I am posting this from my Linux laptop. I have had enough installing Linux for the day and decided to use Linux more. So this post is an effort to do one of my daily computer activities in Linux.

I received a copy of Virtual PC for the Mac but so far have not been able to install an operating system inside the Virtual PC. I will make another try this morning after trying three different WinXP disks and Debian 3.1 r1. I am now trying my Win2000 disk. Again this should be a legal copy of Win2000.

My problems with my Linux install are now just X. I need to configure X to work still. I have no useable screens as my error message. I have so far been unable to google a configuration file. I have found some Nvidia drivers but could not install them for this older kernal. I have a 2.2 kernal instead of the current 2.6 kernal. May be even 2.7 is the current kernal.

I now know how to install Woody only and am doing this overnight.

I reached out to the local Linux novice help email list and got some help with my Linux install and I am also doing this over night. My other computers are fine now. My new eMac gets the most use. My new IBM works fine for WinXP and it is this machine I am also trying to install Linux on. My palm is working fine but not getting as much use as my Palms have in the past. My iPod is also working fine. I am not using my PSP much but did try to get further in the Sims 2 game a week ago. I burnt a CD of songs for my wife and we paid for these songs.

All this computer tinkering keeps me from doing my school work. I know this is true because as soon as I sucessfully completed the SAS install and then the Linux install I almost immediately devoted my time to my homework until it got done. So my computter tinkering was keeping me from doing my school homework. It was also highly frustating and now that I have Xandros Linux installed I realise that this free version of Xandors is very limited and I may try to install Debian Woody again or Fedora core 4. Install, install, I am an install junkie and hardly spend much time actually working in Linux. Actually the problems is I like Woody but not sure I can keep it updated with out going into Sarge and I can't seem to install Sarge with net disks and as I said with no DVD drive on the intellistation I can't use the DVD's I made of Sarge.

Success Xandros installs ok

I was able to install a Xandros Linux desktop. I was not able to watch a DVD though because actually this computer does not have a DVD drive installed. I have a spare DVD drive but I am not up to installing that right now.

I was thinking about trying a different flavour of Linux on the Intellistation and am now trying a Xandros install. It is almost done and I will see if it works ok. I went with a swap partition of almost 2 GB so I can install some more RAM on the Intellistation. It needs PC133 RAM chips which I figure must be cheap these days. I will upgrade this system to 1 GB as soon as I can afford the extra RAM. Always upgrading. Just for fun if the Xandros installs with no issues I will watch the third Matrix film on the intellistation using Xandros starting at 3:30 AM.

I am having trouble mounting CD's made on my Mac on the new refurbished IBM Intellistation. I only seem to be able to get the Debian 3.0 woody CD to work. But then when I download newer Debian 3.1 Sarge software the boot proccess stops at Lilo only producing the letters LI in the upper left corner and then freezing. I am re trying this again and again. Right now I am trying it with out a network connection. I should stop this and start again with Debian 3.0 without ftp apt sources just security updates butthe main system just from the CD.

Success installing SAS, finally after about 20 attempts.

I first had an error because the firmware on my new refurbished computers CDROM had not been updated. I updated it yesterday morning or late Thursday night. Once that was solved I found the install mostly worked or got through more of the proccess. But the SAS install as many softwares is an all or nothing process involving 9 CD's. In the end I could not choose extra language support because a file for that option was on a part of a CD that is damaged. After unselecting that language support option the installation worked. I will report the damaged CD to the school hardware services clerk when I take the disks back to school on Monday.

I now have a functioning SAS workstation. I don't have any SAS homework yet but will have some later in the term.

I bought a refurbished IBM Intellistation Pro E. It has a 64 MB video card. I installed WinXP pro on it as soon as I got it. I am still trying to install SAS on the windows. I split the drive in half and am this morning continuing to try to install Debian Linux on the second half. SAS gave me problems as is Linux giving me problems. I have the SAS disks borrowed from school for another two days. I should stop this computer tinkering and get some school work done. But I have been reading all morning while the computer downloads linux software.

I just read half of a study into computer war gaming. I also have been reading about child poverty and statistics and about modern warfare in terms of body hardening and body injury. I finished a book on the rule of law that I started to read this summer after studying public law with Christian Jackel. I also finished a book titled Techno Feminism.

The new computer is basically supposed to be a windows box for doing windows only software. I did need to do some firmware upgrade on the CDROM. I will stop the Linux tinkering now at 3:36 and try the SAS install a few more times. My reason for buying this computer was to be able to run SAS at home for school work.

This is my test post using a blogger widget by June Tate

I am using a blogger posting widget designed by June Tate. it is licenced under the GPL as free sofwtare. I am test posting this as a test of this widget. I have been playing with widgets for a little while tonight.

I made a back up DVD of the Documents folder on my eMac. I am finding the eMac working fine. My Palm is also fine. My fedora computer is fine. My iPod is fine. My new printer is fine.

I am getting an IBM Intellistation Pro E with a pentium IV chip, 256MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive and CD. This windows computer will be for running SAS. I will also installl Debian 3.1 on this computer and set up things like emacs, R, Octave, GSL and MatLab on the Linux side.

I am using the new eMac and it is working fine. It is also working with the new printer fine.

