Info Zone

This is so cool. I stumbled upon this website when I was reading an article in a forum post about a pastor being mad at people because he had an issue with a fetish priest.

I’m so impressed about this man-Kwaku Bonsam the fetish preist, taking his job a step further by getting a website to promote his services and make himself globally known. In fact how many of his such will embrace technology, either they reject it outright or condemn it blatantly.

Indeed this should really make more people change their mind when it comes to accepting or adopting technology. Now if you own a business or provide a service in what so ever legal form and you don’t have a website, you should feel lagging behind in the digital world and the global reach. Even the traditional men are going digital. :-)

Oh you can take a peek of his website at http://www.kwakubonsam.com

The current hype on the media now is the e-zwich payment system. Quoting from their website,

e-zwich is the brand name for the common platform (the National Switch) that links the payment systems of all banks, savings and loans companies and rural banks in Ghana.It is an electronic platform that enables LOADING and SPENDING of e-cash and also allows the SETTLEMENT of inter-bank claims in addition to online transactions. Customers are able to effect transactions “offline” in underdeveloped areas where power and communication infrastructure maybe lacking. All transactions occur between a customer card and another card in a POS or ATM.

How it operates:
An e-zwich POS device is issued by a bank or savings and loan company with a retail merchant card registered to the owner of the e-zwich POS and linked to the owner’s traditional bank account. During payment, the owner’s customer’s e-zwich card is slotted into the card reader on the POS and debited by the amount of the transaction using the device’s keypad. The customer authenticates the payment with their finger print. Their card is then debited by the amount plus any other fees and credited to the merchant card of the owner of the POS. At the close of the day, all transactions are settled on the POS electronically through e-zwich to the owner’s bank account linked to the merchant card. All funds can be drawn from the bank.

To transfer money to the bank, the device is coupled with a settlement feature. When the settlement feature is selected, the device goes online using either an inserted SIM card from any of the major telecom service providers ( Onetouch, MTN, Tigo, Kasapa ) and a telephone line socket or an internet connection. The POS is pre-configured with the required e-zwich system host destination numbers. So no need to worry about numbers.

Other services offered by the device includes: money transfers, online and offline funds load, payments of bills, enquiries about the card, etc…

With this system coming to play, I foresee a leverage of our problem of online transactions. We can have our own online payment system without necessarily needing any of the international payment system out there ( paypal and the credit card systems, etc… ). Developers can now build solutions for online transactions specifically targeted towards the Ghanaian market. Well this will really work if e-zwich could provide a public APIs where third parties can write applications that support the system.

No need to be carrying huge money around. All is loaded into the card which is secure since using the card requires a finger print for authentication. Now the money snatchers will be out of business :).

One of the project I baby sit lately is The Kamusi Project; an online swahili dictionary. One feature we needed on the website was a slide show [ which we use to have before when the project was hosted at yale ] so we can play a slide show of the images submitted by users. I had to quickly hack something up. The initial implementation went quiet good and we were quiet happy with it considering all the fancy fade in and fade out of the images and as well being able to link an image to it actual word.

One problem that hit us was pixelated images because I was forcing all the images to a particular fixed size[ i can be dumb sometimes ] which quiet didn’t fit well with the size I gave. To fix the problem, I needed to figure out a way to resize the image proportionally. At this juncture, I’m going to share how to resize an image and maintian it proportionality.

To achieve that, you need to know the aspect ratio  of the image, muliply it by the width you want to resize the image to and that gives you the height you need to resize the image to. The algorithm below explains everything.

1. Get the original width and height of the image.
2. Set new width if original width is not going to be used.
3. Divide orignal height by the new width or the original width [ if new width wasn't set ] to get the aspect ratio.
4. Multiply  aspect ratio by the  new width or original width [ if new width wasn't set ] to get the new height needed to resize the image to.
5. Now set the image size to the new width or original width [ if new width wasn't set ] and the new height.

Simple huh!. Yes few research got me this.