Mon, 11 Oct 2004
Drowning in memory
I notice that the price of flash memory cards is falling through the
floor -- I've seen reports of 1Gb SD memory cards going for under US
$100, and certainly they're down to £75 including VAT if you know
where to look in the UK (not Dixons or PC World, both of whom seem to
think that's a good price for 256Kb, thank you very much).
What to do with all that memory?
Well, I have a Palm Tungsten T3. And a neat-o utility called Plucker which is an offline web page
and ebook viewer. And I don't have a really decent encyclopedia for my
palm, yet. So ...
My first hint was this discussion
of how to install Wikipedia on a PDA using TomeRaider as a database.
Well, TomeRaider is (a) shareware and (b) development has been
lagging on the PalmOS platform of late (that is, for the past
couple of years). So I decided to see if I could follow the
instructions for generating a static HTML version of
wikipedia, like the ones at fixedreference.org, from
the monthly
raw SQL database
dumps. I decided to use
wiki2static,
and then generate a Plucker database from it in the usual way.
Preliminary signs are good: my first static wikipedia build worked
fine, albeit with table, graphic, and equation generation
switched off -- just plain text for now. It's an intimidatingly
huge glom of HTML, about 350,000 files totalling 2.8Gb, that took
nearly 12 hours to generate on my 1.33GHz Powerbook G4. The
Plucker build process is likely to run overnight and may die --
but there's more than one Plucker back end to try before giving
up and so far it seems to be working.
All so that I'm never at a loss for an encyclopedia. Unless
anyone can tell me how to get at the internal HTML tree in the
Java-based Encyclopedia Britannica DVD distribtion ...?
[Discuss
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posted at: 23:59 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
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