The Longest Now

hi sj. i drew a cartoon for you. i’ll show it to you someday. it has you, broccoli, and a kewpie.

The OLPC community Week in Review is back.  It’s currently just a slice of what is going on around the community — missing large facets from IRC channels, mailing lists, and wiki updates, code commits, and community media.  Updates referencing any of these information channels are welcome.  Please take a look and add any notes from the week to it.

Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :

• a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates

• scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time.  A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections.  The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…