I've written a detailed description of how I blog on holiday at my travel blog. I deals with limitations of various Zaurus models and how, sometimes, a full PC is what you want.

Another day at CeBIT and more sore feet. Still, it's been a lot of fun helping out at the CSIRO stand. The best thing was talking to my colleagues about the interesting research that they are doing. These are some of the nicest (and smartest) people that you could meet and it is a real privilege to support them.

CSIRO's Smart Fridge using intelligent agent energy management technology won the CeBIT Early Innovator Award and was also featured in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Unfortunately, the good news was overshadowed by the announcement that the recent federal budget has lead to CSIRO deciding to cut 100 jobs and close some sites. One of those sites is the JM Rendel Laboratory in Rockhampton, which specialises in cattle research. Many years ago, back when I was in high school, I arranged a fun, but somewhat gruesome CSIRO Double Helix club visit to the Laboratory. We started off by taking blood from a cow. Another animal had a hole in its side so that the contents of one of its stomachs could be easily tested. A rubber plug blocked the hole. Finally we were given some organs to inspect, including the uterus of a cow complete with a fetus (the cow had died of natural causes prior to childbirth). A scientist used the uterus and the appropriate equipment to demonstrate to artificial insemination techniques.

Every year the CSIRO has a stand at CeBIT Australia. I was there to help, along with my colleagues at the CSIRO ICT Centre. This year we had some really funky technology, like the Colonoscopy Simulator. The goal of the simulator is to combine a photo-realistic visual simulation of a colon with a haptic (physical feedback) colonoscope simulator. At the moment you can thread the snake-like colonoscope through a box and watch the probe on the screen. Touch the colon wall and blood appears. The team is still working on modelling the physical properties so the haptic feedback is not realistic at this stage, but it's still exciting.

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) display featured a program that allows the users to walk or drive their way around a simulation of the proposed Square Kilometre Array site in outback Western Australia. You can download this program for yourself.

The other day I took a look at the much hyped Asus Eee 4G, recently released in Australia through Myer. I was interested in how well it compared to my Sharp Muramasa CV50F mini-notebook PC (more information). I bought the Muramasa second hand in Japan and it's now out of production. However, it's proved to be a fantastic tool for use on the train, when travelling or even just lying in bed. Would the Eee work just as well?

The Muramasa is longer than the Eee, but thinner and lighter. Like the Eee, the LCD screen has a bezel, but the Muramasa's exquisite screen displays 1280x768 pixels compared with 800x480 on the Eee. That's high definition in 7.2"! At least you don't need a proprietary cable to connect an external monitor to the Eee. The Eee's bezel holds the unit's stereo speakers which are surely better than the Muramasa's mono sound.

Processor wise I'm not certain which wins, but I suspect the Eee's 900MHz Celeron is better than the Muramasa's 1GHz Transmeta Efficeon chip. These are not heavy duty games machines though. The Eee comes with more RAM (512MB cf 256MB) by default. It also uses solid state storage while the Muramasa has a 20GB hard disk. This is probably one reason why the Eee should boot up a lot faster. The Muramasa includes a feature which allows you to hook it up to another computer as a hard disk when powered down.

Battery life should be comparable (3.5 hours), though it was possible to install an additional battery for the Muramasa.

The Zaurus is back! I received my Ambicom compact flash WiFi card today and it works a treat. Hopefully it lasts longer than the Netgear MA701 cards which had a nasty habit of cracking. I've gone through 3 so far. It's fortunate that they have a 3 year warranty, but I don't think that the Netgear make CF WiFi cards anymore.

The reason I really need the Zaurus online again is that my Sharp Muramasa ultraportable notebook is suffering random lockups right now. I've run virus and spyware scans without findding any major issues. Maybe it's a drive or dodgy ram. The problem is that the recovery screens and manuals are all in Japanese! I might also need an external CD drive as well.

I'll wait until I'm feeliqng well before I try anything. For now it's back to my quirky Zaurus.

The latest version of SharePoint has been a support nightmare for me. On paper Microsoft SharePoint looks great. Integration with Microsoft Office, document sharing, discussion forums, task manager, blogs and even wikis. I really like the ability to drag and drop files using the Explorer View for document libraries. The problem is that the interface is unwieldy and the behaviour, especially with permissions, seems often to be inconsistent. For the basic tasks that we are doing in SharePoint I would expect an intuitive interface familiar to Office users.

I have been on the phone constantly with users confused by SharePoint and I am no expert. SharePoint also requires Office 2003 or above and doesn't support Firefox for many administrative and file-related tasks. Unfortunately, I can't use Internet Explorer 7, which at least has tabs, because of organisational software that does not function with it.

Why does Microsoft have to make life so difficult? 

Broadband is big in the Australian news at the moment. Larry Smarr, from the California Institute of Communications garnered a lot of publicity as the latest international expert to criticise Australia's public internet infrastructure as too slow. Today the government responded to the opposition's broadband plans with one of their own. Also in today's Sydney Morning Herald was an article on the top tech capitals of the world which featured quotes from one of my managers and an ex-colleague.

The definition of reasonable broadband speeds seems to have changed to anywhere from ten megabits per second to one gigabit per second. At home I have a 512 kilobit per second download ADSL link. Do I find it too slow? Do I feel an urgent need to upgrade my internet speed? My answer is generally no. I download few files, most of my access is web browsing, emails, uploading scripts and remote desktop into work. It would be nice to try out Second Life with a faster connection, but my PC's are fairly slow.

There is a caveat. My work internet access is very fast. I'm on a research/academic network. If I need to download that Linux distribution ISO I can do that at work and copy it for installation on any other machine (and let's face it, in my case it genuinely is used for work). And I don't download large files often enough that it really makes a difference.