Fundamentals

by Manuel Blum (Bruce Nelson Professor of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Professor)

05-JUN-96

Bird must soar. Skunk must stink.
Cat must prowl. Man must think.

What sets man apart from beast is his engine of
thought. His mind. His
BRAIN
makes him unique
and gives him his greatest pleasure.

But fundamental as is thought for human beings,
there is stuff more basic still that underlies and
DRIVES
not only man
but all great beasts,

And that is nature’s call to each of us… to be special.
To be distinguished in some way. To be
UNIQUE.
To BE something, to DO something, BETTER than everyone else.

Like the leather nosed chimpanzee,
dragging noisy cans and branches,
frightening peers into submission,

One does not have to be brilliant, a genius, to be special.
To do something better than anyone/everyone else. To be
UNMATCHED,
One has only to choose an END
any END
that MATTERS
that INSPIRES
YOU
And then DO IT.

source (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html)

Selamat Hari Raya Eid ul-Fitr, Maaf Zahir dan Batin to all Muslims

A happy Eid ul-Fitr to family, friends and the rest of the world and forgive my physical and emotional wrongdoings. May Allah bestow his infinite mercy and blessings on you.

Eid prayer in Badhshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan

While we celebrate and eat delicious food on this day, let us not forget about those who are not so fortunate. Alhamdhulillah for everything I have and everything I am to receive.

A women attending to her malnourished child outside a camp in Somalia (August 28, 2011)

Thaana support for LaTex

LaTex is a typesetting system that is used to produce publication quality documents. LaTex is predominantly used by academics to produce technical/scientific/journal/conference papers. LaTex began its roots from Tex designed and developed by Donald Knuth around late 1970s. You can read more on the history from here. LaTex was developed by Lesslie Lamport around early 1980s.

LaTex is not for everyone. Most of us who are already very much used to wordprocessors such as Ms Word/LibreOffice Writer, the “point and click toolbar to get everything done” approach cannot be used. Everything is done using special markup or escape sequences of code. However, the benefit is that, you can be assured that the output and formatting is consistent all the time. The file is basically a plan text file, and the LaTex processor handles the processing and generation of the output (either PDF, PS, etc. format). More advantages and disadvantages here.

LaTex does not support Thaana typesetting natively. There are some packages such as bidi or babel that can be used for multilingual/right-to-left language support. LaTex uses packages to add features to the document. Similar to including library at the header when programming. But it wasn’t working out very well for Thaana. So XeTex was the preferred choice. Since I used XeTex for the task in hand, you must be wondering why I have been talking about LaTex all this while. The simple and honest answer is that most of us are familiar with LaTex and we often use it synonymously to refer to Tex style typesetting.

Ramadan Mubarak to everyone

رمضان كريم

May your life be brightened up with the Almighty Allah’s blessings of love, joy and good fortune.

Ramadan Kareem

OCR Dhiraagu E-Directory Captcha with ImageMagick and tesseract-ocr

Dhiraagu E-Directory requires you to enter the Captcha text from the randomly generated image before it searches the directory.

This is a simple control to ensure that you are a human being and not a nasty little program that automatically queries the directory.

I am aware that a few others have come up with small hacks to bypass this or to search through the directory by other means, so this is not what this post is about.

I simply wanted to check how well this captcha control is doing its job in fulfilling its purpose. The object is to challenge so that only a human is able to read and enter the text.

However, using two very simple tools, it is possible to automate the process of identifying the text without the use of a human.

This can be done in two simple steps, 1) perform a simple threshold to get rid of the noise and 2) use an OCR engine to read the text

Two weeks to go, are we ready to face the Copyright Law?

The Maldives Copyright Law (law 23/2010) was published in the gazette on the 21st August 2010. According to the clause 39, the law will be in full effect after 180 days of being gazetted, which would be 19 April 2011.

20 years of Linux

Faculty of Management & Computing launches new Blog

The Faculty of Management and Computing of the Maldives National University has launched its own blog recently.

The address is http://fmcpost.wordpress.com

I think this is great as blogging is a great approach for keeping up-to-date  information about the faculty and activities informed and accessible to the public.

It could also be a good mechanism to get feedback from the public more openly.

There are several international and popular universities with blogs (Princeton University Blog, Harvard University Press Blog, University of Chicago, and many more…), some very much integrated in the mode of knowledge sharing from the lectures and also the students.

Cybercrime on the rise in Maldives

Haveeru Online recently reported about a gang led by a 16 year old blackmailing (cyber bullying) senior government officials, MPS and teenage girls online into paying money. According to the report, this has been ongoing for the past five months. The gang from S. Hithadhoo are already under investigation and is believed to be well versed in IT. This comes with no surprise since Internet is widely accessible from anywhere in the country, its just a matter of few clicks to get a hold of the right tools and information required. And with social networking so widespread regardless of age, we often forget that the Internet is public and should think twice before posting personal photos or videos.

This not the first time that we are hearing about cybercrime in Maldives. Recently there was the DDOS attack on Dhiraagu servers and also others in the recent past. Not to mention the many incidents that were not reported. However, this is the first time that a case of cyber bullying has bee reported in the media.

Welcome to The Maldives National University

It is with great pleasure that I welcome to all staff and students to the Maldives National University, and bid farewell to Maldives College of Higher Education.

When I came to work today, I saw the new name board on one of the buildings that said, Maldives National University, Faculty of Management and Computing.

I truly hope that its not just about changing the name board, but the development of everything that goes on in here that, so many people have been hoping and fighting for a very long time. And as a result produce more knowledgeable and productive graduates who will benefit the society and make us all proud.

I pray to Almighty Allah for a bright future for Maldives National University.