Computer Hints

Links to Resources

UTM Computing Services
Miscellaneous handouts
- Unix/Linux
  - unix handout (short version)
  - unix handout (longer version)
- The emacs text editor
  - emacs handout (short version)
  - emacs handout (longer version)
- SAS Institute website
- SAS Documentation
  - SAS/STAT
  - The Whole Manual
- Get your own copy of SAS under site license from the U of T information commons. Neither necessary nor recommended for this course, but those who want to use SAS on the PC after graducation will find the transition to SAS for Windows an easy one.
Adobe Acrobat Reader: If you are connecting from a computer not located on campus, you may need to download this free software in order to see the handouts and assignments. It's probably already on your computer, though.
Printing files at home
SSH (Secure Shell)
Copy-paste in Putty

Using SAS

An important part of this course is use of the SAS statistical package. The software will not be located on your computer. It runs on a server, and you control it over the Internet. SAS is available to students free of charge on UTM's tuzo and river machines. Undergraduates will use tuzo, and graduate students will use river. The full IP addresses are:

tuzo: tuzo.utm.utoronto.ca
river: river.utm.utoronto.ca

You will use your UTORID login and password. Undergraduate accounts are already set up, but graduate students will need to go to room A2039 (South Building) or call 905-569-4455 and ask them to set up your account.

Chapter 2 of the online textbook contains an introduction to SAS, and also to the unix operating system used by tuzo and river. Well, actually they use linux, but for the most part, the differences between linux and unix are just legal, moral and political. That is, they do not matter to most people.

You will be able to use SAS from the computer labs on campus. You can also run it over the Internet from home or some other remote location. This is convenient, but several issues are involved.

For security reasons, you need to connect using software that probably did not come with your computer. The protocol is SSH, which stands for "Secure SHell." When you use SSH, information travels over the Internet in encrypted form, so hackers have trouble intercepting your password and other information. You can download a free copy of SSH below
In the computer labs, SAS is easy to find in the menus. Running SAS this way starts up the SAS Display Manager. It's really quite nice once you get used to it, but
- It's much easier to learn how to use the Display Manager if you already know how to use SAS from the command line, the way it will be illustrated in lecture and the online text.
- The display manager does not work over SSH, so if you are running SAS from a remote location you will have to do so from the command line anyway.

There is a PC version of SAS, and you can get a copy and run it on your own computer if you really insist. The SAS Institute makes a lot of money selling its software to big corporations as well as universities, research institutes and so on; SAS is expensive! But U of T has paid them a lot of money for a site license, and you can get your own copy of SAS for just $110 a year. It locks up on July 1st. Note that SAS will not run on any "Home" version of Windows. You will have to upgrade to Windows Vista Business (available at the Licensed Software Office) or Windows Vista Ultimate. All this is likely to be more trouble than it is worth.

SSH (Secure Shell)

With an Internet connection, SSH applications give you a text-only connection to tuzo and other unix machines from your home computer. From tuzo's prompt, you can run programs such as SAS, R and emacs. SSH is secure because what you type and see on your screen is encrypted at one end and decrypted at the other end. This prevents hackers from stealing your password as you log on, and also prevents nosy people from spying on the highly sensitive and confidential work you do in your courses.

Different SSH programs are recommended, depending on the operating system that you are using. To use these programs, you must be connected to the Internet, say with a broadband connection or via PPP over your phone line.

Linux: SSH is built in. Suppose your login name on tuzo or river is botulism. At the linux prompt, type
ssh -l botulism tuzo.utm.utoronto.ca
That -l is a lower case L. If your login name on your linux machine is also botulism, you can omit the "-l botulism" part.
Mac OS X: SSH is built in. Suppose your login name on tuzo or river is botulism. Start up the terminal application on your Mac. At the prompt, type
ssh -l botulism river.utm.utoronto.ca
That -l is a lower case L. If your login name on your Mac is also botulism, you can omit the "-l botulism" part.
MS Windows: A number of free SSH programs are available. PuTTY is nice. You can Download it from here.
Recommended download: "Windows installer for everything except PuTTYtel." To connect, put tuzo.utm.utoronto.ca for host name. If you are a grad student, put river.utm.utoronto.ca.

In any of these SSH programs, the first time you connect to a host, you will be told that the program can't verify that this host is really what it appears to be. Do you want to trust it? SSH is just being sanely paraniod. Say yes.

Printing files at home

This is always an issue. When you use SAS on a remote linux machine like tuzo or river, you have an account on the remote machine. When you run SAS, your log and list files (which you need to print and bring to the quizzes) are written on the remote machine's hard drive, in a directory controlled by you. If you are in a computer lab and you use the lpr command to print, everything is fine; it comes out on the lab's printer if you feed the machine some money. But when you are at home, you need to print on the computer there, and the printer you have at home is almost certainly not part of any university network. So you need to transfer the files to the hard drive of your home computer in order to print them.

If you are a Microsoft Windows victim, I mean user, one good way to do this is with a free program called WinSCP. I have not tried it myself, but I have heard good things. You can Download it from here.

If you are a linux or Mac user, just use sftp from the command line.

A more primitive way to get files to your home computer for printing is to email them to yourself. Try
mail yourname@yourisp.com < fname
where yourname@yourisp.com is your email address and fname is the name of the file, like hw3.lst.

Copy-paste in PuTTY

Suppose you want to transfer fairly small amounts of text between the unix machine and your PC. In a normal Windows application like Explorer or Word, the edit menu has Copy and Paste items -- or you can use control-C and control-V. But PuTTY has no menus, and Control-C and control-V don't do what you might expect, especially if emacs is running. But you can still copy-paste; here's how:

When you select a block of text in PuTTY, it's automatically copied into a buffer; you don't need to do anything extra to copy it. So to copy from unix to your PC, select in PuTTY, click over on a Word document or whatever, and then choose Paste from the edit menu.
In PuTTY, you paste by clicking on the right mouse button. So, to get text from Word into emacs, have emacs running in a PuTTY window. In Word, select the text and choose Copy from the edit menu. Click on the PuTTY window (left click). Then right click, and the text will be pasted in.