In about 20 minutes I will print out my three blogs in hard copy for the last month's entries. I will also burn a CD of the My Documents folder on my laptop. This is my regularly scheduled back up process. I will start to prepare the laptop to do this now with plugging in the right cables and getting the paper ready for the printer. Today there was a fire alarm in our building and I evacuated the back up CD's. But it was a false alarm.

I updated a web site I created and maintain as a volunteer at city hall. It is for an accessibility committee that advises the Mayor and city counsel and hears about accessibility issues concerning the city. The web site is at http://accessibility-ottawa.ncf.ca. Tonight I added the new committee members names and took the retiring committee members names off the member's web page. I also added more links and took off dead links on the web sites' links page. One interesting site that concerns accessibility and the web I added was http://www.w3.org/WAI/. This w3 site is the world wide web consortium's web space.

I defraged my laptop today. Later tonight on Sunday, I will back up the My Documents folder on that laptop. I will also hard copy print my three blogs for the month of July in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

I opened Xcode on the eMac but did not really write anything just looked at help screens a little. I did the same thing with Active Perl on the laptop.

I am trying to buy an old Kodak Diconix printer on ebay and I am buying on ebay a Power Mac 5200CD and Apple 2400 printer both for a friend.

Here are some technical books in various fields I am reading at the moment:

Taylor, Dave. Macworld Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML (Foster City, CA: IDG, 1995).

This book is great for simple reference to basic HTML. I have been using it for about 8 years. I use it about once a month like now when I need to look up the code for a definitons list like this one you're reading showing titles of books and a brief comment about each book. For more serious HTML references with more depth, I use Ian Graham's, The HTML Source Book: A Complete Guide to HTML 3.0 (New York, NY: Wiley, 1996).

Schwartz Randal L. & Christiansen, Tom. Learing Perl, 2d (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1993 & 1997).

I have tried to read this book before. I am volunteering as a recording secretary and administration secretary for two of my unions and a community group, so would like some help with report writing and quick editing of word processed documents. PERL promises this help. The problem is... I have not been able to learn much about PERL by reading about it alone. Oh well, I try again and borrowed this book today.

Schwartz, Alan. Managing Mailing Lists (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1998).

This book I bought to read for advice on managing... actually moderating mailing lists. I have present responsiblity as a volunteer for moderating two community group's email lists. These are real life organizations that use mailings lists. I have one of my own yahoo mailing lists too for geography studies discussions but it is only used once or twice a year, so it is sort of a dead list. It also has no real life affiliation. Some people confuse email mailing lists with mass marketing postal mailing lists but if you don't know yet what an Internet email mailing list is then it is easy to see why you might not know there's a difference. In fact, one can use an email mailing list for marketing but I don't think one could use a fund raising postal mailing list or mass market postal mailing list for discussions. I haven't read much of this book but I bought it just last week.

Gulbransen, David. The Complete Idiot's Guide to XML (Indianapolis, IN: QUE, 2000).

Instead of Y2K the year 2000 brought us this book. I started reading this book in the winter of 2003. I have been slowly writing a dtd or two. I have opened about three or four editors for writing XML on all three platforms Linux, Mac and Windos. All these XML editors seem to need a dtd to already exist. I read the whole book last year and am reading it again this year to reference for writing my dtd's. I have been using xemacs on my WinXP laptop most recently to work on one of my dtd's but plan to go back to Gedit next for this work.

Spector, David H.M. Building Linux Clusters (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2000).

Again Y2K didn't happen, I recorded my first movie off TV which was Y2K the movie and this book came out that year. Actually I had a friend record it as at that point, December 31, 1999, I could not work a VCR. I can now program and work a variety of VCR's. I can even install Red Hat 6.2 as a super computer on IBM hardware and this book and its accompanying CDROM made this happen. Reading this a couple of years ago I learned basic networking and SCSI with the help of other networking books since, and the web to learn SCSI facts. I find this a great book but apparently the publisher has appologised for publishing it. I could not get the web interface working on the supercomputer software maybe it was flawed or something. Contact me if you read or used this book just to share notes. I was reading this book recently to understand networking with more than one router.

