Building a Fast Wikipedia Offline Reader 208
ttsiod writes "An internet connection is not always at hand. I wanted to install Wikipedia on my laptop to be able to carry it along with me on business trips. After trying and rejecting the normal (MySQL-based) procedure, I quickly hacked a much better one over the weekend, using open source tools. Highlights: (1) Very fast searching. (2) Keyword (actually, title words) based searching. (3) Search produces multiple possible articles, sorted by probability (you choose amongst them). (4) LaTeX based rendering for mathematical equations. (5) Hard disk usage is minimal: space for the original .bz2 file plus the index built through Xapian. (6) Orders of magnitude faster to install (a matter of hours) compared to loading the 'dump' into MySQL — which, if you want to enable keyword searching, takes days."
Re:Uh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hitchhiker's guide here we come! (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, if that isn't something a hitchhiker needs to know, it at least sounds like something they would need to know!
Does it also give the probability of the Pikachu turning into a bulldozer?
Re:Ho-Hum ... (Score:1, Interesting)
can we get a PSP version of it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Uh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Its funny how time changes you.