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.