South Africa looking for open source suppliers

The revolution has begun!

South African government is tossing proprietary
software for open source!

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=605

Tsuro naGudo CGI animation!

Someone suggested that some of our folk tales that we were tolded as
we were growing up may need to be animated. That sound like a splendid
idea.
We just need to storyboard a simple Tsuro naGudo story and get
cranking on the rendering. Any artists out there?

Blender (http://www.blender.org) and Gimp (http://www.gimp.org) can
help with this big time and they are FREE!

Where the hell is opensource in Zimbabwe?

While opensource has provided other developing nations Such as india, Brazil and China unparalleled flexibility and regaining if control of their IT futures. The question still remains to be answered where is the legislation to bring sweeping infrastructure changes to a country that already is strapped for capital?

We need government to give opensource a chance in rebuilding technology infrastructure.

South Africa with Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu have made phenomenal strides in this respect http://www.ubuntu.org. This version of Linux really kicks tail, Redhat et al.

The following list delves into replacement options and new software that you may have never heard of that is free. On the left is the package that is proprietary and costs a lot of money in licencing and on the right is the FREE alternative.

MS Office Word, Excel and powerpoint - Open office at http://www.openoffice.org
Web Browser - Firefox http://www.mozilla.org
Mail - Thunderbird or Evolution http://www.mozilla.org
databases - mysql (http://www.mysql.org) or postgresql (http://www.postgresql.org)
Web Servers - Apache (http://www.apache.org)
Graphical editor - photoshop equivalent - The Gimp (http://www.gimp.org)

Blender is a cool animation package that has been used in movies like of Spiderman for some of the graphics
check it out at http://www.blender.org - Get some artists to start producing some Zimbabwean animation for crying out loud!

Open Movie project (http://orange.blender.org/cms/Home.553.0.html)

Check some of these out before you dismiss this opensource, this ain't your grand daddy's opensource. This stuff works!

ENJOY!

zimbabwe opensource

CSS Tables

Ran into some cool Cascading Style Sheets table design repository.

http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/index.php

Slick!

Free as in Beer PL/SQL to java converter

I think writing a PL/SQL to java converter makes sense. I can't seem to
find any free ones.

Technology and Zimbabwe book shortage

In Zimbabwe there is a huge shortage of books in schools and i was
thinking about how best that this can be alleviated.

Could all books be converted to a PDF or any internet downloadable
format to allow them to be printed to ordinary paper by ordinary printers?
That way a teacher when he goes to a growth point where they have
internet connectivity can download the latest course material and
teaching guides. Well this is a bit far fetched but I think having books
as open courseware may allow some of the disadvantaged schools to have
access to some of the best material for the best schools like Goromonzi,
Gokomere, Mazowe, St Ignatius, Eaglesvale, Chisipite, Arundel, etc in
the form of simple paper printouts. Would this work?