Just taken delivery of my new machine: a Sony TX2XP. It's quite cute. The keyboard takes a little bit of getting used to, as it's fairly small, but it's probably worth the hassle for the overall size and weight of the machine.

In general, it seems a significant enhancement of the previous machine I had. The mouse buttons are nicer than the old one. The power management drivers are cleverer (the DVD still powers off when in low power mode, but switches on again if you want it...although it won't switch off again if you don't). The only real fly in the ointment are the graphic drivers which still don't work properly: they just cannot cope with multiple set ups. The previous version tried to guess what you wanted, but often got it wrong (setting up a project as an extended desktop for instance). This system has some right click context menus, and includes an option to set up schemes, so you can pick what you want. Sadly, it's totally broken. It seems to randomly forget schemes (although they come back later) and, even when it remembers them, it doesn't get them right, leaving the resolution unchanged. Pity, because it's a good idea.

Hopefully, this one will last a little longer than my last one.

Just tried using a new system for postgraduate admissions at Newcastle. It's built on top of the Universities SAP system, which means that it probably cost lots of cash and barely works. It's taken me about a week to login. Amasingly the system seems to consist of scanning in documents and displaying them as a tiff image, surrounded by enough Javascript to ensure that it will only display with a single viewer.

I went to a talk once by Ted Nelson, during which he slagged of Acrobat. His comments were over the top, but he has a point. Transferring a printed document to screen decreases it's usability. It's the 21st Century people! We shouldn't still be doing this.