My palm can download xls files from its wireless phone connection but can not open them right away. I will try some techniques with this palm to open them today. Otherwise I will transfer the files to the eMac.

I managed to get the new eMac working ok now with all the email it received between December 16-January 6th. I still need to migrate some folders, email and files from the old eMac. I also have to reinstall applications. I have installed X11, Neooffice 1.2 beta, Adobe Reader 7.0.2, Adobe Reader for the Plam 3.05 and X-Code. I will now reinstall Chit Chat and then chat at Yahoo.

Success with the new Mac OS X install.

I seem to have all the preferences imported now. All my Safari bookmarks from my old eMac are imported and all my keychain items. Thus Safari logged into Blogspot no problem. I also imported my iCal and Address book from my old eMac. I am of course waiting for my email to be imported. I will now as the next step import my Music folder to iTunes but from the application itself.

I did a rough size comparisom using Get Info on the new eMac and then only needed to re back up the Music folder. I then started an erase and install on the new eMac. This install is going on now and I am writing this from my PC 325 using Mozilla.

I was not yet able to use the new Brother printer with the Fedora machine because the Fedora does not have the drivers for the MCF 420cn.

I will spend the rest of this morning getting the new eMac set up. This time I will not do a Firewire transfer of user accounts. I will in fact only transfer the Documents, Music, and Mail folders using a USB external hard drive. For the Music and Mail folders I will import these via the applications themselves for the documents folder I will do a simple copy operation using the Finder.

About backing up the new eMac and iPod: I lost two or three voice memos from this year. I am satistfied with the rest of the iTunes back up now. I am just using an ethernet connection now from the old eMac to the new eMac to copy the mail folder from the new eMac to the USB drive connected to the old eMac. But this is taking too long so I am going to connect the USB drive to the new eMac and make the mail folder copy that way. But first I have to wait until I have finished using the USB drive on the old eMac where I am duplicating the documents folder for file management reasons. When this is done and the mail folder is backed up, I will reinstall Mac OS X on the new eMac.

After the iTunes is backed up I will copy the Mac Mail folder one more time to the USB external drive and then I will consider the new eMac backed up and attempt a fresh install of Mac OS X. I would like to have the back up done by midnight and the install done by 4 AM Monday. I would like to be using the new eMac again by 8 AM Monday.

The iTunes on the new eMac is backed up to a DVD now. This is only a back up of purchased songs and voice memos. I will attempt one or two more updates of the iPod to get a new voice memo off the iPod then do another back up to DVD. Then I will consider iTunes on the new eMac backed up.

After resetting the IP address for the printer, it is still printing fine. I will check the Fedora computer on it later tonight. Right now the Fedora computer prints to the Epson 440 via a parallel cable which comes out of an Iomega zip drive 100 MB parallel drive plugged into the computer the IBM PC325. After this test if successful I will have two printers for the Fedora computer. I also have two printers now for the eMac. This is robust redundency for printing.

I got myself a new Brother MFC 420CN all-in-one network printer. I did get it working as network printer, a fax, and a copier so far. It is very easy to use although it took me three hours to configure the Lan printing. I did get it last night and got it to work again tonight.

Backing up my new eMac is going well. I was able to sucessfully copy the documents folder where all my personal files are. I copied it to my USB external drive. I have been using this back up on my old eMac to do my daily work. I also backed up purchased songs and was able to burn a DVD of purchased songs on the new eMac. With iTunes on the new eMac I am just worried about backing up voice memos. The new eMac iTunes still works and I will do a final purchased music back up and voice memo back up then the iTunes will be backed up and I can leave the new iTunes as ready for fresh install. I have already backed up the email but will do this once again and then the Mac Mail will be ready for a fresh install. The documents are already for a fresh install. So iTunes and and Mac Mail need to be done again and I will go for the fresh install maybe tonight.

I have three years of Apple Care support with the new eMac. I did call Apple Care yesterday and they recommended a fresh install of the Mac OS X and this time not to transfer over applications to the new eMac from the old eMac but I will try to transfer email settings. I will also try to restore email, iTunes and the documents folder. I should also back up iBlog. Everything else will be a clean install.

My new eMac computer is freezing up. It is not working at a very good rate. It seems I have not gotten an Apple but instead a lemon.

I did pratice some R coding but did it on the eMac so I did not need to start up the Linux laptop this morning. I did need to reinstall R and this time did install the G77 and other parts and am using R 2.2.0 now. All I did was open some school data sets and do a mean calculation. I did have to learn a little about how to write a directory path on the Mac.

I have been using a TV watching widget in Mac OS X Tiger to watch some Chinese TV. It works quite well. No need for a TV card. I am going to give a talk on R for a local linux user group this spring. I may start to write it later this morning.

I did get around to trying to download gsl on the Debian laptop. It was successful so far. I first used konqueror to browse www.gnu.org/software/gsl. Then I used a Konsole window to ftp the software to the laptop from ftp.gnu.org. I then used Archive to unpack it to the Desktop. I read the README file and then the INSTALL file, just clicking them open in Konqueror. I used the cpmmands ./configure and make in the Konsole window when in the gsl-1.7 folder that unpacking made on the Desktop. Now the make is taking a long time, but the gsl-1.7 folder is big tens of megabytes and this is a pentium 1 computer so I am just going to have to wait.

