Aside from general family news, I expect most of anything I post will likely involve one or more of the following topics:

Digital TV systems and regulations (given that I write software for these)

Web site design (given that I do this in my spare time)

Digital rights management (given that there are some really daft ideas going around these days that, unfortunately, may even end up as laws).

Linux (given that I have a new Linux PC and am enjoying learning something brand new even though the problems are very frustrating).

Photography (given that I am an Adobe Photoshop junkie – if only digital had hit the mainstream 3 years earlier, I could have saved $1000s on the darkroom I built into the house!).

UK/US stuff (given that I am a Scot living in Texas).

I’ll try to post something every day. Let’s see how I get on.

My web time is pretty limited these days with 2 small children in the house and a busy day job. From the spare time I do have, take out the time I need to spend updating my “real” clients’ sites (you can find my web portfolio here and there is pretty much no time left to update any of my own sites. Why start a new one, then, you are probably asking?

The advantage of the blog over my other sites is that I can update is really quickly. No need to fire up GoLive, muck with FTP, etc. Hopefully, this will allow me to keep the information fresh (unlike my personal homepage which is probably the most out of date site I am responsible for).

One other plus to me is that it gives me a public platform to vent frustrations, share opinions and solicit feedback (hopefully). For this, though, I need to persuade a few people outside this house to actually read it….

I took a leaf out of my old friend Simon Phipps’ (aka WebMink – see his blog here ) book. “Dave’s Blog” sounds a bit dull but is exceedingly common. Google lists 2940 hits on “Dave’s Blog”. “FOURCC’s blog”, on the other hand, seems to be unique (at least as far as Google is concerned) so I’m less likely to get confused with other people.

But why FOURCC? A FOURCC, or Four Character Code, is a value used to identify the format of video in an AVI file (or the format of pixels in a Direct Draw surface, or various other things). Since I am the owner of www.fourcc.org, the (almost) definitive list of FOURCC definitions, FOURCC seemed as good a name as any.