Blobsy 2 just had another release checked out today. This latest release - Blobsy 2 RC8 - is, as usual, available at the Blobsy website.

I've fixed a few bugs in this latest release that hindered optimal performance and a few more that prevented desired functionality - including one that prevented the bot from starting conversations by itself. I have also updated the included Demo handler and added another handler to demonstrate the conversation starting abilities more clearly. This has been something that users have been whining for quite a while. Good that I got around to doing this finally

Microsoft has recently allowed bots on its network. It is even running a bot development competition called Invasion of the Robots. They are offering cool cash prizes for the best bots. This is probably a move to promote the new Live Messenger series.

Anyway, I intend on updating Blobsy to the functionality introduced/updated in Windows Live Messenger. Blobsy will be updated/rewritten to be compatible with MSN P13, the communications protocol used by Live Messenger. The rewrite will probably see day light as Blobsy 3 sometime next month.

I just issued a RC 7 version to Blobsy 2. Grab it at the Blobsy site.

The update simply fixes recent bot sign-in problems that apparently sprouted up after Microsoft made some changes to their Passport authentication system. Blobsy 2 releases up until now relied on hard-coded Passport domain to server mappings to handle various user domain groups. The MS update seems to have changed this and suddenly much of the Blobsy bots refused to sign in, after logging authentication failures in the log files.

The update was supplied by Thioz, who fixed the problem after encountering the problem with his live Blobsy bot. Kudos to Thioz for the update and for letting me know! I haven't been using Blobsy for a little while now, so I was not aware there was a problem in the first place... hehe.

Toodles.

Oh you all know what "radheef" is right? (Psst. In case you didn't know, Radheef is the Dhivehi dictionary.)

I had (err unlawfully?) ripped off the data from the Radheef released by the National Centre for Linguistics and Historical Research when the software came out a couple of years ago. It was those times that I was into the MaldivianUnderground project - and quite soon I had programmed an online radheef interface to do lookups. There have been various versions of the online radheef since then: one on MaldivianUnderground that relied on Dhivehi entry in latin, another on Bichoo.net that sported a Flash front-end and yet another somewhere that used what I call "dynamic font rendering" to show the output in Dhivehi - which is neat as it shows up whether the computer has Dhivehi fonts installed or not. However, all of these radheef apps no longer exist, thanks to the disappearance of each of the projects that the radheef was released under, and so I decided to slap up yet another radheef!

The new radheef now resides at its own domain name at http://www.radheef.com/. A cool feature maybe the ability to link to words definitions directly via the use of special URLs like this.

The radheef will be kept alive this time hopefully. Give it a spin. It will be useful if you work with Dhivehi and, like me, have questionable command over Dhivehi vocabulary. Please note that it is at an "experimental" stage at the moment and might not work smoothly on all browsers/operating systems. I'd appreciate if you let know if that is the case - do mention the browser name/version and your operating system name/version.


Techie stuff:
This latest version of my online radheef uses AJAX technology - to suit the current ajax application craze. The new radheef also relies on Unicode Dhivehi and you should be able to enter and read the Dhivehi used on the radheef as long as you have a recent browser with Unicode support. Further options to enable you to use the radheef without having Dhivehi fonts installed would be made available later. The radheef does require that you have JavaScript enabled but that shouldn't be a problem to most, after all almost all browsers these days come with JavaScript and unless you have turned it off manually, the radheef should work fine.

I should note that the Unicode text entry is a bit dodgy at the moment. The text entry relies on Unicode fonts coupled with a custom written keyboard handler (in JavaScript) to map the normal keycodes into Unicode. I shall be releasing the JavaScript keyboard handler script under GPL soon. The script is again something that I had written a couple of years ago but has now been rewritten to accommodate the browser advances and changes. I have tested the handler to work fine under IE 6, Firefox 1.5, K-Meleon 0.9.1, Safari and Opera 9.

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

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)

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!