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 the latest incarnation of the SMS Sender application that I had been releasing since 2001.

It lets you send SMS messages to Dhiraagu mobile users easily. Since it uses the Dhiraagu WebSMS service to dispatch the SMS messages, you need to have a registered WebSMS account. WebSMS accounts are free for all Dhiraagu Dhimobile customers.

The phone book, signature line and proxying features have been disabled in this release and probably will be reinstated in future releases. The new release, however, adds features to show the remaining number of messages in the daily allowance of 10 that Dhiraagu imposes on normal WebSMS accounts. The new release also has versions for Mac, Linux and Windows, unlike the previous releases which were targetted only for Windows.

Drop me a line if you use it, like it, have suggestions or requests. Have fun SMSing!

Download for: Windows ( 1073KB ), Linux ( 986KB ), Mac ( 1012KB )

In the wee hours of this morning, in a moment of boredom, I wrote up (yet another) little script to send SMS via the Dhiraagu WebSMS facility. This particular one integrates into phpBB forums. I have been bugged for quite some time by several people to write them such a script, so finally here it is!

The script is the result of a quick and dirty job but is decent enough to be used without any problems. There are no configuration options that need to be setup and the script creates the necessary database tables upon first run. The user interface and back-end code has been mixed up into one file to make matters simpler. I may add features in the future to let it be skinned using separate phpBB style templates.

The installation is as simple as placing it in the root phpBB folder and accessing it via a browser. Refer to the "readme.txt" file included for step-by-step install and setup instructions. The script is free for use on your forums/portals. Please keep the credits intact or alternatively add a link to my blog on your site. Enjoy!

Download WebSMS 4 phpBB Version 0.1 (5Kb Zip file)

I was rummaging through my backup disks when I stumbled across this PDF document that I produced in 2003. It is called "Dhivehinnaai Portugeesun" and is a digitized version of a similarly titled series of articles that was featured in the "Faiythoora" journal published by the National Center for Linguistic and Historical Research (NCLHR). It was authored by "Khaassa Musheer" Naseema Mohamed from the Center and details the interactions between the Portuguese and the Maldivians through the years 1479 to 1650 in Maldivian history. I thought I'd share it since this undoubtedly would be of much use to anyone looking for such material.

This series was contributed for distribution at the Book Fair 2003, organized by the NCLHR. It was part of a presentation I made at the fair and was used to demo how even old Dhivehi MLS documents maybe converted to modern formats. Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format was chosen to show how Dhivehi can be used and displayed in this (mostly) universal format to be used for distribution as a step in embracing the digital revolution. I was hoping that this would encourage production of Dhivehi e-books and e-documents. The document was converted from the original MLS format to Rich Text format using a converter application that I had released on my then technology playground at bichoo.net. The Rich Text format file that was produced was then imported into Acrobat and the necessary pictures scanned in and inserted to prepare the final document. The font(s) used were embedded into the PDF document so that viewers do not need to have any special Dhivehi fonts installed.

Anyway, I hope someone finds this useful!

- Click here to download DhivehinaaiPortugesun1-3.zip (3.5 MB, Zip file).

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.

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!