Older blog entries for peat (starting at number 2)

Sunday night. 3 am. Another evening that went far too late.

Another chapter coming together, mostly. I now see why TeX works the way it does. If only I'd known about this a few years ago. Oh well, no time like the present. Heh. Scary to think that I can finally do away with most of those despicable word processors. Sadly, most journals in my field wouldn't know a TeX document from a ... um ... you get the idea.

I was approached to give a talk at my alma mater on Linux and Virtual Communities to a course on Cyberspace. Last year, I did the same with a talk comparing Linux and NT for an assembly language course. The irony is particularly delicious: I graduated from the Environmental and Resouce Studies program, and not CS - I didn't take any CS courses during my time there.

I figure I have five days to get the talk together. Fun. So many possibilities. Got to write them down tomorrow. After sleep.

Linux is making inroads into the environmental science field, finally; The ERS program chair mentioned that he'd like a few faculty and students to meet with us and 'chat' informally about what Linux could do for them. I wish I had more than 30 mins. Small school, small classes, great faculty-student ratio, little cash. Lots of potential. Some days I wish either I had a sponsor or I was wealthy enough to go around to places like this and consult / assist on migrating the lab / teaching IT infrastructure to Linux.

Hey, I can dream, right? :)

Weather is starting to get warm again. Been in shorts the last three days, walked a fair bit. 8 km Fri, 9 on Sat, and 3 today. Not stiff either, surprisingly. Metrep looks good for tomorrow. I should walk downtown (~6 km), and around a bit. Maybe time to check Mont Royal's walking trails.

Sleep well. (TTAGGG)n for now.

Woof.

It's been a really busy few days here. I've mostly been hanging out with a colleague (Lyta) and watching her team play in the National Goalball championships. Neat game.

After my conversations with Lyta, it's becoming clearer to me that I'm going to have to learn more about docbook and sgml in general. There's so much info out there, and it seems to me that as more of it becomes marked up in that way, it should be easier to get that information out into formats more amenable to allowing the content to be presented in different ways (seen / heard / felt).

While I'm at it, I guess I should add php to that list. After reading the discussion on the OSWG web site and mailing list, it's finally getting through my small brain that the relationship between content and presentation can be very tenuous indeed. I wonder how hard it would be to take a freshmeat-like site and set up two or three different themes, say 'eye-popping' ,'nice' and 'text'. hm.

Workwise, it's been slow (a change is good, tho) ... I lost mail for a couple of days (translation: I'm coming to hate NT more and more on a daily basis). The gateway is now up, however, thanks to yugami, vicman, ales and TomG; and though I still have to tighten some rules, I think things are in decent shape for the time being. dsl is nice. Better yet, I'm finally using esox for things like web browsing. I can hardly wait to convert acip (dual p200 box currently running en tee) to linux. I suspect it'll be a much happier fish that way.

Speaking of work, it's midnight already, and I have a report to write before I can go to bed. Fare thee well.

Thesis paper written up, given to supervisor. Need to assemble rest of doc (title page, main intro, etc). It gets handed in soon.

Yay!

I finally have time to learn C, perl, python and php! :)

First job is to port the SGPL code from some previous work to Gnumeric.