Tuesday, April 27, 2004

I studied Palm labels and fields, this morning, but did not examine the code carefully in chapter 7 of Bachmann, Glenn, Palm Programmming: The Authoriative Solution (Indianapolis, IN: Sams, 1999). But am only up to chapter 4 actually with reading, reviewing and working with the code in Code Warrior's Palm Constructor. I am doing this learning on my WinXP laptop.
I did some webmastering today. I used some server side folders and full URL's rather than relative. I hope to complete this work in another hour or two this morning.

Then I will work on the IBM Thinkpad 360SC. I am hoping with the Thinkpad that the new Linksys PCMCIA fast ethernet card will re-establish my network connection. Of course I will need to install the right driver to support the card.

Monday, April 26, 2004

These are the computer related books I am reading at the moment.

Bachmann, Glenn, Palm Programmming: The Authoriative Solution (Indianapolis, IN: Sams, 1999)
This book explains the tools and code needed to make applications for the Palm handheld computer.
Stevens, Al, Wiley's Teach Yourself C++ 7d (New York: Wiley, 2003)
This book starts with the basics of programming in C++ similar to C and then goes further.
Schroeder, Michael & Wagner, Gerd, eds., Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web: Second International Workshop, RuleML 2003 Sanibel Island, FL, USA, October 2003 Proceedings (Berlin: Springer, 2003)
This book includes papers about web searching technologies for example.
Delwiche, Lora D. & Slaughter, Susan J., The Little SAS Book: a primer (Cary, NC: SAS Institute, 1998)
This book teaches how to do basic SAS and describes the structure of programs, data formats, and use of Data and Proc steps.
Denning, Dorothy E., Information Warfare and Security (Reading, Mass.: Adison-Wesley, 1999).
I used the Real One radio today and also iTunes radio both on the WinXP laptop. I also upgraded the iTunes software.

Speaking of Apple software. I upgraded to Panther about a month ago for my eMac. And still speaking of Apple, I made an order and saved it for later for an iPod 20GB and an iSight and a USB sound input device for a home studio. Total for this saved order is 1K. The iPod is for my wife. Honestly.

Friday, April 23, 2004

I am not doing much computing today just web and email and no programming. I am working in none computer related work today.
There is a technology tradeshow and conference next week at our cities civic centre. I may have some free time to attend after I write my exam on Monday.
I got a Linksys Fast Ethernet PCMCIA card throguh ebay.ca. The card seems in perfect shape and it should work fine with the older Thinkpad. It came with a bonus Turbo Linux workstation 6.0 CD. I was looking for this OS as Turbo Linux no longer seem to offer it as a free download.

Thursday, April 22, 2004

I am studying for my exam this morning after
    briefly studying
  • Palm programming,
  • Unjust Enrichment,
  • Numerical Analysis,
  • a little para-psychology and philosophy,
  • a little about web searching technology based on communities of common interest,
  • and reading the newspaper.

In the newspaper there was an article about bio-sensors or medical measuring devices built into a ring and using wireless communication to record patient vitals. I saved this article.

I also read city political news and scanned business headlines for the past month.

The paper about web searching technologies seemed to ignore that idea that communities of common interest are maybe unnatural and a way of being exclusive. But there were some eqautions made up that seemed rather arbitrary and some sort of pseudo math approach to web searching technology.

The para-psychology paper from The Journal of the Royal Institue of Philosophy was about why para-psychology or psychical research is an important philosophical topic. To state this thesis the author C. D. Broad described the limits that we generallly accept in the modern world about causation, timing of events, and mental events. He wrote this in 1949.

The numerical analysis reading I did was on about error and the occurance of error in input, problem solving and output.

The Unjust Enrichment book I am reading continued from the case it started with to a classification mapping of this area of law. Professor Ogilvie had stated that this law was not clear. Already Birks the author of the book I am reading has promised that this book will finally make this area of law clear.

In Palm programming I studied the standard Palm GUI buttons for selection by the user.

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Some fellow from OCLUG gave me a set of two Debian 2.1 CD's today.
I sold an HP CD writer plus 8000 drive yesterday and today sold a 14" IBM monitor.
I spent a large part of today finding out I did not download xlibg6 an improtant library file for x windows. I tried in vain to copy the file off another computer using the floppy.
I made some French web pages today. I was given French word doc files which worked best opened in Mac text edit. Then copied and pasted to composer vola done. Now to make an index page.

Monday, April 19, 2004

I am still mostly using my eMac for day to day stuff.

I have a small update of the work web site to do tonight on the Thinkpad T30. I am still waiting for my web master pay check to come in in the mail.

I haven't worked on the Debian laptop for about 48 hours now. I sold a CD-writer out of the duron for 50$ tonight. Tomorrow I am selling the IBM 350 pentium I PC for 30$ with an IBM 14" monitor and three button USB mouse. The fellow buying it is bringing me some Debian 2.1 CD's for free.

Sunday, April 18, 2004

I worked for about two hours with dselect on the debian 2.1. I needed to delete files that I downloaded to make space on the hard drive. I am not quite sure what to delete. So far I have installed a fair amount of programs inclding an email client and Perl. I have still not installed the emacs. I have installed some mouse drivers. The TP 360 no longer connect to the net as I thought it would not. I was able to edit a problem file in vi and get the process moving again.

Saturday, April 17, 2004

I did some web mastering yesterday. I have about ten hours left from my client's last fiscal year. I am expecting to be paid soon and have given them an estimate for work time this coming year. I use really only my Thinkpad T30 for this work.

