The Maldives Airports Company has rolled out a website (http://www.fis.com.mv/) where real-time flight arrival/departure information is available. It's about time they did that and I am sure many people will find it very useful.

I wrote some code yesterday for Nattu, who is currently developing a new website for Haveeru News, to get the data from the Flight Information Services (FIS) website and display it on the Haveeru website. Haveeru has access to an XML feed of the data with more fields available than that shown at the FIS site. The script I wrote implements a class that parses the XML file and provides easy access to the flight information via the class properties.

Sadly, the XML feed is not (yet) available to the public and so today I modified the code so that it works by scraping the publicly available data on the FIS website. The code implements an object called "flightinfo" that can be used in any of your PHP applications and the data displayed as you please. I've included a demo sample file as well.

- Download the flightinfo script

Here is something I conjured up in the minutes of freedom after "work" last night. It is what I would call a widget - a WebSMS widget. The idea for the application came after a blog reader by the handle Vayfarer emailed me asking for advice on implementing a "Gadget" for Google personalised home. Anyway, two and a half hours later, I had this baby all wrapped up just as I wanted it.

This "widget" can be added to your blog or website. You will be able to host this widget on your own server when I release the source code, until then you are welcome to use the service based at the Technova server. The widget supports skinning the widget with your own CSS files and so can be made to fit the look of your blog and/or website. I will be releasing the source code for the project soon - right after I flush any major bugs that crops up the coming few days.



I've also made available a "gadget" package for adding the WebSMS widget to the Google "personalised home".



Here is live demo:


Interested in getting one for your blog/website or adding it to your Google homepage? Click here to go to the widget's homepage at Technova.

Have fun.

PS: Other SMS related stuff that I've released previously include, a SMS Sender program which you can run on your Windows/Mac/Linux computer and a WebSMS tool for phpBB forums.

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.

It is easter holidays for me at the moment and I seem to have more time on my hand than I can spend engaged in "productive" activities. So, in a moment of boredom this morning, I programmed a Dhiraagu telephone directory lookup application for Windows Mobile based Pocket PC and Smartphones.

The program allows you to search the entire Dhiraagu telephone directory. The directory data comes bundled with the application and allows for quick and cheap directory lookups to be performed right on your phone. The directory includes landline numbers as well as mobile phone numbers. This is like the ultimate phone book! The program should run fine on pocket pcs and smartphones running Windows Mobile 2003 and later.

The application does require .NET Compact Framework to be installed. That shouldn't be a problem to Windows Mobile 2003 SE and Windows Mobile 5 devices as they comes with the framework preinstalled. The application takes up about 8Mb on the device, so make sure you install the program onto a SD card or whatever expansion storage supported by your device. The program can be installed simply copying the provided CAB files onto the device and executing them on the device.

Note: Windows Mobile 5 comes with application locking so that only digitally signed applications are allowed to install and run. You will need to remove this locking mechanism to allow your device to run the directory software. Here is a guide to removing application locking.

Download:
- Pocket 110 v1.0beta2 for Pocket PC (WM 2003/SE, WM 5.0)
- Pocket 110 v1.0beta2 for Smartphone (WM 2003/SE, WM 5.0)

Screenshots:

Feel free to download and spread it. Drop a line in the blog comments if you have any suggestions, comments or just want to thank me (or whatever...)

Enjoy!

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.

These are programs that I published on my (previous) digital playground at maldivianunderground.net. The site has been offline for ages, yet these two software are something quite a lot of people ask me for. So here they are; the Accent2RTF converter and MLS Converter.

Accent2RTF Converter
Accent and Accent Express have been used for creating Dhivehi documents for quite a while and remains in high use even now. Unfortunately however, the Accent format is not supported in any of the Microsoft Word or OpenOffice versions and an independant converter is needed to convert the Accent prepared documents for use in these software. This is where Accent2RTF comes into play: point it to a Accent (*.acc) file and it will spit out a RTF (*.rtf) file that can be opened and used in any text editing software that supports RTF formats (eg. MS Word, OpenOffice Write). This is the original version as it was first released in 2001.
- Download Accent2RTF Converter 1.0 Installer ( 217Kb, MS Windows only)

MLS Converter 2
Multi Lingual Scholar is a text editing software that has been used for the creation of Dhivehi documents on computers since 1988, I believe. However, it requires MS DOS to run and the software was discontinued in 1998. The use of MLS has greatly decreased since the introduction of dhivehi text entry using Unicode on Windows XP and later Microsoft operating systems. Despite this, there remain a bundle of MLS format files that were created in its time. This converter takes in any MLS (*.mls) file and gives out a RTF file for use in Microsoft Word and all the other various RTF supporting text editing software. MLS Converter was first released in 2001 and updated to version 2 a year later.
- Download MLS Converter 2 Installer ( 221 Kb, MS Windows only)

Enjoy!

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