I'd quite like to buy a new laptop. The one I have, an Advent 7001, has been quite trusty for the last five or six years, but it's time to upgrade.

One thing that it probably clear to anyone who's read much of this blog is that I'll be running GNU/Linux on the thing, rather than Microsoft Windows. It's quite sensible then, it would seem, to buy a machine without Windows pre-loaded on it. You wouldn't think that it'd be too difficult to do that, would you? Well I didn't...

I'd quite like to get what they call an "ultra mobile notebook" I think. I've become quite envious over recent years, watching people with tiny, stylish little flip-ups sit sipping coffee, checking their email. I quite fancy a piece of that pie. It was this that led me to take a shine to the Samsung Q35, complete with magnetic red lid. Yum.

How naive I was though, to think that one could simply order one without Windows included. That piece of software sells for as much as £260 at PC World. For something I'm not going to use, even with any trade discount they happen to get, this is an expense that I don't want to incur.

So, I emailed Samsung directly yesterday, enquiring about where I might be able to purchase one of their machines without Windows included in the bundle. I was told that "all the units without exception are delivered with Microsoft Windows". Wow, that kind of language makes me think that there's some special deal happening here. I wonder if Microsoft intentionally lock vendors in to exclusive deals in order to prevent the kind of think that happened at Newham Council a couple of years ago.

Samsung's email did also helpfully point out that "it may be possible to make an independent deal with one of [our resellers] but this would be at your own discretion". So, I suppose that this is my next tactic. I think I'll question a few shops.

There are, in fact, a few companies which do supply laptops with Linux pre-installed and no Microsoft software in sight. In the US, System 76 seem to enjoy quite a high profile, though their machines hardly compare to the Samsung one on either design or price. The Linux Emporium, a local company also sell some Windows-less laptops with Linux pre-loaded, but the choice is very limited. I've also emailed them asking for advice on the Samsung machine.

The website linuxcounter.org (which incidentially is a rather weird idea in my opinion) estimates that there are 29 million machines running Linux worldwide. Of course, the majority of these will probably be desktops and servers, which due to their generic nature can be easily bought without Windows, but there's no denying that a large number of people must pay Microsoft for the right to buy a laptop, then just blank the thing. With anti-competitive lock-in deals such as it appears exist at Samsung, Microsoft certainly don't need to worry about revenue. It really is a Microsoft tax on portable computers. Is that kind of anti-competitive tactic even legal?

I have spent the last week and a bit talking to people at the School of Computer Science here at Birmingham University about doing a PhD. This week it's been formally agreed!

I'm going to be working with Professor Xin Yao, with the title Autonomic Solutions for Virtualised ICT Systems. I'm going to be funded through an EPSRC CASE studentship, in part funded by BT Labs for three and a half years. The full description of the project is as follows:

Future virtualised ICT resources (e.g. pervasive Grid systems) will be subject to dynamically changing customer demand, and will have to be highly autonomic (self-managing, self-healing, self-organising) in order to respond to this and provide appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This project will focus on the key task of developing autonomic agents for supporting SLAs in a changing ICT environment. Evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary games will be used as models of interactions between agents where agents engage in markets inspired by trading resources in real-world scenarios (such as bandwidth, quality of service, etc.) Markets will be used as a means of controlling the interaction between agents in order to support the SLA. A likely evolutionary game model would be the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Evolutionary computation may be used to learn effective strategies in this model. This will be used as a basis for comparison to previous research. Issues such as robustness of the learned solutions to uncertain environments will be studied. The research is expected to provide better indications of how to engineer and distribute populations of software agents so as to make them effectively autonomic in a dynamic service-based ICT environment.

Sound like fun? I think so! I start next month.

A few of my friends have recently introduced me to a website called Last.FM. The idea is quite simple, though I suspect that the mechanics behind it are quite complex. The basic idea is that as you listen to music, your computer uploads the title of the tracks you're listening to to the website and slowly it gets to build up a profile of the kind of music you like. The site then compares you to other users and starts recommending music to you. I have yet to build up enough information to get anything other than Queen, U2 and the Rolling Stones recommended, though I suspect most new users will get them.

It also allows me to make the latest addition to this website, the little "Recently listening to" box on the left hand side. It doesn't always update too quickly, but gives anyone who's interested a bit of a sneak peak into what my music tastes are. Actually, it tells you what I listen to while I'm working. I tend to have quite different tastes in the car, for example.

I can be found on Last.FM as prlewis.

Well, as this photo shows, after months of work I am finally almost finished in doing up my house in Leicester ready to sell. I had a couple of valuers round yesterday who seemed fairly impressed with the state the place is now in, which is some relief.

To be honest, I'll be quite glad to be shot of the day-trips from Birmingham to Leicester which have become quite a regular part of my life over the last few months. And thanks to road-works at both Spaghetti Junction on the M6 and at the Leicester south motorway junction, my average journey time has been around two hours, rather than the 55 minutes or so which I'd been used to.

The traffic jams on the Leicester ring road - something unavoidable in the current state of affairs - have been the worst. Yesterday it took me nearly an hour to get a couple of miles. There are consolations though: I quite enjoy people watching in traffic jams, and James Morrison's debut album is quite fantastic and also fairly soothing on my otherwise frustrated mood.

So now... the house goes on the market. And we watch and wait.

Fantastic news! Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame and also known for jumping on stage to interrupt Michael Jackson's impersonation of Jesus at the Brit awards in the late ninetees - Jarvis Cocker is releasing a new album. Anyone who has seen my scrobblings on last.fm (or who knows me) will know that I'm a massive fan of Pulp. So... after several years away from the public eye, Jarvis is releasing a new album.

Keen to see when I'd be able to pick up a copy of his latest work, which includes the single "Cunts are still running the world" (already available for download, though guaranteed to stay off the radio without large holes in the song) I surfed on over to Amazon. Helpfully, the site did tell me that it would be released on the 13th November and I can even pre-order it like in proper record shops. However, the bizarrest thing about Amazon's page for the album (see here) is that their oh so well reputed recommendation engine felt the need to inform me that "customers interested in this title may also be interested in Ramada Jarvis Hotels"! This truly is the most bizarre effect of "helpful" semantic web stuff I've come across so far.

I wonder how far this kind of link can be stretched. Might people interested in James Morrison's new album "Undiscovered" may also wish to purchase expeditions to the South Pole? Or perhaps fans of Basement Jaxx might be interested in loft extensions as an alternative? The mind boggles. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for more of these little nuggets of impromptu humour.