SGI Indigo was the first computer I fell in love with. Playing Flight Simulator on it was plain ecstatic. Looking at the Einstein juggling balls in Indy was fun. When I surfed for the first time on internet, the first site I went to was sgi.com. And today SGI filed for bankruptcy. Commoditization huh.. Would it be another Digital or Wang?? More on this here, here and here.

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I have been trying to maintain a personal wiki for taking notes for a long time. I have tried almost everything available under the sun. There were few basic but absolutely necessary requirements that I wanted from this wiki

1. I am the only one i.e. only I would be able to read it and no one else.
2. Someone else can not start writing to it unless I authorize
3. Ability to change look and feel

In search of this kind of wiki I started to look around. The first stop was the software that runs the largest wiki (wikipedia) i.e. mediawiki. I liked it what I saw in version 1.3.x but it didn’t meet my requirements for a personal wiki and was more geared towards the traditional wiki at that time. Bit I liked it and ended up creating a public wiki called sarvagya for Hindi on web. After this I flirted around with BaseCamp, Jot, PmWiki, Microwiki based around wordpress, tiddlywiki, WakkaWiki etc. etc.

None seemed to fit the bill besides I was spoiled by Mediawiki’s other features and a great and active developer community. One of the things that one has to consider while using open source software is that it will be around for a while ( I will confess it is same for the enterprise software which brings bread for me) But I digress. So recently during one of the conversations with a friend he pointed that Mediawiki’s users right management has been improved a lot and now it supports all the features that you want. I checked and found this page called preventing access, here are the few lines of settings in LocalSettings.php that allowed what I wanted

$wgWhitelistRead = array( "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin" );
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['createaccount']   = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['read']            = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['edit']            = false;

Third requirement of chaging the look and feel of the wiki is possible but still still a little more involved process and I don’t want to spend more time on this. I would have loved if it would have been similar to creating themes for Wordpress.

Overall I am just happy to be able to create a small personal wiki using Mediawiki

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So far I didn’t have a formal resolution for this year. But here I make a formal resolution to writing more about SAP’s technologies, focusing more the Netweaver and ESA side. This wake up call is sponsered by this post from Vinnie  Mirchandani  and my first  post  using Performancing blog writer plugin.

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The great distractor that is internet is the subject of this post from Dey Da. He also equates it with the intellectual equivalent of Kubla Khan’s “miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.”

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This is the first time I am in this cold a weather. Check the photo I took of the compass in the rental 9 degrees fahrenheit. Last time I was in this cold would have been in Louisville about 14 degrees.

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While driving around riding my new Firefox 1.5, I stumbled across something called FON. Initial words “FON is is wifi revolution” caught my attention I started reading more about it. It is a pretty interesting concept analogous to File-sharing networks. Here instead of sharing your files you are actually sharing your internet bandwidth so that FON members can utilize your bandwidth and surf the net while they are near you and you get the same benefits if you happen to be near a FONer. From there website

FON is an integration of those wanting to contribute to free universal communication and solidarity. We are a usernet growing larger every time we exchange part of our bandwidth for the ability to connect to the bandwidth of other FON members, in every moment from every location in the world.

Pretty interesting. I am sure telecom companies won’t like it. They might even introduce a clause in the service :D But if an idea catches up with the masses there is nothing there to prevent it from spreading like virus. So far this is only in Europe let us see when it becomes common in US specially the silicon valley

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Finally internet is opening new avenues to express oneself in true human nature. Read IT in Punjab (Hat Tip - Desipundit)

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