When my relatives moved to Linux

[Bill Marriott]

Hi again, Richmond,

>>>
However, the relative program was written over a 15
minute period (mucking around preparing the graphics
took ages) as a 'one trick pony' for kids who have
little or no contact with computers (in Bulgaria most
people cannot afford a computer) so would be quite
unable to insert photo of their own relatives (one
wonders how they would get the images into the
computers - I have each group of kids for 90 minutes
twice a week, and the main task is to teach them
English - teaching kids how to work with a scanner,
graphics prog. and so on is a whole different
ballpark).
<<<

I can't resist picking this one up. The obvious answer to me is to use 
mobile phones! I spent a lot of time in Europe, even parts of Eastern 
Europe, in 1999-2001 ... and even back then, cell phones were all over the 
place. It seemed adoption was running well ahead of the US. Nowadays even 
"cheap" phones have cameras.

So, here's the idea:

- Set up RevCGI on a nice LAMP server (I'll give you a setup if you need it)
- Have your kiddies borrow a mobile phone and take pictures of their family
- They SMS the pics to your server (email address)
- Have RevCGI read the emails, pre-process and sort the pics
- Your stack connects to the site, pulls down the pics, crops them, sizes 
them, and drops them into place
- The next time your students visit, have them take your "family tree" quiz 
with their actual family's photos
- Print out a beautiful certificate with the tree and words they've learned 
that they can show to their family

Just think of the excitement they'd feel! Actually the concept could be 
extended to learning all kinds of vocabulary, eh?

I'm sure you'd get a lot of help for such an interesting project from the 
Rev list...

- Bill