Earlier this week, Mozilla Labs released a very interesting (and useful) new extension for Firefox called "Ubiquity". It basically taps into the services provided by web services to integrate them better into the browsing experience. For an introduction to Ubiquity, it'd be best to read the post on the Mozilla Labs blog where the product was launched - the video featured in the post presents quite impressive practical enhancements to the browsing experience made possible by the product.

Radheef for Ubiquity
Radheef for Ubiquity adds the verb 'bas' to Ubiquity to facilitate quick and easy look up of definitions of Dhivehi words from any Thaana web page using the Radheef. To lookup a word you find on a Thaana web page, you can either select the word and bring up Ubiquity. Alternatively, you can type the word in to the Ubiquity command window. The definition results are shown immediately within the Ubiquity command bubble.

To install this, visit the Radheef for Ubiquity page after Ubiquity is installed and follow the normal verb installation steps.

Screenshots:


Happy browsing

Radheef for Facebook, the little Facebook application that displays random words from the Radheef on the Facebook profile, has reached its 200th user. It took the whole of three months since its launch in February 2008 for it to get there! :S

- View the application's About page on Facebook

I am launching a new Maldivian Facebook application which I had planned out as part of a scheduled series of feature updates to Radheef.com. This new Facebook application displays a random word, and its associated meaning, from the Dhivehi Radheef on your Facebook profile. Words are automatically updated everyday so as to keep your profile fresh and, perhaps even, educational.

Give it a go if it catches your fancy.

- View the application's About page on Facebook

Here are a couple of entertaining entries I found while meddling with the online Radheef.

ފިނދުބެރު ("findhuberu")

ފިނދުވީދައިގެންކެއުން ("findhuveedhaigen keun")

ފަރުޖުމޮހޮރު ("faruju mohoru")

There, you now know three more words from the (dying, rotting) Dhivehi language which you probably wouldn't ever need to use except for the amusement value of the words themselves...

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.

I was moving the sites we had on our server when I found the tab-delimited file I used to import data into the Online Radheef I launched sometime ago. The data it contains is extracted from the original Radheef software published by the National Centre for Linguistics and Historical Research. There ARE mistakes in it contents - partly a reflection of the mistakes in the texts in the original Radheef and partly errors that had creeped in when I had extracted and formatted the data.

Anyway, I am putting up the data for grabs. It can be used for many a purpose - Dhivehi spelling checks, reverse word lookup by word definition etc. Feel inspired, make something useful and share!

- Download the Dhivehi Radheef in CSV format ( 907Kb, zip )

Have fun.

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.