Doug Ross @ Journal

Se habla open source?

I want to write a column at some point regarding the benefits of propagating low-cost Internet access points in developing nations. Democratization of knowledge, transparency of global information flow, veritas, and all that. The question I'm grappling with: is it better to fund Internet access points as opposed to basic infrastructure (water, food, electricity). In many parts of the world, we've tried repeatedly to push our approach to infrastructure on developing nations. And, often, these attempts have failed. Would it be better to instead provide access to knowledge? I think it's worth examining.

In a related development:

"A small team of developers in Rwanda was just beginning work on a project to produce a localized version of OpenOffice, an open-source alternative to Microsoft's market-leading productivity software, when they realized they had a problem...

Kinyarwanda, the language spoken by most Rwandans, has no words for many basic technical and computing terms, including the very word "computer," explained Steve Murphy, organizer of the project. After debating The language spoken by most Rwandans has no word for "computer." After considering the use of an English or French term, the Rwandan developers created their own: "mudasobwa," which roughly means "something or someone that does not make mistakes." ...

For projects such as Murphy's, challenges like that are only the beginning. Still, hundreds of developer teams have taken up the dare, working to translate open-source software such as OpenOffice and the KDE interface for Linux into languages ranging from Azerbaijani to Xhosa. ...

For now, such projects are largely curiosities. But analysts say they could present a significant long-term threat to Microsoft's dominance on PC desktops. Regions and language groups that don't have enough of a PC market now to justify development of proprietary commercial software will naturally turn to open-source alternatives, they say. And by the time those markets become big enough to draw the attention of Microsoft and other commercial software makers, open-source could be as entrenched as Microsoft is in developed countries now."

Se habla Open Source?

Calling a Win32 DLL in PHP

Thanks to Orkut's PHP community, I found out about PECL's FFI (foreign function interface) extension. This provides the ability to call Win32 DLL's or Unices' shared objects in a relatively seamless fashion. The analagous Java component is JNI (Java Native Interface), which exposes a slightly more clunky interface (at least for Win32). As an aside, PECL is the official repository of PHP extensions.

PECL's FFI Extension

Easy display of JPG's and GIF's in MFC

   Stop the presses... I found useful info in a concise form on MSDN!

"Q: In Visual Basic, I can display a JPG or GIF file by creating a picture control, but how can I display a JPG in my MFC app?

Good question! Sometimes programmers who use Visual Basic® seem to have it so easy. Just plop a picture control in your form and awaaay you go...while C++ programmers have to fret and strut. What are we supposed to do, write our own JPG decompression functions? Of course not! In fact, C/C++ programmers can use the very same (almost) picture control their Visual Basic counterparts use..."

Displaying a JPG in your MFC Application