Building a Fast Wikipedia Offline Reader

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."

Comments

Re:Why?

[thePsychologist]

Realize that some of the greatest things done by humankind were from doing "pointless projects" as you call them. Prime numbers for instance were studied by mathematicians just for fun, and now look, they're used for cryptography. Try doing your banking without them.

Complex numbers originated from something "useless" like trying to solve the quartic polynomial in radicals...try building a bridge without them. In fact all of science is built upon people going in random tangents doing things they enjoy, discovering seemingly "useless facts" but most of it becomes useful *and* gives us an idea of the universe in which we live.

Only working on immediate practical problems is very shortsighted, and if mandated throughout the academic community, would mean the death of innovation and most discoveries.

I know the feeling

[aepervius]

They say to you that their hobby is painting/music/walking/repairing old car/gardening/making reduced model etc... And they seem to think that their hobby are perfectly acceptable. But as soon as you say you like to program stuff, they don't understand how this would be a hobby. They mostly fail to recognize that every one of us has something in common : the joy of act of creation. The fact that our hobby entail creating something immaterial and full of "logic" does not matter. It is still a joy.