I got side tracked downloading gsl. I instead used fink and updated fink and can't get dpkg working on the new mac. I barely had fink working on the old mac. So I did not download gsl. I may try this on my debian laptop now.

I just deleted a bunch of old pdf's and some old unused apps off the old eMac. I also used the old eMac and old copy of Dreamweaver to update my school web page. I then used sftp to up load the index.html page which was all I updated. I have had some luck using sftp these past few days.

I am now making some back up DVD's of my old computer's files. This includes my Performa 1995-1998. My various IBM's the aptiva 2000-2003 and the Thinkpad 2003-2005. I also am backing up my WinNT 2002-2005 machine files. I can not back up all the Thinkpad files on one DVD disk but will need three or four for this. The other computers can be backed up to only one DVD.

I am just going to download the gsl for the Mac now so am going to visit some gnu pages

I am looking at buying an older Itronix laptop on ebay but this can wait as well.

I got the RSS feed working on the Palm with Avantgo. I still have not gotten RSS feeds working on my PSP. I have done nothing with my PSP web design project for the past month.

I am trying out the new RSS channels beta on the avantgo web site. The avantgo web site loads web pages onto my palm using my computer's internet connection. It could also download these web pages with avantgo and a wireless connection but this would cost more from the wireless company because the downloads from news services through avantgo would change everyday and the size of total downloads are metered at the wireless company. I am limited to about 2 MB per month which is fine for using the Palm for email only and only email from my low traffic school email address. But downloading web pages would be too expensive at 10$ per MB. But I added rss feeds from two of my blogs and put them on the palm with the USB cradle hotsync and so I will test those out on the palm today as I travel around on the bus.

I spent about an hour backing up and configuring my Palm w. I also ordered voice mail service for it this morning as this may be cheaper than my present other cell phone by about 10 dollars per month. Right now I have two cell phones plus my wifes phone. Now I can cut one cell phone off and save 35$ and pay 20$ plus tax for the voice on the palm. I will test the palm voice for now and can cancel the voice plan at any time for no charge. I also spent some time over night trying out some software for the iPod from the missing manual CD for the missing manual book iPod and iTunes from the missing manual web site.

I also gifted some music to family from the iTunes store for a Christmas present.

I was successful at burning one DVD back up of ten years of email.

I was looking at the size of the Mail folder on my new eMac and for some reason it was only around 900 MB. So I deleted my original old eMac email(this import appeared empty) off the new eMac and retransfered it from the old eMac using my Iomega 20GB drive. I then imported all of it but the old Thinkpad email that was stored in a netscape email file. That file has already been imported on the new eMac. So hopefully now I have only about two years or so of duplicates from my dot mac transfer from Thinkpad to the old eMac. My new eMac has ten years worth of email now which is about a year and a half shy of the time I have been using email. The Mail file is 2.5 GB now. I had some trouble transfering it to a DVD to burn. But now I am ready to burn the first back up DVD of 2.5 GB.

I did some usual tasks on the old eMac and then ethernet transfered the files to the new eMac and it worked fine.

I tried turning comments off now.

I was able to run R from the command line and do the same code as I did last winter in my first assignment in my data mining course. I also was able with KWord to open my code files which were kept in word doc format. But I could not copy and paste the code as I was used to with R so needed to retype it. Also the directory in Linux needed to be changed slightly from the windows directory that was in the code for opening the data file. But it works. I think this is R 1.5.1 I am using on this machine.

I reinstalled Debian 3.0 r2 on the old Compaq laptop using only CD's about a week ago. I tried resetting the network environment up with netenv and was successful at getting an internet connection last night. I guessed the IP address for the machine that the DNS server in the router might offer. Anyway it worked.

I also installed, R, R-base, R-latex and R-recommended. This evening I will transfer some school files over from my data mining course and test drive the R. I will also download Ggobi and try that out too. This will require that I access and search for Ggobi on the web.

The eMac is up and running. I still can not get my old eMac user files to function on the new eMac using the firewire transfer but I did get the applications transfered. That is I can not log in as the old user.

I got iBlog working on the new eMac. I copied the folder from application support for iBlog and also copied the peferences file for iBlog. Now iBlog is open with all my old iBlogs there ready to go.

I also used the copied iTunes folder to update my iPod so lost some voice memos (I don't know why) which I am just transfering back.

I used my Iomega huge 20GB portable drive to do these transfers by swapping the USB cable between the two eMacs which are side by side on the living room desk.

I finally cleaned up cables in the office in front of the PC server and the shelves. Most of the cables are now behind the shelves. I also cleared off my desktop space around the IBM monitor, MSN keyboard, and IBM mouse, so I can comfortably and safely use the Fedora core machine in the office. I also after this just minutes ago, cleared up papers and headphones and ear phones off the living room desk.

eMac working fine now

I was able to set up my email by the end of Thursday. It is still a little buggy. I was able to make those back up DVD's so I have reached some safety now with computers and saving all my volumious writing which is largely emails. But this email back up includes most non-spam email I have ever received too in a broken not quite continuous and smooth record from 1996 to 2005 on a variety of different computers. This is all now on two identical DVD's and I will make a third copy still as three copies are recommended by security professionals for back up archives of files.

