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.

If you need to set up a compact, secure, easily configurable Web server in as short a time, then we recommend installing Abyss Web Server. The software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD operating systems. Depending on your needs, you may choose one of the two available editions. The free personal edition (X1) is a fully usable web server with no limitations. The professional edition (X2) includes an immediate access at no additional cost to new minor and major versions for a small amount of money. Abyss isn't open source software, but it is an interesting product and can provide a full web server with no cost, on older hardware, and with high-performance results.

Laptops are easily lost or stolen and in order to protect your emails, web passwords, encryption keys, etc., you should really think about encrypting (at least) your home directory.

I first met Bill Gates at the age of twenty. He stood in the yard of his Washington lakefront home, Diet Coke in hand, a tastefully small ketchup stain on his shirt, which no one had the courage to point out, and answered our questions, in-turn, like a savant.

"Software licenses and patents aren't the only ways proprietary software vendors can restrict the freedoms of computer users. A key component of our overall campaign for software freedom is making sure that the hardware we buy is not an obstacle to the exercise of our freedoms.

When I heard U.S. president-elect Barack Obama make his "lipstick on a pig" remark while running as a candidate back in September, it got me thinking about language, and how it can be used to deceive as easily as to explain.

"Berners-Lee is a strong advocate for Net Neutrality and here he speaks very eloquently about the net freedoms we currently enjoy and must work to preserve and never take for granted..."

"Quite a fair amount of time has flown since my decision to implement an emacs mode for the proposed machine-readable format for debian/copyright files. A have to admit that I had left that sleeping for quite a long while. But I took my courage, and rewrote nearly everything I had done so far. I'm quite happy with the results, to be truthful. The debian-mr-copyright-mode features: ..."

If IDC says Windows Server is down 29%, then it is a lot worse in reality and in practice