Anyone Can Edit

My dear friend Danny Wool was chatting with me this morning, and he mentioned a recent project he’s been involved with regarding the Rwandan Genocide. To get some background knowledge on Kinyarwanda–the local language–he went to the Kinyarwanda Wikipedia to get some basic info. He came across the article on Yesu Kristo (staple article of pretty much all Wikipedias). The following is the current revision (as of this post):

Yesu Kristo on rw.wikipedia.org

What’s wrong with this article (I’ve already found 3 or 4 things)? I just hope one of the ~1-1.5% of the population of Rwanda who’s online gets to it soon. On a side note, I think the ITU’s figures may be a little skewed here. I did read an article about a push for more internet penetration in Rwanda (in the form of thin clients for schools), but I believe the metric here might be “people who can get to a computer (at their local school)” rather than “people who are actively online (and more likely to be maintaining rw.wikipedia).” Who knows. The NYT doesn’t seem to think the project is going well (bottom of first page):

Over all, less than 1 percent of the population is connected to the Internet. Rwandan officials say the company seems more interested in tapping the more lucrative cellphone market than in being an Internet service provider.

Maybe my Android client will be a hit then :)

I took this screenshot from Android’s docs on the various system permission constants:

I wonder if anyone’s made any apps that require this permission  yet.

Mike finally agreed to try Linux. That’s how this whole thing began. I gave him a couple of options for some user-friendly distros and he settled on Ubuntu. Downloaded the ISO, burned, began the process. I had one partition I left OSX on, and I installed Ubuntu in the spare partition.

/dev/sda2 is the OSX drive, and / is mounted at /dev/sda3. I’ve got /boot/ on /sda3 and my swap is on /dev/sda4. I got everything up and running ok. Had a minor hiccup with the bluetooth keyboard–it was detected pre-boot and worked fine, but for some reason Ubuntu failed to load the drivers in userland. I had a spare USB keyboard lying around, so I switched it out and kept on going. Wireless drivers also took some manual install. Nothing ndiswrapper couldn’t handle. So at this point, we’ve got a fully functioning Ubuntu install. Startup is fine, goes to Grub, can boot into Ubuntu a-ok.

So now I want to put OSX into my Grub config. I tried every possible combination of root/rootnoverify/guid and kernel/chainloader (with and without –force) imaginable. Playing in the Grub commandline for a bit, I did get some helpful info: uuid revealed all the partions as I expected them, and that hd0,1 was in fact htfsplus as I expected. However, when experimenting with root(hd0,1) and trying to chainloader to /usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi, I would get a “Drive cannot be mounted” error. I am completely out of ideas there (can read but not boot to htfsplus?). I also attempted the boot_v8 method, but that halted post Grub but before kernel would kick in. Finally came across rEFIt. Made a bootable CD of it and restarted with that in place. It read all of my partitions and allowed me to boot back into OS X. Reading a bit more into rEFIt, I installed it as my new bootloader. Works like a charm :)

I was browsing the Android Market (App Store for you iPhone junkies) and I saw an application that was rather cool. Someone has put together a web server that runs off the Android platform. Granted, it’s limited to one connection at a time, and it’s by-default password protected, but it demonstrates a cool concept. They bundle it with a photo-sharing app which I have yet to try out.

This all got me thinking: I wonder if I can run MediaWiki on the system? I know by default that applications for Android are in Java, but would it be possible to compile PHP on the device and get MediaWiki up and running? Even just to run update.php would be awesome to me. Might be hard, as the RC30 release made it more difficult to obtain root on your system. The default user (if you have the terminal client) is so restricted its not even funny. No hopes of compiling there. However, the second issue is getting some web server up and running. I highly doubt I’d be able to get Apache going, but its certainly something to think about. Since applications are supposed to be in Java (although, I’ve heard some rumors of the .NET platform being partially ported to Android), I thought it might be easier to port something like TTiny JWS to Android, which should be significantly easier than attempting to run Apache–or worse, writing my own Java-based web server.

Maybe this can become my pet project on the weekends :). I can always try a local VM and see where that gets me, before I potentially brick my phone trying to hack MediaWiki into running. Still, this all depends on me being able to compile PHP on Android to begin with…