We had a fantastic trip back from Toronto yesterday to Montreal. After our difficult drive down, we knew we were going to be taking the slow route home -- lots of stops and starts keeping the baby happy. Our friend Lee gave us some tips for driving back along Lake Ontario and the St. Laurent Seaway, which turned out to be a great idea. We spent several hours along the Loyalist Parkway in Prince Edward County, and it turned out to be great.
Prince Edward County was settled by Loyalists escaping the American Revolution in the late 18th century. Bounded on one side by Lake Ontario and on the other by the Bay of Quinte, the area is a near-island, barely attached to the mainland by a narrow neck of land at Trenton. Even after 200 years, the area has a real distinct feel and flavor compared ot other parts of Ontario; the architecture is distinct and the farmland has a different look.
We stopped in several places to admire the view, then Picton for lunch. We ended up eating at a roadside pub several kilometers outside of Picton in the small township of Waupoos. The Duke of Marysburgh Pub had great food -- we ate salad, smoke salmon, and hummus -- and a really great local cider. We tripped around the peninsula out to Long Point, then back to the Glenora Ferry to get into Kingston around sunset.
The drive home was relatively uneventful after that -- we stopped in Cornwall (Ontario) for a late dinner, then home by midnight. We're thinking that the long-distance roadtrips that worked so well when Amita was an infant are becoming less practical as she moves into pre-toddlerhood. We're going to have to consider other travel options.
One nice thing is that Montreal is well-served by trains to the surrounding region. I haven't done a lot of train travel in North America, so I'm looking forward to the opportunity.
ontario travel prince edward county driving amitajune
Creative Commons 3.0 licenses
I'm excited to see that Mia Garlick of Creative Commons has announced the roadmap for Getting to version 3.0 of the CC licenses. We'll be seeing some public drafts of the license soon, and hopefully the new version will be compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines such that works under the licenses will be acceptable to be included in Debian.
I've been working pretty hard for this for more than a year now -- it's been a real sticking point, I believe, for both Debian and for Creative Commons. The Debian stamp of disapproval puts a bad aura around any project, and I think that CC has suffered some unfair criticism based on the rejection of the 1.0 and 2.x licenses. I think people have extended the minor problems with the CC license to be a well-rounded criticism of CC as a whole. I think that's a sign of lazy reasoning, but there's not much to be done about it.
I also think that not having a good document-oriented DFSG-compatible license has been difficult for Debian. Having some alternatives to the GFDL to recommend for upstream documentation developers would make things a lot easier. Sadly, the options just aren't out there. I think that the CC Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses could be a good alternative for people to consider.
So, I'm excited to see this process moving forward. Mia and Lawrence Lessig have been persistent in courting Debian's involvement, and I'm glad that their work is bearing fruit. The whole thing isn't completed yet, but I think we can get there soon.
cc debian cc3.0 licenses creativecommons
Distinguishing CC Licences
In response to some ideas that have been kicked around on the cc-licenses list, I've written an essay about CC Licence Distinctions.
XML exports on Wikitravel
I'm pretty excited that we're going to have XML versions of Wikitravel content available for download by request. It's been a big feature request from Wikitravel users for a long time, and I'm glad that we're going to be going out on this limb.
wikitravel mediawiki xml features wiki
Deprecated
The following items are now deprecated.
- Ruby on Rails
- "awesome"
- Snakes on a Plane
ruby awesome snakes on a plane deprecated
Amazon Web services
Amazon Web Services are so crazy they just might work. I'm tempted by the simple storage service, for example. And what's up with that queues thing? And why are Amazon URLs so bad?