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.

Insecure ID Cards, A Serious Risk

The National Identity Card (ID Card) is one of the most important official documents that we poses as a Maldivian citizen. It is issued by the Department of National Registration (DNR), and is the primary form of photo ID used for almost all the services provided by the government and private organizations. We use it for obtaining the passport, health insurance, marriage, exams, college enrollments, bank verifications, domestic air travel, new SIM card, and numerous other registrations. And of course lets not forget…voting.

Despite all this, we don’t bother much about the importance of this document unless we need it for one of the services that I mentioned before. Most of us don’t bother about keeping it safe, or making sure it is renewed before expiring. But this is not what I intend to discuss in this post.

Since it is a very important document, just like the passport, one would assume that it would have some security features that would prevent from forgeries and fraudulent reproductions. Lets take a closer look…

National ID Card Characteristics:

• By taking a closer look at the National ID Card, we can see that it is simply a plastic card with a magnetic stripe on it.
• The person’s information is printed on both sides.
• The person’s unique National Identification Number (a running sequence, not unique in any other characteristic) is placed on the front side.
• A unique Serial Number (unique to each plastic card) is printed/pre-printed at the back side of the card.
• On the front side, a protective hologram with the National Emblem is used. (The only security feature)
• The magnetic stripe is not used to store any data.

From the above characteristics, we can ascertain that our National ID Card can only be used as a photo ID for visual verification. There aren’t any other integrated mechanisms such as the smart passport for purposes such as biometric verification, data acquisition, etc.

Thus the visual security feature(s) are the only characteristics that maintain the security and integrity of the ID Card, which is vital as proof of authenticity. In the case of the National ID Card, the hologram is the only security feature used.

So why is this hologram so important? Because without the hologram, it is just another plastic card. With the plastic cards as cheap as US$0.15 (MRF 2.00) and ID Card Printers for just US$100-200, anyone can print and reproduce the ID Card. And today several government offices, political parties and private organizations own ID Card printers. The only things that separates the National ID Card and the cards coming out of those other printers is the hologram. So, if for any reason, this hologram layer was to come off, it would invalidate the card, i.e. of course until recently…

Quran – Text Analysis

I recently wrote a simple Python script to analyze the Quran Text to determine the occurrences of individual Arabic characters.

The Quran Text was obtained from http://tanzil.net and the format used was the “Simple Clean” XML format – excluding the pause marks, sajdhah signs, rub-el-hizb signs, and superscript alefs.

I haven’t done much Python programming before, so wanted to get more familiar with it. While developing this script, I was amazed at how easy it was to get the job done. The script simply parses the XML and iterates through the chapters, verses and letters to narrow down to each letter. These letters are then added to a Counter (new in Python 2.7), which is a data structure that adds unique elements and then increments the duplicates. This made it ideal for my task. And there were no complexities involved even though all the content was in Unicode. I plan to experiment further, so there could be more versions in the future.

The following are the results, excluding the white-space count. I exported to Excel to generate a graph to make it look much prettier

Top 5 Lies told by Teaching Assistants

Just a bit of humour before teaching starts in the first semester…

This list was taken from http://chat.carleton.ca/~jnoakes/grad.html

5. I’m not going to grant any extensions.
4. Call me any time. I’m always available.
3. It doesn’t matter what I think; write what you believe.
2. Think of the midterm as a diagnostic tool.
1. My other section is much better prepared than you guys.

HTML DOM USING .NET

By Ahmed Ibrahim

Today the software development landscape has evolved significantly with the proliferation of Web technologies. Thus a majority of applications developed have some form of connectivity or integration with another application, web service, web application, remote database, etc.

This article will therefore try to touch one specific area, which is HTML content and DOM. And in doing so will investigate two approaches available in .Net which can be used to fuse these two for some practical purpose.

Examples provided are based on .Net code and libraries. However, the concepts remain the same for HTML and DOM are independent from any programming language. This article is not exhaustive in any manner however references are provided for those seeking a more in depth coverage.

Full Article on Code Project…

Free[dom] Licenses

If you are interested in distributing or uploading code, documents, etc., under the claim that it’s free, you might find the following link interesting.

http://www.codeproject.com/info/Licenses.aspx

Happy Jan.02.2008