Time flies! I didn't realize so much time had passed since I last blogged but then again I've been quite strapped for time all this month...

My end-of-year exams, 8 mildly gruelling ones, ended the very last day of May. The exams didn’t go without incident as one would ideally have it as I (somehow) managed to do the wrong paper at one of the exams! Anyway, that seems to have been sorted out now since it turned out that it wasn’t entirely my fault. Uni has, since then, (almost) ground to a halt and I’m a bit relieved that I don’t have to attend 20+ hours of lectures now... and won’t have to atleast for a few more months. I had to deal with my third (but not final!) year project selection right after exams and a good couple of days were spent pondering over which project to select. There were so many projects from different supervisors we could choose from where some of them were a bit straightforward and some were a bit challenging. The project I settled on finally is one that I hope is a bit of the latter - it deals with the application of a type of swarm intelligence known as Stochastic Diffusion Search towards real time web search. It mixes two things I love: AI and the Internet/WWW, so I am hoping I don't fall asleep out of boredom however much I have to toil at it!

Sadly, getting rid of uni work wasn’t enough to grant me some free time since my tenancy agreement was running mid this month and I had to move out of the apartment. As ever, moving house was really tiring. I was totally exhausted by the time I had gotten everything neatly packed into boxes, moved everything into a storage unit and cleaned the apartment till it was spotless. Luckily, it all went pretty smooth...

Anyway, I am now in Male’ (and things had it that I arrived here on my birthday!). It's good to meet up with my parents and close friends and hang out with them... but I'm missing UK already. Sigh.

Apparently we humans are the only mammalians kinky enough to drink the milk produce from animals other than our own species. Cow's milk is squeezed out of their udders everyday all year around to feed the millions who are hungry for a little bit of milk. I used to be one of those consumers, drinking dairy milk since I was young like everyone else but as I grew older it started making me queasy and vomitish. Eventually, I bid farewell to raw milk, powdered milk, cheese, milk rich cakes and everything else with cow's milk including my beloved yoghurts. I realized that I must have either a milk allergy or had possibly become lactose intolerant.

I had tried a few of the milk alternatives (often used by vegans), namely soy milk and rice milk, but none of it appealed to my taste buds. I had been off milk almost entirely until few weeks ago when I decided to give goat's milk a go. I was pleasantly surprised to find that its actually pretty good! Needless to say, goat's milk cartons have since managed to earn a comfy spot in my fridge. It tastes as good, has almost the same nutrient composition as that which the cows eject out of their mammary glands and most importantly it doesn't give me any bit of trouble. So here's to the goats and their milk. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be drinking this cup of "kiru sai". Thank you!

Museums are among my favourite places. Never do they fail to instil a sense of wonder and belittlement in me... especially the sections on pre-historic life and cosmology. I spent the day at the Manchester Museum yesterday, ogling and gawking at all those things on display.

I adored the dinosaur on display - a Tyrannosaurus rex named Stan. It is a cast replica from the original and consists of 199 bones that have been discovered. Standing at about 20ft tall and 35ft long, the thing is just gigantic. I only come up to its knees! I was introduced to dinosaurs when I was very young via a book on dinosaurs. It came with special glasses for viewing the special 3D renditions of dinosaurs, including a T Rex. Yet, none of the books, pictures or even movies prepare one for the massively awe-inspiring sight of a real-life fossil reconstruction of the beast!

Anyway, here are some snaps from the museum visit.



Enjoy.

Yes! Finally a break from university and the crushing workload! We started our Easter break last Friday and I now have a whole month to while away in pure freedom. Well, almost. Apart from a few coursework and revising for exams coming up in May. It's been a stressed out month especially with my left eye going bonkers for a few weeks. I definitely need some time off to unwind my brain!

I've got a few interesting projects to work on and some books-to-read stacked up for the holidays so I'll probably be a lot relaxed once the kid in me comes out to play and has a go at (proper?) learning and experimenting on a (care?)free schedule. I had managed to write a whole extra page for my book on science in Dhivehi over the course of last year so I'm very determined to finish it by June this year. I am also hoping to pick up another dead project from early 2006 where I started on a book in Dhivehi on introductory electronics and managed to write a general introduction, an overview of the components as well as the first experiment, before I felt disgusted by the Dhivehi language and quickly closed MS Word and strolled off to laalaa land. However, despite my aversion to Dhivehi as a language, I will be (finally) publishing one of my completed pet projects around mid April- a Dhivehi Optical Character Recognition program for documents - online and accessible for all, though I am currently very tempted to try make a buck out of it to stuff my emptying wallet.

I will be attending the Maldivian Students' Association-UK Extraordinary General Meeting 07 gathering in Manchester from 30th March to 1st April. Current estimates of attendance, some as high as 90, suggest that this is going to be one massive Maldivian student gathering! Also, word has it that this would be an "interesting" gathering (ahem).

