It’s been a busy week on the technological front with quite a few interesting developments. We bring you the headlines courtesy of TechCentral.

Mxit Money, a partnership between Standard Bank and mobile social network Mxit, has been launched and allows Mxit users to send money to one another for free, transact with that money, and even withdraw it. Users can also send money to other mobile phone users for a nominal fee. Read more.

German-based media streaming company Simfy is set to launch a local offering of its music streaming service before the end of the month. Simfy Africa will have more than 18m tracks available for streaming and has secured licensing deals with all of the big international record labels, including Sony Music. Read more.

Mauritius-based DotConnectAfrica is laying claim to the .africa generic top-level domain for which SA’s ZA Central Registry is the African Union’s endorsed bidder. This is in spite of the fact that DotConnectAfrica inadvertently applied for the wrong domain, at a cost of US$185 000, and is unlikely to succeed in meeting the stringent requirements for geographic gTLDs. Read more.

The Competition Tribunal last week fined Telkom R449m for abusing its dominance in the telecommunications industry between 1999 and 2004. Assuming Telkom doesn’t appeal against the decision, half of the penalty is to be paid within six months of the tribunal’s decision, with the balance is payable within 12 months thereafter. Read more.

All you want to do, is email a simple photo to one of your friends or colleagues, but the various formats you can resize images to and which ones you should be using, are just too confusing. Let’s start from the beginning – The most well known format for graphics is .jpg. JPEG is the abbreviation for “Joint Photographic Experts Group”. JPG’s are popular and frequently used due to their excellent compression abilities which ensure that a file is as small as possible, but the images don’t lose too much of their quality. You can always use jpg’s if you need to forward graphic files without having to worry about the files’s size. BMP or the Bitmap format is one of the oldest and most primitive graphical types and has NO compression. In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Bitmaps are generally large and unnecessarily take up a lot of pace which clogs the network and email servers. It will also fill up your mailbox very fast if you keep copies of your emails in your Sent items , as well as the receiver’s mailbox. Try to avoid bitmaps as far as possible. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability. The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel thus allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors. GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art (such as logos) with a limited number of colors and for small small animations and low-resolution film clips. In view of the general limitation on the GIF image palette to 256 colors, it is not usually used as a format for digital photography. Digital photographers use image file formats capable of reproducing a greater range of colors, such as TIFF, RAW or JPEG. To prevent graphic files clogging up your mailbox and those of friends and colleagues, resize your photos or images before you email them. You don’t need to send a high resolution photo to someone for them to see what’s on it  – unless the receiver is supposed to make a high quality print. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a format designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK. PNG offers a variety of transparency options. TIFF‘s (Tagged Image File Format) are used by professional printers for the best possible quality prints with some compression. Originally created by the companyAldus for use with what was then called “desktop publishing”, the TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, by publishing and page layout applications, by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition and other applications.

(Information supplied by Neels Blom & Wikipedia)

The purpose of ASAUDIT is to promote and advance the use and support of computing and information technology at South African universities, and to further develop relationships with key members in the Higher Education sector both locally and internationally.

The association strives to promote professional skills and conduct in university ICT management and to serve as unitary voice for the South African Higher Education IT profession and to provide mutual support mechanisms to its members by encouraging development and application of standards and best practices through the sharing of expertise among members and colleagues in organising informative events.

ASAUDIT focuses on the sharing of knowledge and collaboration between University IT divisions. To ensure that this is facilitated properly special interest groups (SIGs) see to the needs of universities. No less than six Stellenbosch University IT staff are involved in these groups.

Ralph Pina heads the Green IT SIG group. This group ensures that  IT operations are ecologically sustainable (i.e. that energy and material throughputs are minimised) and on ICT’s role in enabling sustainability elsewhere in the university. The SIG share information about Green IT and will be emphasising cross-institutional benchmarking using Green IT indicators.

Johan Kistner is responsible for the ECM SIG group, aiming to provide a forum to share experiences in electronic content management, as well as to collect a library of best practices. The SIG is not limited to any particular brand or solution; it rather strives to serve the interest of all member institutions. Institutions share their knowledge and assist each other with advice. In addition, speakers from the industry are invited with restraint on the commercial tone.

Mark-Allen Johnson was recently chosen as co-chairman for the Mobile Special Interest Group. They offer the opportunity for technologists, teaching and learning specialists as well as other stakeholder groupings within the South African Higher Education sector to collaborate on leveraging the potential of mobile devices. The SIG endeavours to facilitate conversations locally and through international engagement on the theory as well as practice of all areas related to mobility as it applies to higher education.

Petro Uys and Marinka Naude are both members of the Skills Development SIG, whilst IT’s Managing Director, Helmi Dreijer leads the Procurement Committee.

More information on ASAUDIT can be found on http://www.asaudit.ac.za

As of 1 July 2012 free Internet access to the electronic subscription resources of the SU Library Service is only available from the Library’s website.

As announced in a previous Bits-‘n-Bytes article, the former method used to provide free access – namely a configuration setting in the end-user’s browser called the PAC file – is for a number of reasons no longer a technically feasible method to employ.  Free Internet access to electronic subscription resources is therefore now only available by following the applicable links on the Library website.  In such a way the cost for accessing the resources is automatically discounted from the end-user’s monthly Internet bill.  These links can also be bookmarked in web browsers to serve as shortcut links to electronic resources.

Users are still encouraged to use Inetkey whilst accessing subscription electronic resources, because it will speed-up the download of non-academic content from these e-resources sites.

For enquiries contact Wouter Klapwijk.