Okawix

In working in various developing countries one of the most difficult parts has been the mediocre Internet access (hey, we all have our "must haves"). Bandwidth is a precious and often expensive commodity in the countries (a megabit connection in Kenya when i was there in 2006 was $500+/month). With these restrictions access to what the west would consider a bandwidth simple site such as Wikipedia is difficult at best. Another thing i have noticed is the lack of written material in native languages, i was noticing at Nangahar university in Jalalabad Afghanistan they have practically no written material and they are getting donations of *English* material (not particularly useful for the majority of the staff and students i am sure). Well Wikipedia is growing and while the entries in languages other than English are minuscule they are there, and something like Farsi (which is widely spoken in Afghanistan) has a few thousand articles (its a start).

The above thoughts lead me to a very very very nifty but simple peice of software, Okawix. It is a program that has an extraordinarily simple interface and "lets you download the whole content of Wikipedia, with or without images, so that you can browse it offline: Okawix is available in 253 languages and includes sister projects of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks). Okawix is a free software available under GPL licence; sources are available on the SourceForge project. It's featuring the search engine , developed by Linterweb."

A program like this and an old computer could really go a long way towards helping mitigate some of the disadvantages of low bandwidth.

I wish I was a (software) hacker... (leads into wikipedia)

Ok, i wouldn't mind being able to do either (software or hardware) but after trying to teach myself perl then floundering through a c++ course (and ultimately dropping it) i have come to the conclusion that i was not meant to write code (hell, i have a hard time making bat files or hand writing html, a bit of a red flag).

What made me think of this was wikipedia and my inability to throw something together to interface (is that the right word?) with wikipedia. If you have actually read/clicked through on any of my other posts you will see i am a huge wikipedia fan, mainly because its easy, and uptodate and reasonably accurate (for technical things, forget the softer topics). I like to have a bunch of links in my posts but i hate making the links (lazy) so i was thinking wouldn't it be sweet if there was some site/service/script/etc where i could write something up then have it automatically make a link to every word/phrase it found in my posting that was in wikipedia?! The first problem that comes to mind would be words that were incorrectly linked, like " SD" being linked to "abbreviation for Small Dogs" (bad example but you get the idea). I am sure there could be some sort of checker, like a spell checker that asks you about each word/phrase. oh well, if anyone out there knows about something like that let me know.