Open source software installs on new eMac

I installed Neo Office 1.2 alpha late yesterday.

I am reinstalling tex, texshop, R and Grass on my new eMac which means X11 first, from my Mac OS X DVD. Then R which installs G77 the fortran compiler and also tsk(sp?). Then over to tex shop and the i-installer to install X11 apps for teXshop. Then install teX again with i-installer. Then finally texshop itself. Then Grass which might wait until tomorrow. teX2005 includes code for both Mac architectures Mac PPC and Mac Intel which means the open source developers are already designing for the new intel Macs before the hardware is for sale.

I got my new computer an Apple eMac

But this new computer does not work well yet. I am attemping right now to reinstall Mac OS X. I have transfered all the applications and user accounts and network settings from my old eMac. After doing this I was able to open about three applications but once open could not do anything with them. I did a hardware test at my brothers suggestion and the hardware is fine. We both figured that perhaps the file transfer had made the new eMac not work properly. I was also not given the extra 512 MB RAM chip I paid for. It seems either the store was trying to rob me or they forgot to install it. I will have to get the extra 512 MB RAM chip from them and install it myself. I have paid for it already. I guess I could see this as one time when I am giving a store credit rather than them giving me credit.

I have about 30 minutes left in the Max OS X install and then I can see again if the new eMac works. In fact in the time it took me to write this it has rebooted and asked for the Install Disk 2.

This first Mac OS X install didn't work. So I did a clean install and did not firewire transfer anything but instead used my USB back up drive to do things manually. I am taking my usual file storage area on the desktop and moving it to the documents folder.

It seems this blog is no longer considered a spam blog which means I can edit the posts and spell check them again.

I am buying a new eMac

I was able to afford a new eMac. Now I will be able to burn DVD's and have lots of hard drive space. I should be getting it in about a week. I should also be getting the old clamshell iBook soon too.

I borrowed some rock CD's to put on my iPod. It took me about 5 hours to rip 20 CD's but I am not file sharing these mp3's.

I am backing up or copying my Desktop folder to my Iomega portable hard drive which I will again try to take to school and use it on computers there and then burn DVD's of these files.

eMac now running Tiger

I was able to get a copy of Tiger on a family license. So now my old eMac is running Tiger. I had wanted to try widgets and I am trying a TV watching widget, a URL checker widget, and a longfingers World View widget. Longfinger's PSP version of the World View inspired some PSP web mastering by me a few weeks ago.

My computers and gadgets are all running ok except for the Palm but that was only a minor hiccup. My Palm w ran out of power so need to be restored from back up. I also installed Documents to Go on the Mac so now have that functionality between the Palm and the Mac. I am tempted to upgrade the Palm to a Treo 650 this Christmas because my Noikia cell phone contract has almost expired. The Palm w was last Christmas present to myself and the previous Christmas(2003) the cell phone was on a holiday deal from Bell Canada.

I was able open a CD and read pdfs on the Debian laptop. I used KDiskFree to mount the CD ROM drive. I have started to use this laptop for statistics studies.

I repartitoned the external USB 160GB drive on my eMac and made a partition large enough to hold the iTunes folder for the 60GB iPod. I did have to change the iTunes folder location back to the eMac temporarily, so needed to trash about 10 GB of songs to do this. I am now putting my music CD's back into iTunes. I am having trouble because songs I bought recently from the iTunes store are on the iPod but not in iTunes. Apple iTunes support have send me a web link to a help page on how to transfer songs on the iPod so I will read that and see if I can solve my problem.

I was able to find a source for eMacs. So I may buy an eMac from the school computer store. I would get a superdrive model with 1 GB memory and maybe 250GB hard drive. I need some help to afford this.

My eMac is running out of hard drive space. I was looking for a newer model eMac but these are not for sale any longer. My best pic right now in the Apple line up would be an iMac with 20 inch screen. Perhaps this will be my next machine. I would also like an IBM thinkpad with wireless and Gigabyte ethernet and DVD burner. If I get a new thinkpad I will buy it a bigger laptop hard drive and install WinXP and Debian so that it is a dual boot machine. Right now the old compaq is running Debian 3.0 r 2 fine. I still need to take this Debian laptop onto the Internet and need to buy a PCMCIA ethernet card for it.

I was able to buy 64MB of RAM for my Compaq Presario 1210. It works much faster now. I took off Turbo Linux by installing Debian Linux 3.0 r 2 with KDE 2.2.2. It now works not bad and I had no X set up issues. It works fine and even with Octave and R installed has 460MB free on a 1.18 GB root partition.

I am working on the Compaq Presario 1210. I am installing Turbo Linux workstation 6.0.2.

Compaq Presario 1210

I removed Iomega tools from this laptop. I also removed Microsoft money. Parhaps I should have left Iomega tools on until I was sure I could connect to the Internet. I willl try to use a modem connection and also a PMICIA ethernet card now.

I am staying up late to help with the newspapers and then plan to sleep at about 8 AM Saturday. I will also do some research on the Internet over night on fixing up an old model pentium 1 compaq laptop that someone in my family would like to be able to use for email. I will also work on this computer a bit over night uninstalling some software to make space on the hard drive which should speed it up a bit too. It is a Compaq Presario 1210.