Cross, David. Data Munging with PERL (Greenwich, CT: Manning, 2001).

Computer books seem to still to be written only by people named Dave or David and this book comes out a year after Y2K. I just got it today at the library and might stay up all night so I have time to read it before having to go work somewhere.

Bhasin, Shweta & Bhatia, Vikram. Web Security Basics (Cincinnati, OH: Premier, 2003).

Finally it is 2003 and this book is for Intermediate and Advanced users and it is not written by a Dave or a David. Other than that I haven't read it yet.

Well those are the technical books directly in computer science that I am reading. I will post some books on more social computer topics later as well as some technical books I am reading in statistics, GIS, GI science, hydrology, technology and disabilities, and finally some politics and techno-culture books. I mean cyberculture but don't want to use that word really.

Another busy day working as a tutor/student/teaching assistant ends and I feel great.

I have overloaded my Thinkpad 360 after trying to get X working. Now I don't know what to delete to get space on the hard drive. Dselect won't do much at all. I don't seem to be able to reinstall Debian 3 either.

I had my laptop running my new web cam and watched it using Yahoo Messenger on another machine in the living room. Right now I am doing tech support for a friend.

I downloaded R for the fedora computer.

I helped a friend install drivers for his sound card, and his CD burner. I also set up the software for his printer. He paid me a package of smokes for this help.

I got X Windows working on my Thinkpad 360SC. I used a XF86Config file posted to the web and it worked.

I attended Linux in the Wild a local Linux group BBQ.

I still did not upgrade my palm. I used it fair amount yesterday. I am trying out a medical calculator and a 14 day trial of PDA stats.

I bought a palm belt clip case. I have considered upgrading my palm to a Tungsten W or E model.

This blog has a new interface. I had to choose edit html to write this. This interface is much better and saves me two clicks.

I discovered a new calendar view on my Palm. I recharged the palm fully. I read an article about palms from http://www.wiredwoman.com. I also read an article about palms from the Globe and Mail from 2001. I used my new palm belt clip case tonight. I did not take my palm out of the case while out.

I picked up my Epson 820 photo colour stylus printer, which had been out on loan. I bought basic office supplies yesterday. I got floppy labels at a very good price. I thought of making html files of our books and selling them copied to floppy with labels. The router is working fine. I have been using my laptop for two days now as my main machine. I booted up my Fedora machine and copied some code from a almost forty year old book. I used Gedit to copy the code. The code is Fortran IV. The program I was copying was MM1A or matrix math.

I had broken the reset button off on my D-Link DI704 router. I placed a long tool into the reset button hole on the router and tried to reset. I am not sure this worked.

I used the TCP/IP panel in the Macintosh to manually set the Mac's connection to the router as 192.168.0.2 and was able to get into the router using a web browser by setting the web address as 192.168.0.2 the last IP address of the router. I then ran the router's wizard and got the router working again. I then reset the settings on the Macintosh.

I had reinstalled Fedora core 1 on the IBM PC server and then once the router was properly set up I could get on-line with the IBM linux system.

So I have three working systems. One the Laptop running win XP, two the eMac running Panther and lastly but not least the IBM PC server 325 running Fedora 1 core.

I sold my router to a friend. I did get a gateway with print server but botched the configuration and then broke the reset button with too much force. I didn't quite get the print server working. I would like now to get a wireless router.

I was getting impatient not having a Linux x windows desktop so reinstalled fedora core 1 on the IBM PC rather than fix the problems with the previous install. But since I don't have a working router now I have to use PPPoe for all my computers at present and don't know how to configure this on the Linux side so am not on-line with this Linux box right now.

I failed once again to install Linux in the duron computer. I think it is time to buy a new hard drive for that machine. I should pick up a 20GB or 10GB drive for it.

I made a web page for my Thinkpad 360SC and Linux. I put this new web page on my www.crystalcomputing.net web site. I also sent my cheque in for the domain registration and URL forwarding for my computer ethics web site.

I can use my laptop on my coffee table, while sittting on the couch. From couch potatoe to couch commando. I am just putting all my computer law papers together to create a book using Open Office.