I am downright embarrassed by the quality of my code. It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain. Do you feel the same way? If so, then what is holding you back from realizing your full potential? More importantly, what if anything are you planning to do about it?

Sadly the one constant in my career is that I am assigned to projects that drift, seemingly aimlessly, from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding. Have any developers here successfully lobbied their company to stop or cut back on 'cowboy coding' and adopt best practices?

Several months ago a workgroup of the W3C decided to include Ogg/Theora+Vorbis as the recommended baseline video codec standard for HTML5, against Apple's aggressive protest. Now, Nokia seems to be seeking a reversal of that decision: they have released a position paper calling Ogg 'proprietary' and citing the importance of DRM support. Nokia has historically responded to questions about Ogg on their internet tablets with strange and inconsistent answers, along with hand waving about their legal department. This latest step is enough to really make you wonder what they are really up to.

The idea of using nanorobots to deliver drugs and fight diseases such as cancers is not new.

Now, an international team of researchers has designed a software and hardware platform of a nanorobot to be used in medical applications. The researchers think their nanorobots could become available around 2015. 'The proposed platform should enable patient pervasive monitoring, and details are given in prognosis with nanorobots application for intracranial treatments.

Bean-counters at Gartner have warned businesses that they should roll out Vista as soon as possible or be prepared for pain.

The outfit is, apparently, a little concerned that some businesses have written Vista off as a lemon and have decided to wait until Vole comes up with something better.

But Silver warned that there were no guarantees that the next version of Windows, code-named "Windows 7" will arrive on time and might end up being just as lemon flavoured.

Anyone trying to by-pass Vista will have the same woes, he warned.

This is the most extreme example I've seen yet of tech companies crippling data devices in order to please Hollywood: Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication'. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?

As befits a man who has spent years in DC, the MPAA's Dan Glickman has polished his share of folksy analogies to a shine.

His words yesterday revealed that movie execs are thinking about one thing in particular: the technology that can be used to halt film piracy, and that they expect ISPs to implement it.

The MPAA needs the support of those companies best in a position to implement filtering technology: ISPs.

ISPs that are concerned with being, well, ISPs aren't likely to see many benefits from installing some sort of industrial-strength packet-sniffing and filtering solution at the core of their network. It costs money, customers won't like the idea, and the potential for backlash remains high. Should such a system work, it could lower overall bandwidth usage, but whether that would make up for the cost and PR headaches of a filtering regime is unclear. It won't do much for liability issues, since ISPs are already protected under "safe harbor" provisions.

It looks like Warner and Sony are going to follow EMI and Universal and start issuing music in MP3 format without DRM.

The change of heart follows a public revolt of the Wal Mart against DRM.

Wal-Mart has said that it will stop supplying MP3s with DRM from its online store and other retailers are expected to follow.

On the positive side, EMI and Universal have been making a killing supplying DRM-free music and Warner and Sony have been missing out.

Billboard sources claim that Sony will carry out MP3 test even though in the past it said it was totally against the idea.

One of the regulars of the Scoobynet.com board paid £180+£30 for a Wii from eBay and when it didn't turn up he contacted the seller, Miss Hightee H. Butzlaff.

She told him that he could call the cops if he wanted too, but she didn't live in the UK so ner.

While many people would have thought that Hightee H. Butzlaff was a joke name, the buyer had managed to get some of her personal details including her phone number, and address.

The denizens of Scoobynet did as much searching as they could on the woman. They found pictures of her in her underwear, hobbies, religion.

Apparently, Hightee started to feel a bit less cocky and offered to remove the pictures if she refunded the money.

But it is starting to look like the horse has well and truly bolted and the boy racers cannot be stopped.

Two days ago an article on TechCrunch about IRSeeK revealed to the community that a service logs conversations of public IRC channels and put them into a public searchable database. What is especially shocking for the community is that the logging bots are very hard to identify. They have human-like nicks, connect via anonymous Tor nodes and authenticate as mIRC clients. IRSeeK never asked for permission and violates the privacy terms of networks and users.

As a result, Freenode, the largest FOSS IRC network in existence, immediately banned all tor connections while the community gathered and set up a public wiki page to share knowledge and news about IRSeeK. The demands are clear: remove all existing logs and stop covert operations in our channels and networks.

If you try to play an AACS-protected disc on an unapproved TV, the player is required to reduce the quality of the video, or refuse to play the video altogether. As a consequence, there are a lot of customers out there who would like to play their legally-purchased movies on their legally-purchased TVs, but whose legally-purchased HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players refuse to cooperate.

Ed Felten notes that the limited functionality of the official players has created a market for software that will allow them to play their movies on "unapproved" hardware. And thanks to the DMCA, such players cannot be legally developed in the United States. So not surprisingly, overseas firms are taking up the slack.

As Hollywood develops ever-more-elaborate and restrictive copy protection schemes, those copy-protection schemes come to inconvenience more and more customers. That, in turn, creates a larger market for circumvention software, prompting software companies to invest more in developing more powerful and user-friendly tools for removing copy protection.