he 2005 Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) show ended in Las Vegas on January 9, giving birth to 1,731 Press releases on new products and services. After you have waded through those at in the search for the newest gadgets to get, then turn your attention to the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, which ends on January 14.

Apple?s chief executive officer Steve Jobs delivered his keynote address on Tuesday evening and was due to announce a flash memory-based iPod, a new office software package called iWork and an iMac with a drop-dead price tag of $500.

To see a video cast of his speech go to or . The Macworld Expo site was down yesterday (probably due to an overload of visitors).

The CEA show highlighted media servers, portable entertainment, hybrid white goods, gaming gadgets and telematics as the five technologies to watch in 2005.

In its annual Technology Watch report the CEA says content is driving the creation of new devices and that the continued adoption of broadband is allowing product innovation to soar.

With an estimated 52 percent of US households expected to have home networks by 2008, the role of home based media servers is forecast to soar.

Media servers refer to a system containing a hard disk drive for storing digital media and that allows the distribution of those files to other devices located throughout the home.

A media server would allow consumers to store digital media, including photos, movies and music, on one device and listen to or view it on another.

Product interconnectivity, bandwidth capacity and copyright issues remain the largest barriers to the mass adoption of a home network.

The market for portable entertainment, in the form of MP3 players DVD players and installed mobile video, is already well established.

Hybrid white goods refers to kitchen items that include computer technology such as refrigerators that can monitor the shelf life of its contents and ovens that can download and execute recipes via the Internet.

Telematics refer to the use of computer technology in vehicles.

Meanwhile gaming technology is due to continue its upward climb, with 35 percent of American homes owning a system, computer or PC games, online games and portable games.

You might need to upgrade your skills in 2005 if you are an IT specialist or a budding software writer.

Here is an indication of some of the trends.

For programmers there is the Tiobe Programming Community Index, which tracks the popularity of programming languages via search engine statistics.

The January 2005 index indicates the trends in programming languages during 2004.

Tiobe Software, which publishes the monthly index, called PHP the programming language of 2004.

PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is used to create the HTML scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages ? ones that provide customised information to Internet users. PHP is freely available and used primarily on Linux (UNIX) Web servers.

In this newest poll, the top three languages remain in the same order as 2003, with C, Java and C++ holding the top three spots in terms of popularity.

PHP comes in fourth place, on a rising trend.

C, Delphi and Python programming languages are also on rising trends, Tiobe states. Java?s popularity dropped heavily in 2004.

However Bruce Eckel (author of ?Thinking in Java?) discounts the data, says one cannot make conclusions based on search engine statistics.

The stats and the debate can be found at .

Meanwhile Tech Republic continues to beat the drum for Linux as a viable operating system. ?Shun Linux and kiss your job security good-bye,? says the publisher, which has just published a primer on the operating system.

?For every Windows action, there?s a comparative Linux action, and with every action, there?s an operating system response,? the primer states primly. Ok, we get the point.

The guide is available for free at . Registration is free.

Another free document worth picking up is the first volume of ?Architecture of the World Wide Web?, published last month by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The organisation () develops the common protocols that promote interoperability on the Internet. The document defines the core design components of the Web and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources.

Contact Ahmed at . Go to for security updates.