Featured Freeware: WikiTaxi
The idea behind WikiTaxi is so simple that the utility of it should be obvious: take Wikipedia offline. How cool is that? The real question is, though, does it work? Is it even possible to take the massive online encyclopedia offline in a usable format?
Surprisingly, the answer is yes. WikiTaxi compresses all of Wikipedia into a database that's searchable, fully usable, and small enough to fit on an 8GB USB drive. It grabs the Wikipedia database dump every few weeks, keeping your offline entries up-to-date with the latest changes. There's also an option in the program to update it yourself, if you happen to venture near enough to an Internet connection.
As a single-file app, WikiTaxi is easy to manage--hence the portability. To install it, you extract the file to any folder. When you open it, it opens to a randomly selected page, and you can browse from there. WikiTaxi does leave Wikipedia's images behind to keep the file size down, so if you need graphics this might not be for you. Also, given the nature of WikiTaxi, don't forget that external links are not supported for obvious reasons. Internal links should still work, though. So as a growing number of people try to take advantage of the Internet's resources without getting all the online distractions, WikiTaxi is a smart way to bus around one of the best tools on the Web.
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So, now after you download the database file, you have to extract it using the WikiTaxi Importer that came with the program, a seperate exe file. When I started that at 5 AM this morning, it said time remaining over an hour and a half. When I got up after 11, more than 6 hours later, it still had 3 minutes and 15 seconds left to go, mostly because it was going at the time when all my anti programs were scheduled to do their daily scans, but that's not the point. After shutting down a few running programs, the WikiTaxi Importer was still at 3 minutes and 15 seconds remaining and it wasn't moving.
I had to restart my computer and the first thing I did when it came back up was start WikiTaxi Importer and just let that get done. It's still going because I'm doing other things on the computer at the moment. Oh and my resources are down to 20% of the RAM it's normally at, so I can see WikiTaxi Importer is trying to use up everything my computer has available. I just hope the WikiTaxi program itself doesn't do that, so we'll see.
So, just a warning to anyone else who might be interested in this program what they are getting into. Don't even try to get this program unless you are doing nothing else on the computer at the time and have no scheduled scans.
Oh and I guess I should mention that once you get this program and the database file, you don't have to do it again on a different computer. Since the program doesn't install on the computer, you can just copy it to a different drive or disc and run it from there, even copy it to a friend's computer for them, even use it on a flash drive, if it's big enough.
That's my rant for today.
And if that isn't confusing enough, after all the time it took to go through everything with WikiTaxi, I ended up removing it from my computer anyway. I realized that this isn't something I need or will get much use out of. I don't use Wikipedia enough to make it worth my while to have this huge program eat up my resources or take up a huge chunk of my hard drive. If I need to look something up, I can just go to Wikipedia and even get pictures. Plus the fact that any page on Wikipedia loads a lot faster than WikiTaxi does. The program just wasn't for me.
And let me tell you, it took a lot less time to get rid of the program than it was to get it.
- by batchaesir May 16, 2009 9:14 AM PDT
- all is perfect ,but math expressions could not be displayed well,for example:<math>f'(x_0)=\lim_{\Delta x \to 0}\frac{\Delta y}{\Delta x}=\lim_{\Delta x \to 0}\frac{f(x_0+\Delta x)-f(x_0)}{\Delta x}</math>
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