"Aard Dictionary is a multiplatform dictionary and offline Wikipedia reader. It runs on desktop computers, notebooks and netbooks with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as well as Nokia Internet Tablets (N800 and N810) and anywhere Python, PyGTK and ICU are available.

In 2005 I spent some time ICT volunteering for Geekcorp Mali.  And in 2001 I traveled in India and had a great time in the North.  Now, a ICT volunteer is actually needed in Dharamsala.  Contact me if you have the skills, time and you feel like an amazing experience:

AirJaldi, a nonprofit dedicated to harnessing the capabilities of the internet for the benefit of rural communities in developing countries, is looking for a highly-motivated and experienced person to take a central role in carrying out an innovative research project aimed at de

I've come to realize that it's silly that most wikis are using nofollow by default. In fact, it seems that the majority of the most visited websites are not contributing to a healthy way for spreading pagerank. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Wikipedia and Delicious are all adding rel="pleasefollow" to links added by their users.

It's clear that dashes (-) are better than underscores (_) for search engine optimization. So people have looked for ways to make MediaWiki use -. Wikihow is one of the few MediaWiki sites that behaves this way, but unfortunately even they don't seem to be running an extension for this. I tried my luck at changing the MediaWiki core (Title.php) but I'll leave this for now.

My unlimited MetroCard was still valid for a day and a half so I left it to the poor soul who was robbed from all of his belongings in Lower Manhattan - he was also staying at my host's place in Williamsburg. I had a good flight to Dublin, where I had a very pleasant stay with Dublin's superhost. The guy has been hosting more than 1000 people. Now I'm back in Amsterdam, and it feels good to be among friends. It was just a bit annoying to find out that a "1 zone" tram ride in Amsterdam costs 2,60 euro these days. I boycotted that and walked instead - with about 25 kg of extra weight.

I'm in Northampton MA right now, at Joe Edelman's place. It's nice to be out of the City. It's even nicer to see Joe excited about Groundcrew. The guy who worked on the user interfaces for Blogger and Twitter is doing the design and there are some cool opportunities. It also looks like the project has taken a clear direction on one side - while leaving open the community side for later. The main problem is the cost of text messages, which should have been free by now.

I'd like to see some logos for the following wikis: Healthywiki, Visawiki and Wikifurniture. Let me know if you think you can make something nice, or even better, you can directly upload it to the wiki. And yeah, anything is better than nothing at all.

A bit silly. I tried setting up rsnapshot to make snapshots of the entire filesystem on my server. This apparently led to a fatal exception in the Linux kernel, probably when rsyncing /dev and especially /proc. It took a bit of time before it was fixed, but everything is working fine again. I'll make sure to first try silly things such as backup / localhost on my laptop.

Sometimes wifi connections only allow connections to a limited range of ports. In Israel connections to ports over 1024 were seriously throttled. So I put the SSH server of one machine on port 22. When going through /var/log/auth last week I found many bots trying to enter with standard names. So I installed fail2ban, today I'm checking and everything is working fine. For your own safety you can set up IP addresses that can always come through. Merely putting sshd on a non-standard port seems to be a more adequate way to keep bots out.