Dear all,
you may have noticed a short outage tonight. The server lost its physical network link several time. We did now exchange the patch cable. I hope the issue is now resolved.
Then we had the conference call with Erik Möller, Tomasz Finc and Brion Vibber from Wikimedia Foundation tonight. The WMF is interested in openZIM as a standard storage format for offline content and offers support, eg. funding DVDs or similar. The WMF has some plans in standardizing the distribution of content in several ways. The ZIM format may play a major role there, but this will have to evolve in the next one or two years. Then we might see how the plans of the WMF work out and in which state ZIM will be at that time and what features it has by then. I will add the outcome later to the preparation page under http://openzim.org/Wikimedia_Foundation_Relationship
I am happy to welcome Brion Vibber, Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, on our list.
Some unrelated news: For our Windows instance I added RDP support as well. Feel free to use that instead of VNC (which doesn't work so seemlessly). It works the same way - just install "rdesktop" and tunnel port 3389 through ssh.
$ ssh -L 3389:localhost:3389 USERNAME@openzim.org $ rdesktop localhost
Thanks for your support,
Manuel
On 4/16/09 12:51 PM, Manuel Schneider wrote:
Then we had the conference call with Erik Möller, Tomasz Finc and Brion Vibber from Wikimedia Foundation tonight. The WMF is interested in openZIM as a standard storage format for offline content and offers support, eg. funding DVDs or similar. The WMF has some plans in standardizing the distribution of content in several ways. The ZIM format may play a major role there, but this will have to evolve in the next one or two years. Then we might see how the plans of the WMF work out and in which state ZIM will be at that time and what features it has by then.
A couple development things we're interested in seeing happen that came up in our discussion:
* Simplifying the process of building a ZIM file out of an arbitrary wiki -- one-button operation :)
If we can for instance integrate ZIM builds into our own dump process we can make regular updates available on download.wikimedia.org, which would be fantastic!
Making it easy for other wikis to build their own offline-reader dumps would be a great thing for all.
* Maintenance of cross-platform builds of Kiwix (or similar reader) -- apparently current builds are happening on Linux only :(
Longer-term we'd love to see consideration of issues such as updating an archive with new/changed pages.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)