I swallowed the NDR spec over Christmas, and I have some ideas on how Samba's implementation can be both faster and simpler. Once you realize what they're trying to acheive, it all starts to make sense. (I'm sure lkcl is going to deservedly say "I told you so." :-) So I got funny looks in the restaurant this evening by excitedly explaining it to Tim.
I was going to ride my motorbike up to Sydney for New Year's, but there are big bushfires near the highway so it didn't seem wise. Instead we went into cosmopolitan Canberra (!) and went on the old merry-go-round. With no fireworks (for fire safety reasons) midnight was a bit anticlimactic: people didn't know when they were supposed to go crazy.
Bill Bryson says Canberra is a hole, and in a way he's correct. It's certainly much like a town rather than a city. But as J.R.R. Tolkein points out, some holes can be nice.
Reading: "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" (good), "The Great Arc" (good light history, slightly amateur style), Pratchett's "The Truth" (undemanding, funny), Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" (good).
"The Lexus and the Olive Tree" is interesting, but I think it suffers from this "journalistic" style of heavily using short vivid anecdotes. Anecdotes are fine, and I'm all in favour of vivid writing, but they don't actually make a very strong argument -- they tend to make me think "right, but you could just be making that up, or at the very least it could be unrepresentative." It seems to show a low opinion of your audience to assume they can't concentrate unless all the content is personalized into a Dick-and-Jane story.
That slight annoyance aside it's highly worth reading. (A good counterbalance to No Logo.) "Open source" is not in the index; I'm not sure if he mentions it. I would be interested to hear his opinion. On the whole I would expect him to be sympathetic to the idea of chaordic distributed semi-commercial development. Microsoft's model is very close to the planned economies he rails against.
If you haven't seen JoelOnSoftware yet you might like to look.