It's been over a year since I wrote about my conversion to a Linux based digital media environment, and since it's the holiday season (or just after) I thought it was time to update the story, and describe some new Linux based devices I'm using that others might find useful.

Jeremy was asked to take part in the Free Software Foundation's video campaign entitled "I use Free Software, and I support Free Software", which launches on Monday, and decided to do something targeted at Windows users, and salesman-like :-).

Ellen Ko spent half a day coaching him through "about 20 bloody takes, most of which were disastrous and ended up with me screaming into the camera after screwing it up one way or another."

Finally they got "a perfect take", but Jeremy realised he'd got an important fact wrong, and had to start over again the next day.

There has been a lot of press recently about the Open Source "Mono" project, arguing about whether it is safe to use by the Free Software community, and even comparing it to the project I work on, Samba. Given all this controversy I thought I might as well write down my own thoughts on the matter, and even try and change a few minds into the bargain.

I don't often write about my day to day work, but sometimes I run across a problem that is so intransigent that it was a triumph when I finally fixed it. If you take an engineering job in the software industry, this is the kind of thing you might end up working on. If you find this column fun and interesting, then you might be a good candidate for a network engineer. Even if you don't I hope you'll appreciate the insane level of detail network engineers have to know on your behalf, to make something as simple as “saving a file” work seamlessly across operating systems.

I gave up on the mainstream media in 2002-2003, in the run up to the Iraq war. Every single channel in the USA was selling the prospect of war like a product, a new soap powder. I tried to find coverage of the over one million person protest march in London that I'd heard about via email, and it was barely mentioned. The last straw came when I got so angry I nearly threw a chair through my brand new plasma TV, which would have been an expensive outburst, but that's what you get for watching Fox News for longer than it takes to flip through the channels on the remote.

Microsoft recently released service pack two (SP2) for their flagship office product, Office 2007. As I'm not a user of Microsoft products normally I wouldn't have noticed, but Office 2007 SP2 had an important new feature for users of Open Source office productivity software that made me pay attention.

Ubuntu is Debian unstable with some of the rough edges smoothed over, some security features deprecated and some enhanced, the implementation of proprietary blobs made easier, a bit of polish, a different theme, and a lot less packages. Ubuntu is a clean and polished experience for those new to GNU/Linux, (although the 'release often release early' philosophy it has taken from other free software projects has created occasional stability issues).

Eduardo Reck Miranda (born 1963) is a Brazilian composer of chamber and electro-acoustic music. His interests in science and music are evenly balanced.

He studied in Brazil, England, Scotland and France and is currently Professor in Computer Music and Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) at the University of Plymouth, Devon, England. His music has been played in many countries, and his research in the field of human-machine interfaces is known globally.

One of the things about getting older is that you learn to ignore things until you have to do something about them. It's a learned efficiency I suppose, rationing your increasingly precious time out to the unceasing demands upon it. I finally realized I have to do some serious thinking about cloud computing.

"People have always made music. Once human beings had computers available, software became just like music. People create software the same way they create music. They really do. You don't do it because you get paid for it. You do it because it's fun. Samba is the equivalent of a garage band that made it big."