I spent most of the day today putting polishing touches on the OpenID MediaWiki extension I took to Wikimania a couple of weeks ago. It was fun to work on, but spending a lot of time with Jonathan Daugherty of Janrain Inc., David Recordon of Verisign and David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios let me know that there was still a lot of work to do.
Needless to say, helping kate of Wikia and Travis of wikiHow step through the installation and testing also was a humbling experience. "No... don't do that... Ouch... No, I didn't think of that... Uh, I'll definitely get to that later..." Probably the most painful moment was having about 4 people all at once exclaim in horror that I was storing searchable data inside a blob in the database. "Uh, see, it was just easier that way..." Harsh stares for Evan, you can believe.
So today I've been sanding a few of the rough edges and doing some optimization (indexed columns -- what a concept!) and otherwise fudging with the code to make it work better. Jonathan had done some quick hacks at the conference, and I've been adding in his patches as well.
tags: mediawiki wikimania openid extension
Thaï Grill
Maj, Amita June and I went out to dinner at the Thaï Grill on rue Laurier and St. Laurent this evening. We had some anniversaries to celebrate, so it seemed like a good day to go out for dinner at a new restaurant.
The Grill is at the portal between Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal hipster neighborhood and foodier-but-also-hipster Mile End. It's got huge, open windows on St. Laurent and we got to sit right off the sidewalk, perfect people-watching spot. The room is big and airy with pleasant wood details and lots of Thai statuary -- all in natural wood tones. It's a very nice room.
The food was great, too. We got crab claws in curry sauce, and a green curry, with papaya salad and fried squid as appetizers. It was all done very nicely. Most pleasant was the proprietor coming to our table with small, heart-shaped slices of melon d'eau (watermelon) for Amita June. Les enfants sont sacrés en Thaïland, he gave as explanation: that is, children are sacred in Thailand. Ah, if that were only the case everywhere.
It's hard to see summer slipping away in Montreal -- especially since we're off to Wikisym this weekend, and by the time we come back it will be a few days into September. Such a good place to be when the sun is warm, really.
tags: montreal thai grill restaurant