I was able to sell my broken IBM thinkpad tonight. We are ordering pizza. That was a very good laptop. I used it quite a lot for two years. My wife had stepped on the screen as I had left it out on the coffee table and it fell off. I got about 25% of the original price but this includes a new Linksys Ghz wireless router that the fellow traded me with some cash. The fellow, a high tech engineer and new Canadian from China is going to use it as a server and he will not use the screen. He gave me this particular router because it can be used with custom Linux software but I will probably just use it as it was originally designed to be used. But I won't set it up tonight as I have marking to do after we eat the pizza.

I am thinking of making a PSP web experience. I would use psp sized web pages and do graphic buttons and basically copy the longfinger map software which exists on the web. The thing is I can understand how they do this. I willl try some stuff tonight using dreamweaver and photoshop.

I paid for the iBlog software. It cost about 25$ Canadian dollars. It was purchased from an Indian software company. I am using this software to keep my statistics graduate school blog.

I designed a very simple web page for the Sony Playstation Portable.

I used dreamweaver to make a very simple links page for viewing on my PSP to use various commonly used web pages at the school web space.

I was invited and today attended a workshop on using SAS Enterprise Guide. We worked on computers in the Sprott School of business Lab E this morning. I found out about a meeting of the Ottawa Area SAS Users Society that is happening tomorrow morning. To attend this tomorrow I will go back to normal days with early mornings and early nights.

I installed SAS 8.1 on the WinXP side of the laptop. I also installed R 1.9 from my data mining course CD and then did a virus scan of the whole machine. That scan was done with Norton so it did not scan the Linux side of that computer. I have been using my iPod regularly and been listening to the Cyberpsych meets the PDA guy podcast from Australia.

After listening to the PDA guy I tried out iBlog. I used it to create a blog for my grad studies. I hosted it at my school web space. School internet? Lets just say this was part of the law and disorder internet in the 1990's.

I listened to some podcasts, which are in this case just spoken radio like entertainment. But the difference is that they are digital and thus can seemingly be saved for later use or reference. I have also listened to two or three albums of music. I have two reasons to listen to more music. One I need to put more relaxation into my schedule because even reading is work for me. And two I am taking up my music career a bit more including giving a free lesson today at about midnight, in blues playing and also major and minor scales on the guitar. In my studies today and in the podcast I was learning about PDA's as well and I mention this here because the applications I installed and tested on my Palm PDA today were artistic tools. One is called Fretboard and is very useful and not bad as an interface for what it does. It is able to show the fretboard positioning for chords, scales, and notes for a variety of fretted instruments and this is really its power is that it has many fretted instruments I have never played on nor have played with players of these instruments. Another music tool for the palm PDA was the software Tuning Fork which played throught the speaker on the palm perfect A notes at 440. I tried it to play 880 which it did but then the palm froze and needed to be soft reset.

The other PDA art tool was Q draw perhaps more in line with my school training in arts and I used it to draw a floor plan of our apartment. I was quicker and did a better drawing, than I have with other softwares like Illustrator and Photoshop. The reason perhaps is because doing this on the palm was more like holding a sketch pad with a pen instead of a mouse. Yet the various drawing tools are similar to other computer drawing programs where there are tools such as shapes and fill and of course text my all time favorite tool as I was trained to techincal drawing and map making. These types of drawings are incomplete without text labels.

Apparently this months Mac World has some stuff on using the PSP with the Macintosh computer. I may pick it up later this month. I just listened to a pod cast by the PDA guy on my new iPod 60GB. I have almost put 4 GB of songs on now. I have some podcasts( I have surfed the health catagory for podcasts at iTunes store so far) and about one thousand photos. The 60GB iPod photo took a price dive this week as the new models came out so I took advantage of this and picked up one of the old models at a reduced price. I also got an open box item from future shop for further savings. I got an Otter iPod case, l as I would recommend for an iPod, as these are water proof, dust proof, and some of their cases are crush proof. I have simple Otter case for my PDA not the full PDA case they make but just a box. I can work the iPod while it is protected in the case.

I am tempted to buy a 60GB iPod but have set a goal of debit repayment for next weekend that if I don't make it I don't consider the iPod further. I got my PSP working with the eMac again.

Talking about confusion I am thinking that emacs(which are not eMacs) are an answer to my computer needs from the 1980's. I wanted a word processor in those days but could not afford one for our Vic 20.

I have been reading these critcal works about the internet recently:

Rose, Ellen. User Error: Resisting the Computer Culture (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003).

Shenk, David. Data Smog : Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco, Calif. : Harper Edge, 1997).

Stoll, Clifford. High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (New York: Double Day, 1999).

Ellen Rose makes some interesting comments about hackers and how she can and can not say who these people are and what motivates them. I am curious to see this attempt being made at all.

on emacs: I think Richard Stallman must have been pretty smart of have assessed our needs as hackers in the 1980s and late 1970's by choosing to build a word processor but perhaps given computing needs of programmers this was not such a great move. He needed emacs for programming in other words writing code. But I cant even be sure that is why he made emacs that is just what I have read. Perhaps I should email him about this or check his web site. As opposed to writers and what we needed I am not so sure Richard Stallman the original author of the emacs software was really creating something free for authors and writers.

