My regularly scheduled back ups happen later today. I did manage to install Fedora Core 3. I also was sucsessful at installing Debian 3 r2 again on a 486 laptop. I had messed up the laptop using deselect trying to get X windows working the last time on that IBM 360SC. I am offering a friend this computer as a command line machine for web surfing at high speed using Lynx and vi for his needs. I have told him to get a copy of Linux for dummies quick reference first before I give him the computer. I paid 2$ for this book at our school bookstore and will look for another copy or two or three later today for giving away in my computer help work.

I have been doing school work on the win XP computer using MATLAB and also open office and also SAS. I have also been doing web mastering using Dreamweaver now.

I chatted with my dad briefly about installing MATLAB 7.0.1 on a Mac computer. The minimum on the Mac side is a Mac running system 10.3.2. My dad is getting himself a Powerbook.

I was able to stay home and continue downloading the Fedora core 3. Now that is almost done.

I am reading a computer/numerical analysis classic Numerical Recipes, by Press et al.. This is to study for my numerical analysis course exam coming up mid December.

I am downloading Fedora core 3. Each disk will take about 1.5 hours to down load. There are up to eight disks total. I can download two at a time so it could take 6 hours. I only have about four hours to do this this afternoon. I may have to run some of the downloads over night, tonight.

I tried chatting at yahoo web designers room just now. It was not bad no big flames and an interesting discussion. various topics included

• aligning graphics,
• web safe colours,
• Firefox versions,
• selling web mastering,
• Universal Accessible design,
• how to learn web mastering,
• and access to political web sites.

I took back the Apple video adapter as it did not work with my eMac computer and TV.

I am going to be getting an apple video adapter, today, so I can send a video signal to my TV. This is so we can watch photos on the TV as slide shows. This is the cheaper alterative to the iPod Photo.

That's it for computer spending although last week I got myself a USB memory key at 512MB for 60$.

I am still planning on studying SAS for a certification exam in early January late December and my plans to study datamining with SAS continue.

I am uninstalling RSSowl. I am going to check out Internet telephony with www.skype.com. I am also going to try out gaim on my winXP laptop. Cygwin is updated and I should have tex now on this laptop.

I may spend sometime reinstalling Debian 3.0 r 2 on the 486 laptop this morning. I also will be doing some work on the WinXP laptop, maybe chatting at yahoo with gaim and maybe trying out Internet telephony. I will also, of course, be using Open Office for school work.

Also this morning I will be marking statistics assignments and if I get those graded I will read some stuff on SAS to prepare for the basic programmer certification exam in early Janaury. I settled down my course choices for winter and am fairly certain I will study date warehouseing using SAS and may also study statistical computing in the winter term using either SAS or R.

It is Rememberance day in Canada today. I will remember my grandfather an Air Commander in the RCAF and a brother of his who died fighting in Italy and my grandfather a Estonian freedom fighter. Also some of my family were shot by Stalinists. As well I will remember two other soliders both of whom are alive at this moment. One is a fellow I grew up with who has fought mostly in the Middle East with the Canadian forces. He was a military doctor. As well I know someone through the Internet who is presently in hospital from wounds suffered in Iraq and is fighting for his life in that hospital.

I will also pause today to reflect on my own committments to peace and justice and the fact that wars have brought us technology. I will think of Alan Turing and the development of computers and also think of arms sales. I will reflect as well on the horror of war and think back on my peace movement activities of the past thirty or more years.

I am being hired to work on my teaching assistant's union local's web site. The national union are hosting it. They have a content managment system for web sites they host. I am going to recommend that our local also use the content management system and not straight html. The content managment system can be used with html and also wiki formating. This morning I read about half of the basic manual for using the content management system. So far I have put in about 1 hour on this job. I will be paid to do this web work so this is my second web mastering job that is a waged job.

To use CVS in my new work on a sourceforge project I have installed Fink on my eMac and also Cygwin on my Thinkpad. These were both needed for other work on both machines. I also bought a copy of MATLAB release 14 for my MATH3806 course and installed it also on my eMac. I have also updated real player because of a security problem. I also used gaim on my IBM Fedora Core 1 linux box to chat at yahoo rooms.

Hi fellow coders,

If you write computer code you may need to learn CVS. Here is a very useful info page about this.

http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=14033&group_id=1

You can ignore this if you want or save the link for some other day when you want to learn about writing code on open source projects. The learning curve for CVS is steep but the link can be read fairly easily to see what CVS does for the modern developer.

stay in touch if you want I haven't heard from some of you in a long time hope you're ok.