ill; but good news is all around

i'm feeling rather ill today and am therefore resting a bit. this is, in fact, the first time i've touched a computer yet today and it's already mid-afternoon.

so it was nice to come across this article that describes how KDE is being used to provide a portal to information on the global internet to farmers and other rural residents in south africa. in the article, Kugan Soobramani, who is a senior manager in government involved with the project, said:

People's perception of Linux and open source is that everything is command-based, text-based. Our pilot projects are meant to address that perception. Our core function as the department of agriculture is to deliver agricultural services to the community. So we use these Digital Doorways in the rural areas to assist farmers. If they want share prices, market information, agricultural information, they can use the kiosks to find it. And it's working.

they use KDE in several african languages, including isiZulu, isiXhosa, tshiVenda, Setswana, and Afrikaans. interestingly, several of these don't even show up in our online translation stats. perhaps the translation team should track down these trailblazers in the limpopo province of south africa?

right now they have four installations around the province and are continuing to deploy more open source across the province. seeing something that i've in some small way help out with help others makes me feel a little better, even when i'm feeling under the weather.