Here's a wonderful explanation of why Microsoft's "open" OpenXML "standard" is a wolf in sheep's clothing: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html In short, the specification is littered with little tidbits which say that to properly display a file you must understand details of how 12 year old software (Word 95) worked, or reverse engineer it.... And that, folks, is why I don't use Microsoft software and stopped buying their junk several years ago. Update: Just to better explain why this is a problem, there is no guarantee that Microsoft is using its own specifications in its own software, namely Office 2007.

You can tell the world is a-buzz about something when you start receiving spam about it less than 24 hours after its unveiling. That's right, at 4am this morning I received an email telling me that my iPhone was ready to ship. While I have to 100% agree that I'd utterly love one, a) they're not going to ship until June, and b) nobody's going to send me an email out of the blue saying that they're shipping me one - I just ain't that lucky. That said, if anyone did want to send me one, how about one for my wife too? ;-)

At work someone needed to be able to post Powerpoint files online that:

Today saw the final release of the third major production-ready release of Ruby on Rails, everyone's favorite web development suite.

There's another great Rails book available that is up-to-date with the new v1.2 release, Rails Cookbook from O'Reilly. I'm hoping to get it soon and will let you know what I think.