kent sent me

I don't know how many of you still remember this screen. Yeah man this was "the game!".Larry the very first one. Some of us may still remember when this was played on CGA/EGA video cards, with 4 or 16 colors. Way back around 1987 to 1991. I first played it with a group of friends back in school , maybe or 91. This was amazing then. An interactive character, who was out hunting for girls. Was kinda a big thing back then, something you really talked about. And if I asked for the password; how many of you still remember it.... :P
Anyway this was a good inspiration to some people too. I remember some guys working on a similar small scale game. Which was built for the O'Level computer project; using the BBC Micro's. Don't really remember who the gang was. It was done using sprite animations, at a very simple level. Anyway those were good old time; when everything new you see inspired and fascinated you.

So where are we moving now? I guess its a lot changed; the internet has come a long way; and game development has improved so much. I guess the next level is more to do with online gaming. Things worth looking at are new games like Naughty America's which is a blend of The Sims and Yahoo Personals.

Hardware, Software and Vaporware?

Here is the definition from wikipedia. "Vaporware (in British English: Vapourware) is software or hardware which is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge, either with or without a protracted development cycle. The term implies unwarranted optimism, or sometimes even deception; that is, it implies that the announcer knows that product development is in too early a stage to support responsible statements about its completion date, feature set, or even feasibility."

So what's so bad about it? NOTHING! Infect one of the longest-running vaporware project known as project xanadu is one of the basis of the world wide web. Although Tim Berners-Lee is to be credited for the w3 some of the technologies (The hypertext mark-up language) used were results of long running vaporware projects. Example; HyperMedia : is a term used for hypertext which is not constrained to be text (it can include graphics, video and sound). W3 is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. The term hypermedia was coined by Ted Nelson around 1965. Project Xanadu is the Original Hypertext Project which was started by Ted Nelson.

tracking technology on the Internet

netcraft.com has been around since the very early days of internet. Not many of us use it as individuals? Or do we? I was first introduced to netcraf back in 1996, by my good friend Ishan (where are u dude now). After a long time, I went into the site. Still to find the good old looks and information. Some of the public services which has been long provided by them include, tools to see what web server the site is running on. Example google. And other stats like up times and performances. Its some times very useful to know these kinda information. Loads of new tools or applications is out there to do the same now, but I still find netcraft to be more reliable and something worth to look and use. Some examples include web server surveys

Netcraft is a internet service company based Bath, England and has clients like Aegon, American Express, AMP, Britannic, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Capita, Credit Suisse, Dell, Deloitte & Touche, Energis, Elsevier Science, EV1, GCHQ, Google, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Interland, John Lewis, Keytrade, Lloyds of London, Macromedia, Microsoft, Northern Rock, Oracle, Paypal, Rackspace, Securicor, Sun Microsystems, Verisign, Virgin, Visa, and Vodafone.

Google Earth For Linux

I've never tried it before , but I was told that Google Earth did run on wine under Linux. Never got the chance to test it. Tonight I downloaded the new version which is version 4 and tested it on Linux. It works fine, the thing about this is its a native release, not running through wine. Finally I can too :)

The screen shot showing, the little place on earth where I live and work

Slashdot gets a face lift

A lot of us have been slashdotting for a few years now. Its been one of the best source of news for most of us. Anyway I think the new face lift is cool. From what I've read it seems the new looks is just the magic of CSS. Its very much been the same looks for years now; except on the 1st of April 2006. That was a good one.

sms(email?) blogging

The last post I made was using my mobile phone. What's the big deal? Well its not using GPRS, its just through a simple SMS. But it did not work as I expected. It did not handle the compressed sms(multipart). But anyway its a start, I just need to fix some stuff.

How this really works is using a simple sms to email gateway that I am developing. Its not really fully done yet. Anyway Its functional. I got the idea of giving it a try after coming across a project called mPost. Blogger also has the functionality to post via email, so I am taking advantage of that.

sms

this is a blog post i am making via sms via email to blogger. Jee long method ey. This works through a sms to email ga

CMS

I am not much of a web guy at all, but lately I had no choice. Had to work on a small project and I was forced to look into a good CMS. I went through a lot of them. Mostly php based ones, which are very famous and strongly suggested by my fellow friends. They were all cool.

But then I got to plone. Plone is a open source cms built on top of zope. I think this is the best CMS I have seen thus far. It is more then just a simple CMS, there is a hell lot more to it then being a simple CMS. I also liked the fact that I can develop stuff for it, more like addons, using python and take advantage of zope application framework. I had to less concentrate on the presentation layer and could do more on the business logic of the stuff I worked on. I really enjoyed the last 3 months I spend working with zope and plone.

Also it is worth to note that companies like Lufthansa, Nokia, eBay and also Nasa have adopted plone on various levels. I think even Ubuntu is using plone on their web site.

News

Been a while since I blogged now. Anyway Just came across this news while reading through digg. Thought this is something worth to be noted. "Mobile phone companies join forces on Linux"....

Ctrl+C

Break!

