurateness of the recognition of this little application.

Have a look at it HERE. Let me know if you find it amusing... or not.

My company - Technova Pvt Ltd - is currently working on bringing a full fledged Dhivehi OCR software to the Maldivian public. It will probably be made available early 2006, as a service for customers requiring bulk OCR processing. We shall be releasing Windows, Linux and Mac versions of the software for home and business use around mid 2006.

There are a lot of little "projects" that I start with much gusto; however me being me, I burn out of enthusiasm in a few months. So today, while I was in my happy place I felt this utter need to rejuvenate the orphaned projects and stuff I've created over the years and bring them back to life. This renewed enthusiasm, so far, extends as far as bringing back online the orphaned projects by injecting some vitality into them or in a lot of cases bringing them back from the land of the dead.

So tonight, I started with one of my once most beloved projects known as Blobsy (http://www.blobsy.org/). Blobsy is an MSN Messenger bot framework written in PHP and works with any PHP version 4.3.0 and above. It can run on both Linux and Windows. It was the first PHP based bot to be distributed on the net as far as I know but then again I might be buttering up myself too much. Blobsy got featured on the main MSN Messenger fan sites such as mess.be and msnfanatic.com over the various versions I released. The live Blobsy demo bots had 3000+ people using it before I took them down. I was quite a really happy teenager back then.

What does Blobsy do? It provides a base framework for providing bot services to clients on MSN Messenger chat network. It was meant to do to Messenger chat, what Eggdrop did for IRC. Blobsy provides very flexible methods to extend the functionality of basic framework via what I've called Handlers. So if you want to provide news, phone number lookups, emailing, group chat or whatever else your imagination lets you conjure up with the MSN Messenger chat network, then Blobsy would probably be able to pull it off. Blobsy supports Custom Emoticons and Display pictures as well. The current release versioned B2 beta 5 is compliant with the MSNP9 protocol used by Messenger 6.

Some of you may have used my live Blobsy demo bots which carried the same name (post a comment if you have encountered it or used it!). It had features such as sending SMS to DhiMobile phones easily via MSN Messenger. It also let you see the latest news from Haveeru and Aafathis. It let you lookup phone numbers and addresses on the phone directory. You could also store notes on it so that you could retrieve it from wherever you had access to MSN Messenger. Another Blobsy experience would have been the IRC2MSN bot that I launched sometime late last year or early this year. It used the Blobsy framework to let you see what was going on the Maldivian IRC channels while you were on Messenger. There have been quite a number of Blobsy based bots run by various organizations and individuals around the globe over the years.

However, the usage and support has waned over the past months due to my lack of updating the Blobsy project. I hope to renew the Blobsy project by regularly updating the project to provide for the changes being brought to MSN Messenger. I also plan to relaunch the live Blobsy bots targeted mainly for the Maldivian MSN Messenger users, by providing the old live bot features in addition to a mix of new features such as chat rooms right on Messenger. Imagine the fun!

Drop me a line if you got any feedback regarding the project/code or if you have suggestions for the features of the live bot.

I started to write a book about three months back. The project has been idle for about a month now but I've returned to it today. The book is aimed at teaching or rather introducing science to children. It is being written in Dhivehi and is targeted mainly for distribution in the islands. Yes, I did say distribution - I have no intention of making this a for-profit endeavor. I have yet to work out the details of how the distribution shall take place. However, I certainly intend on letting it loose on the internet once it's done.

The book shall begin with a prologue to science, scientific methods, analysis and critical thinking - all simplified enough to suffice in communicating the essence of these topics while maintaining comprehensibility. The book then proceeds with a number of practical investigations and experiments each tackling a different phenomena. The investigations themselves are each divided into segments: introduction, materials used, step by step method, explanation and finishes off with further thoughts and suggestions. This method of hands-on investigation followed by theory elucidation is an often adopted form of teaching science used in many books. I hope this tried and tested formula stands true for teaching science in Dhivehi.

The experiments and ideas used in the book are more or less used universally as introductory material. The experiments featured also have reflections from my childhood, when day in and day out I used to experiment with stuff. I am running the material through a few of my friends as I write it, to get their comments and input. Much appreciation goes to my buddy Muththu for the help he has been lending to the project since I started it.

There are a few reasons why I have made the choice to write a science book and that too specifically for kids in the islands. I am targeting the islands because of its neglected status in our society. The islands have been under-served, especially in the educational sector, for a reason. I want to challenge that and will, hopefully, continue to do that through further activities. I chose to write a science book not only because of my love for the scientific field, but more because of the lack of Dhivehi literature in the field. This is especially true for material available to children. While there is a yearly award offered by the President to the authors of educational material for kids, it is generally seen as a superficial game to taint the record books by increasing the count of books rather than encouraging the production of quality and diverse material. I hope my book can do a little bit of good to my intended audience and that it may aid them in rising up to a better life.