I spent six hours reinstalling Debian 2.1 on the Thinkpad 360SC. I figured I would only have the thing networked until my first reboot after logging in for the first time. So I downloaded as much of the debian archive for 2.1 main as I could. I was able to install a handful of applications using dselect this time. I will probably have to keep runing dselect a number of times. I am not using the best access method in dselect in other words I am not using apt. I might try to do that next.

I bid and won a Linksys etherfast PCMCIA card. I also bid on a Firewire PCMCIA card. I was surfing as well the IBM IDE PCMCIA cards and also bid on a Adaptect Slim SCSI PCMCIA card. All this shopping was on ebay.ca.

Again this week I mostly used my eMac for daily computing and web surfing and email.

Thursday, April 15, 2004

I used my Palm and eMac today as well as my IBM laptop. I did some web master related phone calls. Our hydro bill is not excessive.

Sunday, April 11, 2004

Just spent a half hour reading Internet law news and clearing spam out of my netscape account.
Success with networking! I got the ThinkPad 360SC connected to a Debian Archive ftp server. I got the network settings from a helpful person this morning after I requested help @ the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group. Ok success with one more step to installing the full Debian 2.1 on the old 486 ThinkPad but dselect was a bit of problem. I guess I am learning to use dselect now but I got many many 505 file size errors on the ftp method of getting the files on dselect using apt. Oh well one problem solved another on the road to success.

My friend now also wants a LAN card from the same source namely ebay.ca. I will have to pick up another PCMCIA card later in the month for him. I also want to get an IBM IDE card from an ebay seller.

I installed Win98 on my my Duron 850 today. Now I am thinking of downloading all the Debian 2.1 archive and burning it to CD as the archive seems to be dissapearing from the net. Only one US ftp site seemed to be on-line over the past month.

A few days ago I installed the drivers for the new PCMCIA ethernet card I have for the thinkpad 360SC. I now need to figure out how to configure the thinkpad to connect to the network. I might try to reinstall and follow instructions on the Debian web site.
I have been reading about Palm programming, XML and C++ programming. I have installed various tools for programming on my WinXP laptop and my Fedora Linux machine. I have been following the examples in the books with these tools on the computers. I have also written some more of my protest dtd and posted it live on the web now. I have also been doing paid web master work.

Thursday, April 08, 2004

I don't need my laptop as much now that school is out.
I did not end up using LEAVES so it was a waste of three hours of energy for up time.

I downloaded and installed Netscape 7.02 for my friends computer. I also installed Sun Java 2 and this may have started some errors on his machine. Maybe this is one of those Sun v. Microsoft things. We seemed to have gotten rid of the addware on his computer for now. It is also much faster for surfing. I also installed 11 critical updates from Microosft for his Win98.

I use the eMac only yestersay to surf ebay and listen to tunes and use iChat with my brother in Toronto. He file transfered an old tune he wrote, sang and played in the early 1980's as an mp3. Hopefully this song will be sent to the no cause for concern radio web site.

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Monday, April 05, 2004

I am becoming a programmer again. I have been studying programming the Palm and also programming in C++.

I spent about two hours trying to install Debian Linux 2.1 on an old Thinkpad 360SC. It was extremely frustrating and I stayed up late doing it and then slept a lot and had a broken sleep last night.

Tonight I read about palm programming reviewing the first two chapters that I read last week, of a book on palm programming. I then installed a POSE and unpacked the SDK files onto my Fedora machine.

I have nicked named this machine LEAVES. The machine is an IBM 325 PC server with dual Pentium II 300Mhz processors. Maybe this acronym stands for Linux Educational Application v. Enterprise Solutions. It used to be part of a super computer I build and called Lamda after the Lambda moo which was legal example we studied in LAWS3501 last winter. This example of a community dispute in an on-line community came from Lawrence Lessig's book Code: and other laws of cyberspace. This same example is in Rob Kitcin's book Cyberspace.

I now want to install a POSE on my windows laptop because I just installed GCC and an IDE for GCC on this WinXP laptop.

But for now I must sleep and attend a University President's committee meeting tomorrow. Well actually later today but I am up late in the morning.

Sunday, April 04, 2004

Tonight I relaxed and read the Palm Programming book from QA 76.76 1999. I downloaded the Palm SDK for my Fedora machine. I signed up to be a Palm Developer. I could not download the files to my eMac. I also got the emulator for the Fedora and set some goals with learning Palm programming. The application I want to build will allow interviewers in the field to record answers to questions. Thus this is a statistical application. It may in fact require that this data then by conduited to something like a spreadsheet or statistical analysis software. It maybe simple enough the the palm application creates a text file of the data in some format for the PC.
I worked on the Linux intsall for the old 486 IBM thinkpad 360SC. I did reinstall Debian 2.1 base system. I tried for about two hours to copy the G++ and G77 compilers to this computer but failed. It was very frustrating.

Thursday, April 01, 2004

It helps to surf the math department web pages. I found out today I could get a copy of SAS for use on my home PC. I went to school for about 15 minutes to pick up a copy and installed it on my laptop. This will help me study for a SAS certification.
I updated some news on a local union website I look after.
I am using my Mac today. Yesterday I read some of William Gibson's Count Zero on the bus with my Palm. I read chapter 1 in Al Steven's Teach Yourself C++, 7 ed., yesterday.