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)

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)

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.

There are plenty of articles about producing documents in LaTex, but none specifically for Thaana/Dhivehi. So after a few hours research, I found out that it is possible to produce a decent document in Thaana. I was pleased with the results, given the nature of typesetting Thaana documents.

Things you would need:

1. LaTex installed and running. Instructions for Windows/Mac/Linux here. When you install the LaTex installation from any of the packages, XeTex will also be installed, along with an editor. I would recommend using the editor, however, you can also use any text editor for creating the document. But then you would have to “compile” the document from command line to generate the output.
2. Install polyglossia and fontspec installed if they are not already installed along with the LaTex. Polyglossia enables the right-to-left support. If you don’t use it, then the output using the standard packages will produce a mirror image for all the words in Thaana script (even if you type it correctly in the editor). Fontspec allows you to specify fonts that are installed on the system such as “Faruma” or any other unicode Thaana font, instead of the standard fonts that are used by default.
3. Make sure your OS (Windows/Mac/Linux) has the Dhivehi/Maldives keyboard installed to allow you to actually type Thaana text in unicode. If you are already typing Thaana in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, then you’ve probably completed this step.
4. Finally install the Thaana unicode fonts that you like and start creating the document. The font that I’ve used is Faruma.

After completing the above requirements, you would have to place the following lines in the preamble before actually creating the content of the document. These lines tell the LaTex engine to use the polyglossia and fontspec packages, and sets “divehi” as the default language (it’s not a typo, that’s how divehi is spelled in this package) and sets “Faruma” as the default language.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\setdefaultlanguage{divehi}
\newfontfamily\divehifont{Faruma}
\setmainfont{Faruma}

The following are the source document and the output in PDF format.

• LaTex source file: dhilatex.doc (This file was uploaded with extension .doc, because WordPress doesn’t allow to upload documents with .tex extension. Please download and rename to .tex extension before opening in the editor).

• PDF output file: dhilatex.pdf

As you can see the bullets are alright, but the numbered list shows the “dot” after the number on the wrong side (in left-to-right format). Like I said before, it’s not perfect. Hopefully I will be posting more updates of my future experiments as this looks quite promising.

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

Ramadan Kareem

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

Thresholding is used to remove the pixels in an image based on the value (e.g. grey-level) specified. You can do this using any image processing application such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. But for simplicity I used ImageMagick which has a nice and powerful set of command-line tools that can be used on all platforms (Linux, Windows, and Mac). But before thresholding, I converted the image to a greyscale image, because the original images generated a in blue color.

convert -colorspace Gray input.jpg -threshold 30% processed.jpg

The above command can be used to convert the original image (input.jpg) into the pre-processed image (processed.jpg)

After thresholding, a nice image with very few noise was produced, and this pre-processed image was then passed to an OCR engine to convert the image text, to readable electronic text. For this I chose tesseract-ocr because its simple, easy to use and again available in command-line on multiple platforms. The default language is English.

tesseract processed.jpg output.txt

The above command with OCR the input image (processed.jpg) and create the output in the file output.txt.

For my small experiment, I generated a few captachas from the Dhiraagu E-Directory and saved the images.

The captcha image consists of very clearly written text with several random lines to create a noise effect. So a simple threshold was sufficient and the uniform text made it very easy for the OCR engine to recognize the text.

The following are the results. The results aren’t 100% accurate, but with a few adjustments it would be very easy to make this more accurate. With some work put into it, I bet someone could make a firefox plugin so whenever we visit the Dhiraagu E-Directory, it enters the text for us

Dhiraagu E-Directory Captcha OCR

The big question is, are we ready for it? Starting from the government offices to the private businesses, how many of us are in compliance with the Act? How many of us know well enough about the Act and the consequences of non-compliance? Could it be that some people are already preparing for the deadline so that they can go to court and sue everyone who is in violation of the rights protected by the Act?

Video shops who sell or rent illegal copies of Video CD/DVD. Photocopiers still continue to duplicate full text books, exam papers and other literature in bulk and are even put on sale in bookshops. The majority of software used in government offices, private and public education institutions, private businesses and individuals are pirated or cracked software. In addition to using for administrative purposes, education institutions continue to use pirated software as a means of delivering and teaching course content. And the list goes on…

So what can we do? Firstly, we need to educate ourselves and those around us of the Copyright Act. Instead of waiting for the government to initiate and organize forums and TV programs and other advertisement campaigns, we need to step it up as well. The biggest problem that we as a society face today is the habit of being passive, and waiting for things to happen. And in doing so, we are always left behind in so many ways. So as heads of schools, deans of faculties, managers of businesses, owners of businesses, and individual citizens, lets take an effort today and learn more about the Copyright Law, and be in compliance today before its too late.

Respect the intellectual property of others so that they may respect ours…

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.

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.

According to BullyingStatistics.org :

“Cyber bullying is a form of teen violence that can do lasting harm to young people. Statistics show that cyber bullying is a serious problem among adolescents and teens. By being more aware of cyber bullying, teens and adults can help to fight it.”

The following are some interesting findings by a survey done by i-SAFE America during 2003-4 among school students:

• 42% of kids have been bullied while online. 1 in 4 have had it happen more than once.
• 35% of kids have been threatened online. Nearly 1 in 5 have had it happen more than once.
• 21% of kids have received mean or threatening e-mail or other messages.
• 58% of kids admit someone has said mean or hurtful things to them online. More than 4 out of 10 say it has happened more than once.
• 53% of kids admit having said something mean or hurtful to another person online. More than 1 in 3 have done it more than once.
• 58% have not told their parents or an adult about something mean or hurtful that happened to them online.

It is about time we face the facts and realize that cybercrime is already here. It is not something that we are expecting or forecasting to occur in the near future. Its already happening and several victims are already suffering the consequences. In the same article, it has been reported that some of the teenage girls who were bullied has also attempted suicide.

This indicates that it is no different from someone breaking into your house and threatening you with a knife. It is much worse as cybercrime can cross borders much easily and can be organized at a larger scale. Thus the legal framework to deal with such crimes have to be strengthened. Correct me if I am wrong, but there was a draft of the Computer Misuse Act posted by NCIT in 2009 and after that we didn’t hear anything about it.

Since some MPs were victimized this time by the cybercriminals, the Computer Misuse Act might be taken a bit more seriously. So the lesson here is to be aware and take necessary precautions to not fall victim. Parents should be more aware and pay more attention to the online activities of their children. If your children fall victim, inform the authorities without delay. Grownups and the rest of us (senior government officials and MPs included), should be more careful when taking/sharing pictures and videos, because we never know when it may end up on facebook or in a publicly circulating email. Lastly, there are several resources online that offers on ways of preventing and dealing with cyber bullying which may be useful.

I-SAFE website (http://www.isafe.org/)

Bullying Statistics website (http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/)

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.