A sister worker sent me this link but I haven't checked it out yet. How to encourage women in computing
(http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/howto.html")

I worked with Dreamweaver for about two hours last night. I also did some Perl research on the web and also on a Perl books CD from O'Reilly. I am updating my blogs regularly. I downloaded all my law course outlines as pdf's to my palm pilot. I chatted at Yahoo using both chitchat and yahoo messenger yesterday. I bought some DVD+R's to use at school where they have DVD burners. I will back up my files soon by taking my USB 20 GB drive to school with the files on it and then burn these files to DVD. I did some planning of this back up Wednesday morning. I also made some back up CD's on my eMac of web files and work related files. I tried the wireless internet at school with my PSP but need to use pop up windows on this wireless network for it to work.

I did not yet buy an iPod. I used the T30 Thinkpad to change the songs on the PSP.

I have my first rack now. It is case for 10 U on wheels and is totally covered but not fully weather proof. It is lockable to a limted extent. I now need a good power bar for this rack. A dual pentium III server for this rack would cost about 400$ US or about 500$ CND. A cheap laptop might be a better idea. I am thinking of writing a book about open source music workstations. I know nothing about Linux music workstations so would present it after and as I learned these workstations.

I am just installing pdf's from my eMac desktop to my palm. I would also like to change the songs on my PSP but it doesn't seem to connect to the eMac and let me access the folder. The PSP does not show up in the finder window when I connect it. I almost bought an iPod yesterday. Maybe I will buy a 20GB iPod today.

I clicked a link in a virus email but luckly I was on my eMac so the exe file did nothing.

I am just installing Debian 3.1 r0 on the T30 Thinkpad. I have WinXP working on the first 29GB. I have an 8 GB FAT partition which is the D drive. But realise that it is Fedora Red Hat linux that can see and write to fat partitions. I am not sure about Debian. I am installing Debian into a 19GB partition. I have a 750MB swap partition. So basically today and Monday/Tuesday I have reinstalled all the operating systems on the T30. If I could replace the screen I would have the cool laptop system back in use. I may order a 256 MB RAM PC2100 chip for this laptop today at the school computer store.

I am copying my user account on the eMac and all the files and folders to my back up hard drive. This is about 10GB. I will perhaps wait a bit to make my DVD back ups. But this user account would be one thing to back up. Also I would back up to DVD, the My Documents folder from my windows machines.

I have the credit to buy a new laptop from futureshop. I also have the credit to buy a refurbished IBM from HBC.com. But of these sources are selling these laptops at higher costs than elsewhere and also this would be on credit which would be costlier in the long run too. I am getting more into buying music equipment these days.

My eMac computer is still working ok although MS Internet explorer is a bit buggy these days. The broken laptop can be my windows machine. And my used iBook might be here this week. So there is really no need for a new machine right now. I have at least two more computers here that can surf the net. I am keeping all my email on the eMac these days and can also back up this email. I also now have access to DVD burners at school and will be buying some blank DVD's and making some DVD backups soon. I may do that this weekend. I would use my 20GB USB drive to copy files off the eMac and thern burn them to DVD at school on the Learning Commons computers now available in our library.

My windows XP CD's arrived. I got both WinXP SP2 and WinXP for 64 bit computers. I installed the WinXP SP2 on the broken T30 laptop. I updated it at microsoft.com. I also went to IBM.ca and downloaded and installed all the drivers for this T30 running WinXP. I used an automated software installer at IBM. I am just copying my old WinXP my documents folder over to the new install. I will now reinstall Debian 3.1 using the Debian net install CD. Then I will be done with this T30 for the day.

I printed this blog in hard copy for the months of February to August and placed these printouts in my hard copy computer log book. I also have some R code and some C++ code and my XML dtd in this hard copy binder.

I bought a Belkin USB keyboard and Kensington USB mouse for the Thinkpad T30 so I can work comfortably at the external monitor with out the broken screen blocking the way. Both of these work fine in Win2K and Debian 3.1. I explored a little of the Debian net applications. Last night I installled R and SAS 8.2 on the Win2K side. R is already installed on the Debian side.

The clamshell iBook should arrive next week sometime. I will still need to buy it a larger hard drive and install Panther on it. I will also still need to install more memory.

If I get a new refurbished Thinkpad I will use the 60GB drive and reinstall WinXP and Debian 3.1 on the new Thinkpad.

I used the web today, not much email, some of my Palm and Dream Weaver. It is now Tuesday and I have not yet uploaded the pictures of my new PA but the pictures are taken and have been imported to iPhoto.

I installed Adobe Reader on the Macintosh and got some copies of book reviews from the journal The Information Society onto my palm W. I have been using my palm W for school email and have been paying 25$ a month for this. I am just about to install Avantgo on my Macintosh but actually I am installing an open source software to do this in Mac OS X which will work with the Avantgo web clipping service.

I have been making some web pages with dream weaver. I built a little bit of a fan web site for the TV show Stargate. I need to write a little more content for these web pages before Wednesday evening. I will do some of this tonight.