Anyway, I felt compelled to post an entry with my yakking just to give the impression that my blog is updated regularly. Now that it's done, I might as well bugger off and stop with the "khiyaalee folaa" and yakking. :p

I went to take the trash out today only to find it was snowinggg! Winter has passed so far without a hint of snow except for a random morning sometime ago when there was sprinkle of snow that covered less than half of an inch. Like Calvin says, that doesn't count as snowing

P.S: Busy with work and reading tons of stuff thus the lack of blog updates...

People have been bashing Microsoft's latest incarnation of its popular operating system, Windows Vista, ever since its conceptual stages. I don't know what people were expecting of the new operating system but some people claim that Vista is a disappointment. Me? I beg to disagree!

Some of Microsoft's OSes have indeed been dodgy, like Windows 95 or 98. However, of late, their software have been better and a lot more stable. Windows 2000 was pretty solid as a server OS. Windows XP was a decent OS for home and office use. I've used all of Microsoft's OS at some point in time although Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 has served as my main workhorse OS(es) for the past 6 or so years. Windows 2003 Server is undoubtedly the most stable Windows release, atleast in my experience. Despite it being a server OS, I used it for all my work on my laptop and since I keep my laptop switched on throughout the day I can say it goes without crashing or needing a restart for weeks. Since I move around quite a bit, I rely on the "hibernate" feature to retain the machine's state and Windows 2003 do well in that department to help me keep my work uninterrupted. I consider that more than acceptable performance as an OS...

I moved from Windows 2003 to Windows Vista last week after Microsoft included the Vista Business edition DVD in the list of Microsoft software that is downloadable to our university students via the Microsoft Academic Alliance program. I thought I'd jump the chance and grab my own copy of Vista since it comes with my own key so that I can avoid the registration and activation hassles that we, the pirate software ridden Maldivians, usually have to put up with . I chose to go for a clean install rather than an upgrade as Vista has quite a few issues with "older" software. Starting afresh also gave me a chance to get rid of the accumulated mess that I've made now and then.

Vista installed automatically and uneventfully after a short wizard driven process of collecting the information it wanted. My laptop booted straight into Windows and Vista had picked up and installed all the drivers except for the built-in Bluetooth module. What becomes apparent from the first boot is the shift toward a more graphical user interface. The new Aero skin gives Vista a visibly different feel to that of XP/2003 and the various graphical enhancements make for some good eye candy. Font smoothing, the technology that makes fonts looks so much better, is now enabled by default unlike previous versions - it's something I always had enabled manually in previous Windows'es. But it wasn't the looks of Vista that impressed me - it was the added options, the extra utilities and bits of software that has been integrated and united into the OS that really caught me eye. Windows Explorer, the taskbar, the Control Panel, the administration options etc have undergone changes. The security options have been beefed up - an adequate firewalling solution comes in the form of Windows Firewall and spyware/rogueware protection is offered by Windows Defender. The image viewing program has improved, although it is still not in the same league as ACDSee. Networking has been enhanced - Windows automatically figures out the network, finds nearby devices and has extensive Wifi support. Voice recognition and control is available out-of-the-box and is effective throughout the OS. There is also built in support for mobile devices via the cool new Windows Mobile Device Center which allows me to sync with my mobile phone easily. Fax, scanning and CD burning is available by default. A contacts manager and a calendaring program is also now available with the default install. The boot (and resume from hibernation) time has also increased significantly.

Anyway, enough of sugar-coating Vista. It's been a week since I moved to it, I've had my laptop switched on all the time as usual and Vista has remained stable thus far. If you are looking to move to Vista, do so by all means as long as your computer fits the hardware requirements.

>hibernate<

Quite a bitta time since I last blogged! University resumed on the 15th after a month of break for winter holidays and I've been just swamped with work. Well, that or more likely my effort to, for once in my life, shift into the "normal" sleep-wake cycle is turning sour and leaving me drained and vegetative.

This semester at uni should be quite interesting but is fully loaded with various coursework and projects. Of most interest to me is the mobile robot which we will be building over the next few weeks as part of the engineering applications module. Once we create the microcontroller based electronic circuits that power the robot, we will add the locomotive mechanisms and tackle programming the software that would make it do whatever magic we aspire it to do. A bit of artificial intelligence added to it will make it slightly more "intelligent" and interesting than say a computer mouse or perhaps as smart as some random primitive insect. We continue on with the neural networks module this semester and I have yet to tackle the second coursework for the module which requires building an application that uses multilayer perceptron (artificial neural networks). I am quite looking forward to the new set of lectures on AI concepts, which I reckon would keep my eyes open during the lecture unlike the neuroscience lectures which I have already had some unfortunate shut-eye moments. I sure am glad there aren't any electronics/circuits module this semester - we had a surplus of them last semester :s

Anyway, it’s the time of year when I realise that exams are only a few months away and that I have a lot of read and prepare for. Sigh. On second thought, I guess I can afford a few more months before I need to panic! Wish me luck