As described in this article: Open Enterprise: Rebooting HTML for the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of what we now know as the Web, is promoting the next phase of web development, called the Semantic Web.

Tim has made some interesting comments on the development of the web, including the failure of people to adopt XML in a logical way that could affect everybody. HTML and many of the functions in modern browsers have caused problems over the years, leading the confusing mix of standards and 'Built for Netscape' type logos at the bottom of the page.

Christmas is on the way - someone today mentioned to me how many weeks it was, but I really didn't want to hear. This year will be another console war as the new kids on the block, the WII and the Sony PS3, fight it out with the well established XBox 360.

Up to now I've been avoiding upgrading my XBox because the only game I've wanted to play is Halo 3 - the follow up to two of my all time favourite games, Halo and Halo 2. Halo 3 however is more than a year away.

Finding a potential replacement has been difficult. Many of the games that appeared on the XBox 360 in the months after it's release have hardly taxed the new environment and power that is available. Until recently, at least, when I heard about Gears of War. The game centers around the emergence of an alien race of insect like creatures that take over the planet.

Yesterday I purchased an upgrade to Acrobat 8. Acrobat has been one of my staple applications since the first version when I used it to aid the proofing process at an ad agency. By pure accident, I picked up the upgrade after it had been made a Universal application, and thus running at full-speed on the new Intel Macs.

It's also the first time I've purchased a large commercial software product and downloaded the software the live, rather than buying it on CD. I've downloaded plenty of software before, from utilities through to full-blown applications, but never what would be considered a 'box-only' product like Adobe Acrobat before.

My iMac 24" has just arrived. I ordered it weeks ago, and it seems to have taken an age to be built, shipped, and arrive.

I'm happy to say it's perfect. It's got a tremendous amount of WOW factor. Surprisingly for a display this large, there are no dead pixels. Unless you've seen one in the flesh, it's difficult to describe how big it feels, but it makes the 17" iMac I was given by Apple (for being an Apple Transition Kit developer) positively tiny. The sheer size of the screen is impressive, and it's bright and clear throughout.

Also arrived at the same time is the new White MacBook, and all I can say about that is 'gosh this is cute'. I'm typing on it right now, and I can see that it will already be a popular little addition to the toolkit. Best of all, the little screen is incredibly bright (I'm currently using it in a well lit room with the brightness on the lowest setting before the backlight goes off) and, considering the reduction in size and real estate, surprisingly useful.

Before the end of this week, my second laptop will arrive.

Why do I need two? Because my main laptop spends the bulk of its time on my desktop, wired up to an ergonomic keyboard and a second monitor. When you work on the machine for 10 hours a day, you want to be able to get the best out of it, and have the best ergonomics for doing so. With all that in mind, you might be wondering why I have a laptop, not a desktop. Simple, when I'm travelling for work, I need the full blown laptop for work. In those cases, I'm more than happy to use the laptop keyboard (which is one of the best in my experience) and the smaller screen.

As you all know, I've been testing Sun's T1000 for the last few months. The process is a long one, not helped by holidays and real work which gets in the way.

The headline rates are interesting, but I'm hoping to be able to squeeze a little more of the box if I can. To test, I installed the Cool Tools stack (which includes optimized MySQL, Apache and PHP configurations), upped the configuration to support many thousands of concurrent connections, and then used a variety of tools and values to test the capabilities of the box, from small to large numbers of concurrent requests.

Last week my ISP gave me the offer to upgrade for free to their new 8Mbps ADSL service. I still have to pay more (about twice what I was paying for my 512Kbps service), but the actual upgrade (or regrade) was free.

I chose a bad week though - the upgrade coincided with a major failure at my ISP, then at BT, not to mention the additional time it took to sort out the occasional reboot of the ADSL router to see how the upgrade and retraining were going. The result was more down time than I expected, although to be fair that was because failures, not the ADSL regrade process.

Now I'm back, and things are a lot faster. Unfortunately, I'm a long way from the exchange, and with the 512Kbps service I was a couple of hundred meters over the limit, but just able to get the service. With the 8Mbps service I'm too far away to get the full 8Mbps, but the speed has increased almost five-fold to just under 2.5Mbps, and it's amazing how significant a difference it makes to everything from downloading movie trailers through to general browsing.

There's a very good commentary on Sun's Project Blackbox (see I'll take one datacenter, to go) and Sun's approach to virtualization by Stephen Swoyer (Sun’s Virtualization Push). Stephen makes good points, and ones I can only agree with.

Project Blackbox is a datacenter in a ready to run format, and could be a quick and easy way to setup a 'blackbox' (literally) of computing resource. Merge that fundamental idea with the idea of virtualization, where you can create your own discrete machines (either using Solaris Containers or the forthcoming Solaris on Xen technology). Merge the two with some light desktop devices, such as the Sun Ray or other X terminals, and you could have a complete company computing resource in a box.

There's a very good commentary on Sun's Project Blackbox (see I'll take one datacenter, to go) and Sun's approach to virtualization by Stephen Swoyer (Sun’s Virtualization Push). Stephen makes good points, and ones I can only agree with.

Project Blackbox is a datacenter in a ready to run format, and could be a quick and easy way to setup a 'blackbox' (literally) of computing resource. Merge that fundamental idea with the idea of virtualization, where you can create your own discrete machines (either using Solaris Containers or the forthcoming Solaris on Xen technology). Merge the two with some light desktop devices, such as the Sun Ray or other X terminals, and you could have a complete company computing resource in a box.

I've literally just watched an advert from PC World, a massive computer selling chain here in the UK.

They were advertising a Packard Bell PC packed with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor and made two claims which just don't ride. What concerns me here is that they are trying to convince the general public of facts which are not only not untrue (or at least misleading).

The first claim was that 'Intels latest processor lets you run two applications at the same time'. This is not exactly untrue, but I don't think the statement applies in the way they expect. Computers have been running multiple applications for years, even since the lowly days of the 8086.