It's Sunday, and I should be working, so it's time for a blog update! It's all very technical this...

It's Sunday, and I should be working, so it's time for a blog update! It's all very technical this week...
  • The Rio Riot is now the MP3 player you really want, with 20GB of MP3s in a very sexy container.
  • My assignment this week involves using the Ediburgh Concurrency Workbench. In common with the languages used for many of my assignments, CWB is evil.
  • A recent e-mail spurred me finally to look up the difference between a dolphin and a porpoise. Hint: dolphins are the cute ones, and people who like porpoises think "Flipper" was a dumb movie.
  • I was much amused to discover that US companies were hired by China to refit the presidential jet for $10 million, and the companies threw in hundreds of listening devices free of charge. I love stories about spying, it's so 1980s.
  • The Pogo personal organizer now available from Carphone Warehouse looks very sexy, but calls cost 10p a minute minimum, and there's an £8 monthly line rental. However, as the ZDnet review pointed out, the technology behind it is very sexy, if mainly proprietary: the web access gateway takes ordinary HTML pages and translates the fonts, modifies the colours, compresses the data, and actually shrinks the whole page down so it looks normal on the pretty tiny screen, which is quite a cool concept.
  • Finally, black holes may not exist after all. Instead, we have funky-sounding gravastars, which look a lot like black holes but, importantly, don't violate any of the rules of physics and don't require the existence of a "singularity" -- a concept which always gave me trouble, to be honest. Apparently Einstein always thought black holes were a silly concept, which in my book is a good reason to be sceptical.
  • Second finally, I also won my first eBay auction! An original-edition Handspring Visor for a bargainous £67, mainly because it's black instead of sexy translucent blue :-/ It should arrive this week.
  • Finally finally, be warned: TREES KILL!