Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Sunday, May 28, 2006

I am downloading 745 MB of compressed SAS and ASCII files of crime data from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data a US clearing house on mostly US crime data. I am going to use this data in SAS and may be design some statistical learning problems and practices with this data.
I am getting a Macbook computer. The specs of the Macbook are here http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html.

Saturday, May 27, 2006

I am getting a Macbook as a graduation present and am just about to order it on-line.
I had trouble installing Fedora and Debian on the IBM PC 325 server. I even after this trouble tried to give this computer away to a computer charity project but they could not use it so turned down my offer.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

I have gotten some Panther disks and installed that successfully on the old iBook. I then was able to install X windows and then R, TexShop, and Neo Office. The iBook is working ok but I am not using it to store email but instead doing web based email.

I got Win2K installed on the Intellistation but can not get the ethernet drivers installed. So my friend has the Intellistation but it can not connect to the net yet. May be we should installed an ethernet card in his computer.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Changing the machines around here

I installed Win2K on the Intellistation and wipped out the WinXP and Debian 3.1 operating systems on the that computer. I did back up my school work on the WinXP side first. I am selling the Intellistation to a friend and this computer came with a license for Win2K so I am putting that back on it.

The other IBM I have the PC 325 server has also been backed up. The files on the WinNT were backed up last month and I backed up the Fedora core 3 files last night. I was ready to install Fedora core 5 last night but the downloads or CD's had errors on them so I needed to re-download the iso images and they are almost all downloaded this morning. I willl be burning them to cd before lunch this morning.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

I am just downloading Fedora core 5 the latest Fedora core release. Fedora core is a free linux operating system. I am installing it after I download it and burn it to CD's. There are five CD's. I have backed up all the data on the computer I am going to install this operating system on. I will no longer have a WinNT or Fedora core 3 machine after this.

I spent a little time this morning exploring a google search on my name. I also did my usual school web page surfing, reading the school's promotions magazine. I also visited a web site for my old high school a few times. Once this morning when I posted something and then once earlier this week I think Monday morning I visited this high school web site.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

I am helped someone with her email. She hired me to teach her email. I printed some documents to help her learn how to use email.

Update

I only really configured her email. I also taught her a little but very little about outlook express.

Monday, May 08, 2006

The clamshell iBook now has 544 MB of RAM. As far as my research will tell me this is the maximum amount of RAM I can run in this model iBook.
My brother is sending me his family pack of Panther CD's for the iBook clamshell so I can then run X windows and stuff like R and Open Office.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

I came up with this idea in a short workshop for preparedness in home emergencies.


here is my tip


It is recommended that for emergencies you have photo's of people you live with on hand, i.e. in your disaster kit that you take with you when you evacuate. This way if someone like a kid is missing the search team can see what your relatives look like. You should also have copies of important documents. May be you can scan birth certificates or other ID documents but then you risk losing this to data thieves but likewise you could lose paper copies too. So everything is digital and might fit on a cheap these days 8 MB or 16 MB compact flash card. These might work in any camera you find at the disaster reception centre so you can access them. You don't really need a digital camera to make this compact flash card as there are 20 dollar card readers you can transfer the data with and then test it in someone else's camera and you are good to go.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Debian laptop project report

I have been working on this laptop for about 6 months now. I first installed Debian 3.0 and got that working but on that install the terminal program, in other words the command line could not do edit menu functions. So I had to install a more recent version of Debian. For this I needed a larger hard drive. I spent about 40 dollars buying a used 6 GB drive which turned out to be a bit wonky so I used a 3.2 GB drive I had taken out of an original iBook. In the last two days I finally installed Debian 3.1 and just last night installed R and tested it out with some R code from a school assignment from last winter 2005. After changing some directory paths to fit linux directory structures, and where I had copied the school course folder too, I was successful running R and getting one graphic. So now I am ready to write my code for my talk on R and can run it in Linux on this pentium 1 laptop and even then project this at a meeting. I am my code.