I am mostly working on my eMac for everyday work. I did get a 160GB external USB hard drive by Western Digital. I made four partitions and left two partitions free. I made one of the first ones 60GB and the other 14GB. These two are Mac extended journalling partitions. I copied the desktop, email and user to these partitions. So some simple copy file back ups have been done. I just disconnected the hard drive tonight. I will do this copy once a month.

So this goes back to my two 160GB drives with a network USB connector. I will wait until the Linksys USB hard drive network connector becomes a bit cheaper and also get two other 160GB drives for general (none back up) use but I will also wait until these drives become cheaper. The new 160GB drive cost about 280$.

Speaking of costs I have also been upgrading my PA equipment and that has cost hundreds of dollars. I am getting a rack case for this music gear and might buy some music rack cases for computers at some point. May be later this fall I will buy a small 1U or 2U HP server with Pentium III dual processors and about 60GB hard drives. This would be to do music on the server maybe as a Linux workstation may be as a WinXP or WinVista workstation. Maybe dual boot would work well. I would need at least one PCI slot on the server too for a music interface card. At least I can use the music store for a supplier of rack cases. I think I will take some pictures now of my new PA gear and place them on our musical blog.

The iBook is being shipped a second time. I am hoping I can use the older iBook for my laptop and not need to buy a new laptop. I am considering buying another refurbished IBM/Lenovo laptop near the end of the school term. I could maybe capitalise on Christmas sales.

Nothing much new with my computers. I did order a 160GB hard drive to do back ups for the eMac. As soon ago, as 3 years, a 20GB drive would have been enough. I don't have a DVD burner yet.

I sort of did some bidding on a replacement laptop screen for my Thinkpad, this evening. In the end the bidding got too high.

I then retired to work on my laptop hooked up to an external monitor. I installed some software on the Win2K side of the computer. I have installled WinZip, Adobe Reader, FireFox, Black Ice, Lotus Smart Suite, I had trouble installing Illustrator 8.0. I also installed the Palm Desktop on the Win2K.

Speaking of the Palm, I tried installing some Palm softwares I had paid 2$ for namely Chess annd Checkers on my Tungsten W but neither worked very well. Oh well 2$ down the drain.

More photos of Thinkpad T30

More photos of Thinkpad T30

more photos of Thinkpad T30

Photos of Thinkpad T30

I have been using the laptop with an external monitor and installed xcircuit, R, Emacs, ESS and a GNU Go game on the Debian OS. I also surfed a bit this morning in Debian but mostly this was window shopping surfing. I am writing my blogs and doing school work surfing this morning using my eMac. I could sell my thinkpad back to IBM. I am also thinking that using it with the external monitor would be ok and that it might be worth it to keep and even upgrade the RAM by 256MB for 50$. I read about the first half hour of Learning Emacs in 24 hours.

My laptop is still in the shop and so far they haven't been able to fix it. I am hopeful but it may be a lost cause. I was able today to fax using my Mac. So that functionality is ok on the Mac. So I may not need a windows computer for that.

I was able to get my PSP updated to system 2.0. I can now wirelessly surf the internet on my play station portable. I learned a little of how to use it and bookmarked my personal home page and my wife's poetry page. I will now test playing Apple iTunes files on it.

The WinNT would not see the zip drive and also the WinNT would not work with the IBM download for drivers. So I tried Fedora Core and it did both. It downloaded the drivers and also saw and worked with the USB zip drive. So I downloaded only the ethernet driver. I then copied it to the Win2K machine and installed this driver. I was able then to connect the Win2K to the Internet and updated windows first. I then use an automatic drivers update software at IBM and got all the drivers installed and even updated the bios on the laptop. I also completed copying the old My Documents folder to the Win2K.

I am taking the laptop to the school's repair shop to have it looked at tomorrow or today. I also need to install Debian again.

I installed Windows 2000 successfully on my new laptop hard drive. My Windows XP CD is no good. I will now reinstall Debian. I need to download about 20 drivers or more from IBM for Windows 2000 to work properly on the IBM Thinkpad. I can not download the drivers on the Macintosh, so I am going to boot up my server running Windows NT and see if I can download them to a zip disk. Then I will transfer them to the Thinkpad. This will also test the server running Windows NT and its USB connection because I am using a USB zip drive. I have never tried to get anything to work in the server's USB connections. I am at the moment copying the old My Documents folder from Windows XP to Windows 2000 using my USB hard drive on the Thinkpad.

I emailed the school's hardware repairs services and asked if they could fix the laptop's screen. They charge 35$ per hour. The new screen may cost a lot.

I got the X windows working on the T30 but have some problems still with the mouse. I used dpkg-reconfigure. I used information at this page on the web to learn about the xf86Config-4 file. http://ozlabs.org/~jk/docs/T30+linux/

I am reading about SGML, IP law, and e-business this morning.

Recovery of the laptop!

