Standlone wiki on a USB key?

[andygates]

My ISP is down.  There is vexation among the masses, particularly as I need one set of contact details soon or a real-world transaction will bork.  C'est la risk of putting a bunch of stuff on a wiki online; it's available everywhere, but it's very unavailable if the ISP does the dying fly.  So I'm sat here like a lemon, fighting the urge to go to treeware despite its many and obvious suckings.

"Munky!  We need more technodgeoly"

"No silly man, we need better technology."

A wiki is my preferred freeform PIM.  Perfectly good wikis exist which just use text-files as their data.  Here then is the spec for my downtime-inspired disaster-and-zombie-apocalypse-proof PIM from Hell:

• Phyisical hosting on a ruggedised USB stick with a universal (Windows & *NIX) file format; a device that'll survive being on a keyring, thrown into a bike bag and puked on by the cat.  Repeatedly.
  
• Text-based data storage.
  
• Two executables which can serve the thing, one each for Windows and *NIX. 
  
• Some security measures on the stick; HTTPS on the served pages.
• Absurdly clean vanilla HTML so it'll run anywhere.

Okay, the IronDrive is rugged (nuke-proof, even), but at $700 it is full of fail for my non-milspec budget.  One of the great things a popcorn device like a USB stick is that you can clone it and bury one in your ammo cache for when the zombies come.  That'd be $1400 and even with the dollar tanking, that's just bonkers.  Maybe one of these cute Iocell ones.

But for putting software on a stick, I become once more the eternal noob.  Any ideas?

Comments

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Is this for personal use, or more general serving? I assumed the former until you mentioned HTTPS (which only encrypts the communication, not the actual data).

Pardon me if I'm being confused by something which isn't confusing; it's been that kind of morning, honestly.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Personal use. HTTPS is a red herring because, after all, it'll be plugged into the computer at which the reader sits. Well spotted ;)

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Aha, got it. The difficulty here is that, if you're putting the server on the USB drive, you'll have to start it as a service on whatever computer you're using. And, while I'm hep to that jive on Linux (set Apache to start on a nonstandard high port, like 8008, and you should have no problems), I don't know if this is difficult on Winders.

As for filesystem, I'm really not sure; I don't dual-boot, so I never really have to have a filesystem that both Linux and Windows can work with, so I'm not up on the state of the art. And, of course, you need something that will work on default installs of both Linux and Windows, unless you want to carry a second USB drive with appropriate drivers for reading the first one. And I assume you don't.

Maybe VFAT? I think that's out-of-the-box for Windows and Linux, and supports sensibly-sized filenames. You'd need to have a minimal but statically-linked httpd server for each OS (can't assume the presence of shared libraries/DLLs), but as USB keychains get up to above 8GB these days, that shouldn't be a real problem, at least in terms of space.

You could get a couple of non-milspec-ruggedness 8GB drives for under $150, use one for daily use, and clone it to the other nightly as a backup and for replacement when you step on the first one.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Ah, do ignore me totally. Googling for "wiki on a stick" gets some great hits worth exploring. GTDTiddlyWiki and Sourceforge's Wiki On A Stick both look interesting, are both open and both just use the browser as the brain - they're monolithic XHTML files with javascript in 'em. Should keep me busy for a night or two...

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Ah, nifty. That was the part that was giving me pause, really -- needing a web server backend to make it work. Something that can get the browser to do all the work does away with that handily.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

It *nearly* does. I've just killed Wiki On A Stick for the first time (don't ask how, I was just editing stuff). It does claim to be in beta, though. TiddlyWiki next!

As for rugged USB, I found some 2Gb micro drives in little rubber jelly housings. Small and squodgy is inherently tough, and they're cheap as chips.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Ay de mi, I am a prize doof. The kill was in fact just triggering infinite recursion by visiting the "attempt to trigger infinite recursion" test page. Beta + luser = woez. We now return you to your regular programmes.

[skean.livejournal.com]

Isn't this what paper was invented for?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Paper doesn't back up. Paper doesn't edit nicely. Paper doesn't embed stuff nicked from elsewhere. Paper gets physically heavier the more data you have. Paper is harder to share with others when the main medium for sharing is the internet...

Every so often I have a luddite phase and put my Stuff onto trees, usually as a filofax. After a few months, I get bored of all the crossing-out and I spill tea on a bit I wrote with the wrong ink, and can't recover from backups, and I get grumpy.

Paper has its place. This ain't it.

The stickwiki (which works *great* btw) already has my contacts, work technical notes, and crackpot project notebook on it. That's three books, paperwise.

[skean.livejournal.com]

Hey, what can I say? I live on my Palm TX.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Well exactly, you big geek.

Paper is for survivalist nutters expecting the Russians / Chinese / Arabs to pop a high-altitude EMP over Wall Street or Google's datacentre.