We had an active day around here getting ready to fly off to Odense in Denmark for Wikisym. I finally debugged the last testing error with the MediaWiki 1.7.1 upgrade for Wikitravel, so I did a rollout this morning, and things seem to be working great. The Wikimedia team's rollout schedule -- they run the Subversion trunk version on e.g. Wikipedia and make quarterly stable drops -- has worked out pretty well.
It's interesting to see the Free Software world moving away from "It'll be done when it's done" to "Here's what we have since the last 6 months, and it more or less works". It doesn't seem to be damaging the quality of the software released or the willingness to innovate -- more the opposite. And users seem to really appreciate not having to decide between "stable" and "up-to-date". Having a bleeding edge that everyone can afford to be on makes things a little less bloody.
tags: free software mediawiki scheduled releases mediawiki wiki wikitravel
Burn
I also started the insurance process for our Montreal local Burning Man event in September. All Burning Man regional events have to be fully insured, which is pretty annoying when you are paying for it and pretty calming when you've got a big bonfire going. Next up: toilets. This is the glamour of Burning Man, folks.
tags: burning man regional montreal insurance
Baby carriers
Maj, Amita June and I took a trip to nearby Bébé Depôt on Christophe Colombe and St. Zotique -- yes, non-Montreal-residents, those are real street names -- to get some baby carrying units.
Baby carrying is serious technology. A week before Amita June was born, we got this 12-foot-long elastic cloth that you're supposed to wrap around your body 4 times and the baby ends up in one or more of the various folds. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but trying to get a newborn into it turned out to be a real hassle. So, a few days after we came home from the hospital, I ran out to Bummie's on Mont Royal and got a black Heart-to-Heart shoulder sling. It's been absolutely fantastic -- the real workhorse of our baby-carrying needs.
But as Amita got bigger, it got harder to go for long walks with her in the sling. So when we were at 2006 SxSW Interactive I ran out early one morning to the Walmart near our hotel and got a $12.99 umbrella stroller. Amita loves it -- go figure -- but the thing is about 6 inches too short for me, so I've developed a real hunch pushing it around.
For our trip to Europe, we decided to shell out some serious dough -- far into the double digits -- to get major technology for our baby-carrying needs. We got a really nice stroller from Chicco with a canopy and comfy handles that reach up just about to where I need them, which is very nice. And we got a baby backpack -- porte-bébé sac-à-dos -- that Amita can sit in while I carry her on my back. That's by far the most fun for me so far. She cried like the dickens when we put her in, but pretty soon she was cooing like a dove. It was really comfortable for me, too.
We're taking the backpack and not the stroller to Europe... we're both trepidatious about the choice and I hope it turns out well.
tags: baby carrier amitajune maj