Now, I have a request from any science aficionados among you. Please send in suggestions for experiments you think will be effective in teaching or inducing deeper thought in the little fellows who may read the book. I have a request from the rest of you as well. That is, to tell me of anything from your childhood that really got your mind whirring. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Serendipity is extensively customisable and has quite a number of plugins available to enhance the basic feature set. It is developed in PHP, which being my favourite server-side programming language for web applications, has inspired me to study the code deeper and write code to help the Serendipity community. I shall begin my contribution to the Serendipity project by sharing a teeny weeny script I wrote to import all my posts (and comments) from Blogger.com. Blogger.com service is the same thing as Blogspot blogs.

Just place this Blogger.com To Serendipity Import file in the Serendipity directory and access it from a browser. Follow the instructions it gives. There are a few steps you need to take to make sure it goes well, so be careful.

If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to drop me a line.

Update (29/11/2005): My code has since been integrated into the Serendipity distribution as an importer by the project developers and now comes standard as part of all their new releases!

I hacked up my mobile phone camera a few months ago to make it sensitive to Infrared as well as the Visible wavelengths of light. I have been meaning to share the hack with others, so finally here it is!

Introduction
My phone, a Sony Ericsson T610, had been giving me trouble. There was static when I am in a call and sometimes my voice cuts out altogether. I had guessed it was the mic giving me trouble. I got out my hex screwdriver set and disassembled the phone and repositioned the mic after cleaning the contacts. Sure enough, that fixed the problem.

Curiosity got the better of me after fixing the mic. I wanted to check out the camera in the phone! I had modified a webcam before to make it senstitive to Infrared (IR). The CCDs (Charge Coupled Devices: the part of a camera that actually converts what it sees into electrical signals) are usually sensitive to IR as much as it is to visible light and camera manufacturers place an IR filter in the lens assembly to remove the IR spectrum. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could do the same to my phone camera.

I then had the camera carefully disassembled soon as it turned out to be quite easy. I proceeded to identify the IR filter in the lens assembly, removed it and reassembled the phone. I turn on the phone and viola! It works! Of course it works!

How to do it?!
Do this under a table light and use a magnifying glass to make things easier.

1. Take apart your phone. You'll need a hex screw driver of the right size.
2. Get to the camera and just remove the clips holding the camera onto the phone case, then remove the wires from the socket.
3. When you have the camera assembly separate from the phone, remove the back of the camera by prying apart the plastic clips that hold it together. Be careful when doing this!


4. You should see inside the lens assembly now. Look at the outer most lens, pasted using globs of glue at the sides. The lens would have a red tint to it. Use a sharp object, possibly a tiny screw driver to pry the lens out. Store it in a safe place. WARNING: You will most likely damage the lens if you are not ultra careful!


5. Reassemble everything once you get that lens out.

Switch on your phone. Bring the front of a TV remote control near your camera and see the IR being emitted by the remote!!

Exploring the IR World
What could this possibly be useful for? Since the camera is now sensitive to IR, it can see things that our eyes can’t see. This was mind boggling at first, well to me at least. I could darken my room and “illuminate” it with IR light which is invisible to the human eye. Turn my camera on and the room is clear as daylight!

First things first, you'd want to just snap pictures and see how they look. Amusing aint it? Well, you can do quite cool things in addition to taking weird images. You could even “see” the light from a TV remote. TV remotes rely on IR signals to communicate with the TV.

Your hacked up camera will now be able to spot security cameras in the night that use IR to illuminate the area. Such areas will be lit up and clear as day. I've had much fun at night with security cameras.

Got another SE T610? Try looking at the "opague" top black bit with the hacked camera. It would be see thru! Or try with a glass of coke. You'll see right through the coke and the coke will appear colorless!

Moreover, for you perverts like me. I encountered an interesting occurence - an IR sensitive camera seems to expose more than is visible to the naked eye when it comes to clothing. Those wearing certain types of clothes beware!

Further thoughts
I am dying to try this out with a phone with a better camera. The SE K700i/K750i would be ideal! These new generation mobile have better cameras, thus better quality pictures even for infrared. I could also replace the illuminator/flash LED in the phone with a high brightness IR LED. Now to get my hands on a willing K750i... Sigh. Have fun!