Sexy looks

This is still an experimental work in progress for the translation project for GNOME. Aim of the project is to have a functional UI in Dhivehi for the Linux OS. Hopefully.

Friday

Its a Friday and its a Friday. Anyone wants fries with that?

Message from Maldivian Linux User Group

We've planned an initial meeting for the discussion of the translation project.
Everyone interested to join are welcome and I urge to tell anyone else who might
as well be interested in coming over.

Venu: West Park
Date: Friday, 19th May 2006
Time: 16:00
Props: MRF 20/- for the coffee.

I'll keep it organized. Meet you then. Thank you!.

gedit on drugs

Been working on this dhivehification for gnome for the last few days. Mostly experimenting. Finally I think I now know how to setup a working model and a path. Meaning what is needed and how to go about this.

Today I was able to transform the GUI to have the widgets mirrored so that we would have the RTL looks, etc.. The screen shot posted here is using a po file I edited for gedit for thaana and Hebrew gtk20 mo file. This file is responsible for the RTL stuff on the widgets, tool bars,menus etc. I have not started work on our own version of this file yet. Also the dv_MV file bug issues are still pending. Good news again is we are moving, progress day by day. What is lacking is man power as of now. It would really help if others took interest and joined? aaah, in anycase lets see how things go. I like to be optimistic what ever anyone has to say about these kinds of work; what the hell its fun anyway.

gedit in dhivehi :: testing

This is work in progress. Still a lot to be fixed. Good news is now we can start work on the translation. Also need to fix the Right to Left stuff. Ah! my work is done for the day; need a rest.

First locale test

Ok, here is the screen shot of the first dv_MV locale test. I know its wrong and still far from complete, but its started. So now I just need a few more days and some extra help before I can upload the first version.

Language names in translation status pages

Today we got the following mail; which really made me happy.

Hi Carlos,

can you please add the following language names to the translation status pages:

dv Divehi
gn Guarani
zh_HK Chinese (Hong Kong)


Thanks,
Christian

This means we are officially added to the gnome translation project . Inn and I are now involved, but we hope to get as many helping hands we can get. First thing I think was to correct the name from Divehi to Dhivehi. I think the reason for this mistake is cos its listed as Divehi at ISO 639 registration authority. So I have already requested this to be changed.

As i have posted in my previous post nothing can be moved before we create the locale, so first thing is first. Also inn has setup a mailing list and the MLUG web site back up. So if anyone is interested please sign in to the list. We hope to make this a platform for us to communicate.

Linux and ތާނަ

with the recent linux distro's thaana enable keyboard is shipped, I have tested on ubuntu and fedora. this is a very good improvement, should have done this long ago. anyway so what's the next step? after having a few chats with people who are interested I decided to go on with localization project. been try'n to do it for long; but did not find the time. so where goes. tonight I signed up with the gnome translation project after having a look into the translation teams did not find an entry for thaana or dhivehi. so I thought i'd sign up and start. this is middle of the night; almost morning. and wala after about one hour or so my dear old friend inn calls up. hmmm! asking me about the mail. I was happy to find out he had already signed up for this and was waiting for an answer. this is good news. guess i am not the only one and even the first. this is good.

so what next? where do we go from here. I guess we need to start the work, first step is to create locale definition file for dv_MV. Once this is created then we have a start. next will be to find people and time to translate the apps. we don't need a very big team for this, but all the help we can get will be good. so anyone interested in the project (already couple of guys have talked to me on this over msn; which really got me started) drop me a mail or to inn. lets say a week from today we meet up; next week end.by then we all would have done our research and home works as well? i

vision 2020

here is mine: when all CEO's of all major companies of Maldives will be orin. all ministers will be orin and we have to pay our rents to orin too. We will go to ori land and serve as maids and labors and get paid 110 USD. when our national anthem will be sung in ori bas. we will teach in ori medium. all ladies will wear ori saalhi. our names will have the initials fanando, etc. all maldivians will smell like orin.

Thanks to the people who are making this a reality now. who are working so hard to make this a reality. long live ori'n

Blocked?

This is a common case at work environments. No longer the sys admins are stupid. They can monitor and block all most all traffic in and out of the network. Well; hmm! Even if they are not smart enough, now we have very cool software's (farewells) that can do it. But does this stop you from going in and out? Well to some level yes and no.

ok, here is one case. Lets say; like in my case irc is blocked. hmmm! easy ey change port? No its not just port blocking. In my case its blocked at the protocol level. the firewall filters all traffic and looks for any irc stuff. this makes it impossible for you to get in even using a BNC. so now what? here is one solution.

if you have a shell account else where, then this is no hard job. Maybe you can ask a friend to give you one. anyway, here is what I did

ssh -L 6667:eu.undernet.org:6667 yourshell.com -l user

where yourshell.com is where you have a shell account access. once you do this, you'd be asked for the password and now you are having an established connection. now what's next? Simply run xchat and type /server localhost. so what's the point? well on a shell too you have things like BitchX; but not a GUI client running locally. thats it. enjoy.