Maldives Basketball Association's Website officially hosted!

Maldives Basketball Association's official website has been launched. This website is a fully dynamic website which will provide the information about the association, up-to-date information about the tournaments and clubs registered under association. Further more, the match schedules and scores will be displayed in the website. And also information about the Youth Development Program (YDP) and its members are also listed. Website was designed and developed by TechSo Pvt. Ltd. and it took about 3 months to complete the whole website but most of the time was spent for organizing the contents of the site. The address of the website is www.mba.org.mv

Got wireless conn --==>>

at last we got the internet connection at our apartement... but its not ours.. unencrypted network.. anyways atleast we could check our mail and chat now ;-).. hope the ISP will make the setup in our apartment soon.. :/

Eureka Website hosted

This is the first post of the year.. very busy these days.. just now i uploaded the website of Eureka Maldives. It's a very small website which took 2 days to complete.. am quite busy with the Inland Revenue's website.. here's the link to Eureka's site.. www.eurekamaldives.com

Memories of the Tsunami Desaster - 26th December 2004

On 26th December 2004, at 9.21 AM, Malé and other islands in Maldives was hit by devastating tsunami waves after earthquakes in the eastern Indian Ocean. Hulhumalé was also in the list of the islands which were affected by this wave.

At that time I was in Malé, at Ghiyaasuddin School hall, attending a draw taking ceremony of a scholarship that I have applied. While we were at the hall, through the windows of the hall, I saw the flood moving with waste and small containers. And when people started to standup and look outside, we heard the announcement from a coordinator that Malé was hit by a wave but he said that the ceremony will be continued coz they didn’t know how serious the situation was. However, I also didn’t took it so seriously until I got a phone call from my sister saying that Hulhumalé is flooded because of a big wave and that they have moved to the nearby mosque. Then I walked out of the hall and looked outside, was really surprised to see the big flood in the capital city. Everything was changed within a couple of minutes. Even my cycle was totally under the flood and I couldn’t start the engine so I had to walk to the ferry terminal. While I was walking around Malé, I was just wondering, what had really happened on that beautiful sunny day. There was no sign at all of a thing like this could happen to this country.

After about 2 hours, I was able to reach my island, Hulhumalé. Since, Hulhumalé is a reclaimed island which is above 3 meters from the sea-level, the affect by the tsunami was less compared to other islands of Maldives.

So to bring those memories back, here are some photos of Hulhumalé that I have collected from my friends at Hulhumale. One of the most interesting photo is the first one which was taken after about 5 minutes after the tsunami hit Hulhumalé.

After a couple of minutes when the wave hit the island of Hulhumale

People running for shelter

Protection walls are exploded..

No Admitance!! but for Tsunami...

Next day .. 27th December 2004.. Thanks for the residents of Hulhumale

Dhiraagu Web SMS widget using ASP VB.NET and AJAX

Yesterday, I didn’t have much work to do, so I decided to surf the net to find something interesting. And while I was reading some blogs at mvblogs.org I found a PHP script written by jaa, which sends web sms using the Dhiraagu’s web server. I don’t know much about PHP, but I wanted to write a similar script using ASP vbscript, the language that I have been using for the past 3 years. But due to the limitations in ASP vbscript I decided to move to ASP VB.NET to do the server-side scripting. (in classic ASP, http web request cannot be made without using a third-party component like AspHttp) In ASP VB.NET, the methods were much simpler than I thought. But it took about 5 hours of non-stop programming to complete the server-side part. In general, what this script does is, it passes the login information to the perl-script hosted at dhiraagu server, and when the user is authenticated, the perl-script sets a cookie named “Dhi” which has a value like ‘0653233’. After grabbing the cookie value from that page, the second request is made to the “send_message.pl” to send the message. I have also added some additional functionality to script, which will display the remaining SMS for the day and all validations are made on server-side. AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) is used to supply the form fields with required parameters. I will release the source code for the script after ‘beautifying’ and commenting the code blocks.

Dynamic image resizing and caching in ASP .NET

Recently I have faced a problem of caching in ASP .NET. What happened was, I was using an ASPX page to resize the image size by passing the required image width and image path in querystring. An example image resizing tag that I was using will look like this..

< i m g src="thumbnail.aspx?filename=" width="170" />

The above tag works perfectly when it was running on .NET framework 1.1 but when I changed my server to framework 2.0 all the images displayed are the same, no matter the image path and file name was changed!! I knew it was a problem with the caching feature in .NET 2.0. So I googled for a solution for this, and figured out this cool tag to control the caching based on the parameters passed to the ASPX page. Here’s the tag that you need to place at the top of the ASPX page.

< % @ OutputCache duration="1000" varybyparam="width; filename" %>

After implementing the above code the page rendered as expected, and the caching was controlled based on the width and file name passed in querystring. You can find more information about this and the serverside thumbnail script from here http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/283.aspx

3-Dimensional view of Male'

Nice aerial views of Male'