It is only the screen that was broken on the laptop. But this is a key part. On Monday I will call IBM and see if they can fix it. I was able to connect the laptop to an external monitor and access everything and keep it working. I took the entire My Documents folder off using a USB hard drive of 20GB size. I am able to access all the word processing documents on the Macintosh computer. These are most of my key school documents. The only other documents that might be windows only are SAS program files. I may not need these too dearly this year as I may not study much in the way of statistics this year. I also took the email off the laptop be exporting it to Netscape and then copying this folder full of email to the Mac mail program. In the end I had just bought a new 60GB hard drive for the IBM laptop and installed it and tried to put on the operating systems WinXP and Debian. Both failed at this point. With the Debian though it is just a matter of getting X windows working.

My laptop is broken

My laptop got knocked off the coffee table and is now unusable. Thus this linux plan is on hold now. I will have to use my Macintosh computer now. This accident will test my back up process. I did not yet make an end of July back up so I will be using my end of June back up CD. I did make a back up CD of email at the end of July. Now I need to decide what I will do for a laptop. Perhaps the used iBook will be my laptop. Perhaps I will buy another IBM laptop. For now I am using my eMac computer.

I got some help from our local Linux novice email list. Farrah Rashid sugested he had simply divided his drive into two patitions. In the first he had installed WinXP then simply rebooted and installed Debian from CD in the second partition with a swap patition of 1 GB. I would use a swap partition of 512 MB but I think I may upgrade the RAM at some point so a 1 GB partition should be good.

With this method I am wondering about the Grub or Boot Magic. In other words how do you handle the dual boot up?

The new hard drive was shipped from Vancouver yesterday. In terms of initial format and and partitioning, I know I am limited in the number of partitions I can make. I was thinking of making one boot partition and then two reasonably similar 30GB sized partitions for each of the two operating systems. The web page I meantioned below suggested that Grub will not work well with WinXP. This author suggested using Boot Magic in its own Win FAT partition of a fair size that both operating systems could view and access. Boot Magic comes free with Partition Magic. So this is perhaps undecided at present.

Researching the install of Fedora and WinXP

I found this page at a Linux on Thinkpads ring site http://www.phys.cwru.edu/~covault/linux_fedora_core3_x23.html I read most of the page. I would have to buy partition magic for this method and this guy kept his original WinXP because he did not want to buy XP. So two differences in my senario. I have a copy of WinXP from school that my tuition has paid for and two I am installing on a new hard drive. But I also learned from this web page that Fedora core is an easy OS to install on a Thinkpad in terms of drivers for the various Thinkpad parts.

I sold my old Duron chip and mother board and RAM. I got 18$ for these. Just two years ago the RAM cost close to 100$ and three years ago the motherboard and chip were about 300$. I got about one full year of use of these parts. The computer these were from was my 16th personal computer. It did not last long. It was frustrating later on in its life. I am left with the case, hard drive and floppy drive now. I can now buy it a new motherboard and chip and RAM, if I have time and money to do this.

Major project: install WinXP and Debian Linux on my IBM Thinkpad T30 laptop

My next major Linux install will be to get this Thinkpad T30 working as a dual boot machine. I will download and install Debian as well as WinXP on this laptop. I still need to research the Debian step. I also need to do back up with the 20GB USB drive but the My Documents folder on my Thinkpad is only some 6 GB in size so this USB 20GB drive will do this no problem. I must remember to do a Win Fat format on this USB drive with my eMac computer.

I am buying a 60GB hard drive, a 20 GB USB drive and a 16 channel mixing board.

I did a fair amount of shopping today. I won on ebay a 20GB USB hard drive for a fair price. I also put a down payment on a Behringer 16 channel mixing board. I also must now pay for a 60GB hard drive for my IBM laptop and from this same ebay seller I bought an iLife DVD. It is difficult to manage all this spending and money. The mixer will possible make money for me. I was able to make 40$ this past month with our PA system. I will have spent about 550$ on this PA by the end of the summer. But my original PA system has paid for itself. It originally cost about 1600$. I have earned this much with it from about 1993 to 1999.

I won on ebay.ca a 60GB hard drive I can use in my Thinkpad for the dual boot install. I have my school provided copy of WinXP. I will install either Fedora or Debian as the Linux OS. I will need to do some more research into installing Linux on the Thinkpad T30. I also won a copy of iLife 04. I am still bidding on a 512 MB RAM chip and another 60GB hard drive for the iBook with the same seller. This will cost approximately 350$ in total.

My computers are all running fine now except for a few of the Thinkpad project machines. My main Thinkpad is fine. My new used iBook should arrive via UPS this week. In about a week I will purchase a 60GB hard drive for the iBook with Panther installed on the hard drive by the seller of the drive. I will also buy from this same ebay seller a 512MB RAM chip for ths iBook. So in about three weeks just on time for school I should have two well functioning laptops. My old IBM PC server is presently up and running Red Hat Fedora in my office. This post is being written on my Thinkpad T30 in the living room.

I am just doing my back up process now. I am printing my blogs in hard copy. I will save my outlook store folder on a CD. The outlook store folder is soon going to be too big for a CD. I will probably be able to delete some email from this folder though. I will also back up the my documents folder and my school work folder to CD.

I installed Fedora core 3 on my friend's HP pentium III 500 MHz computer. It really had no problems except for some error messages perhaps because we were using a 65 GB hard drive.

I did not do my back ups yet. Instead I helped a friend by installing Fedora Core 3 on his computer. It took me about 4 hours to update the software.