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.

I went out to dinner with an old programming friend the other night, and as all old programmers do, over our Chillis burgers we started swapping war stories about the systems and projects we'd worked on. Neither of us had a formal computer science education, and as we ended up comparing great computer related books we'd both read, it started me wondering, “How did we learn this stuff ?”

I've been spending far too much time reading a blog recently. Normally I dislike reading blogs, or as my friend from the IT News site "the Register" Andrew Orlowski calls them; "Wikki W**kers". They are usually rather vacuous and the pressure to write something, anything, to attract attention means there is very little worth reading. Note to potentially irate readers who level the same accusation at me, this is a column, not a blog (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). Mainly because I don't write often enough to qualify as a blogger.

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
--Isaac Newton.

It isn't really a surprise that I ended up in the computing field. I started in Astronomy. As a small child I used to lie outside on my back on top of the crisp crust of snow on my parent's lawn in Sheffield in the UK. Dressed in a fluffy parka, wellington boots, gloves, and a pair of binoculars; I never noticed the cold back in 'them days'. I was too busy looking out at the universe, trying to discover something new.

The OOXML document format war is over, and the good guys lost. The world will be a worse place because of it, for a long time to come. After being a lobbyist for many months, it was a great relief to get back to being a Samba coder. At least that's something I feel I have some competence in. The jury is still out on my lobbying career.