We had a great trip out to Park de la Yamaska and Mount Orford this weekend. Sure, it rained a couple of hours each night, so we had some wet mornings, but if you have a good tent and some half-decent rain clothes it's really not that big a deal.
Park de la Yamaska is one of the closest Quebec parks to Montreal, and it borders a reservoir, so we thought it would be kind of boring. Not at all -- nice big beach, huge pine forests, lots of space for camping and a lot of trails. It was a contrast to the Fraser sector of Mount Orford that we slept at last night -- much smaller, denser deciduous forest, and the lake's beach, although really nice, was a long walk from our camp.
Amita June, it turns out, is one great camper. She loves the trees and the flowers and going in the lakes. She's been really good about sleeping on the big air mattress we have, and playing in her playpen, and riding in the car. Probably going to the beach 2-3 times a day is sufficiently tiring that she doesn't have time to fuss, but I have to admit that eating pasta with her next to a campfire last night really impressed me. She's a real outdoors girl.
We woke up to rain this morning, so we packed the car in a hurry and ran off to Magog for breakfast instead of cooking for ourselves. As soon as we got in cell-phone range, I started getting alerts about Wikitravel -- messages from admins and notifications from the servers. Turns out our /var/ device got too full and the monitoring tool didn't detect it, so no PHP sessions were getting created.
Maj and Amita June were really tolerant of my Treo-hacking over breakfast at Restaurant Jack-o -- the admins at IB and I were able to identify and correct the problem pretty quickly once we realized what was going on. It kind of put me off ever going camping again, though... I think our servers have put some sort of GPS tracking device on my person, and go kablooie as soon as they see I'm out of cell range.
tags: camping yamaska mount orford lake fraser quebec eastern townships magog restaurant jack-o maj amitajune wikitravel
OpenID extension released
So, I got around to checking in the OpenID extension for MediaWiki that I've been working on. It's in the extensions section of the MW Subversion repository; the code's visible here for Web-viewing pleasure.
tags: openid mediawiki extension
Wikimania is a-comin'
Maj, Amita June and I are heading down to Cambridge (Massachusetts) next week for Wikimania 2006. Wikimania is the world-wide Wikimedia conference, but it's also become a real magnet for ideas and projects that are related, like other wiki projects, open content, and community collaboration. As a member of the MediaWiki dev team, I'd probably go anyways, but I think it's a good opportunity to meet people and talk about wikis and travel, too.
I'll be doing a lot of hacking at the Hacking Days pre-event, which I think will be pretty fun. From what I hear, there are a lot of cool features coming down the pike for MW over the next few months, and people really want to unveil them at Hacking Days. I'll have the OpenID extension under my arm, but I'll be curious to see what else is coming up.
I'll be giving a talk about Wiki and open content travel guides: past, present, future, in a session with Jack Herrick of WikiHow. Jack's a great guy and WikiHow is an exceptional project -- I think it should be a lot of fun.
Mostly I hope we get our Cambridge travel guide in shape for the conference. I think it'll be a great resource for wiki people going to the event.