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.

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.

I didn't want to write this column. I live as Windows-free an existence as most people can these days. Of course I have to run Windows as part of my job, in order to make sure that Samba, the software I write, will interoperate correctly with all the multiple Windows versions out there. I also have to install some Windows applications using the Open Source Wine project, which emulates Windows on Linux well enough that some binary Windows applications will install and run straight off the DvD.

Recently I was able to visit the Ontario Linux Fest. I love shows like Ontario, as they're run by amateurs, not by professional show companies. Don't get me wrong, the professional shows have their place too, but I don't tend to listen to the other speakers at those shows as I've heard most of them before. I'm sure they've all heard my talks as well, so instead we tend to hang out in the speaker rooms trying to get the wireless network to work, and swapping airline travel horror stories.

Last weekend I finished a home project I've been slowly working on for several months. I finally finished converting all the CDs in my collection from physical media to digital files. It turns out that every CD I ever bought, which now comes to somewhere around four hundred, fits within 160 gigabytes of storage. It's hard to buy a new disk that small these days, that's how much storage capacity has increased.