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.

The high-definition DVD format struggle is over. Toshiba's High-definition DVD (HD-DVD) was slugging it out in the market with Sony's BLU-RAY disk format. BLU-RAY has won, and no one except for the creators of HD-DVD is really sorry. I have an HD-DVD player stuck upstairs in a closet (inherited from the previous owner when we moved into our new house) and even I don't care. I never bought any HD-DVD's you see.

December 20th 2007. Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.

It hasn't been a good month for my code. Samba, the project I'm responsible for, has had to announce several security flaws. Unfortunately some of them were in code I wrote. I always do a large amount of soul-searching whenever that happens. There's nothing worse than finding out something you were responsible for is the cause of many thousands of people having to waste their time rolling out patches. It always makes me wonder if the time has come to give up this programming lark and end my days peacefully in management, messing up other peoples code instead of creating my own.

Innovation is a weasel word. It used to earn an honest living, but now it's been hijacked by marketing people for dishonest purposes. It's now in the same category as "rich". Does anyone now hear the words "rich user experience" or "rich client" without thinking of a bloated, Windows-only client that doesn't use open or standard protocols ?

In his last column, The Definition of Sanity, Jeremy noted that Cuba voted "yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, "even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format." As if by way of an apology, Fidel Castro has responded by quoting one of Jeremy's columns in his own column, which appeared 5 days later, in Juventu Rebelde, the Newspaper of Cuban Youth.