I too was a COBOL and Pascal coder in the 1980s, but wrote mostly in Assembler, then C, for airline reservation and travel automation systems. In the first half of the 1990s I was writing less code and doing more "analyst" stuff. I got a consulting job in 1995 which forced me to upgrade skills and learn configuration and scripting for Solaris, OS/2, Windows NT/2000. I then worked as a secondary researcher and essentially did no coding, but read and did self-study, including studying Linux. In 2000, I went back to university and learnt Matlab, and at the same time invested in my first Linux distro: SuSE Linux 6.3. I subsequently obtained a job at the uni which required me to learn Fortran 90. For my masters project I taught myself C++ by writing an open source library, GluCat. In a later job, I had to quickly learn Labview, IDL, Java and MySQL. I am now a postdoc. My teaching now involves Python and Scilab.

My point is, if you know how to program, you just pick up a language manual and do it. Preferably do it using Linux, where you don't need to pay for compilers and tools, and the documentation is all on the DVD or on the web. Sure, the learning curve is initially steep, but if you give yourself some credit, you can get started. As a next step, start your own small open source project on SourceForge, or join a simple, small project. I have found, as a coder, the large projects seem complicated and hard to get my head around.

Left out:

1.5. Mkramfs ran out of disk space on the boot partition. I had to delete the files for one old kernel and continue the upgrade from there.

Also, Flash does not fully work in Firefox.

I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.04 on an Intel machine, with the following problems (from memory, corrections, if any, will be in a reply).

1. The upgrade process hung, so I killed it and ran "dpkg --configure -a". The upgrade then completed.
2. After logging in I noticed that quanta was missing. It looks like quanta is not ready for KDE 4.3.2. I fixed this by downgrading kdewebdev to KDE 3.5.10: The KDE software manager KPackageKit was not up to the job of sorting out dependencies, and complained about them one at a time. I used Synaptic instead.
3. The screen was flickering, so I used the Display button in System Settings to change the resolution and refresh rate from 1280x1024 @ 85 Hz. After a hiccup or two (eg. the top 1/2 of the screen not displaying) I changed the settings to 1600x1200 @ 75 Hz. This now works fine.

Everything now seems to work, including the desktop effects.

Julian Havil's book, Gamma, is both a popular mathematics book and a mathematics book. It gives both history and results.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7494.html

I briefly read the article. The idea is to discourage certain high school students from taking a class which (a) they are likely to fail or at least do poorly, and (b) they will derive little or no benefit from, namely higher level mathematics. The key problem is how to determine if both (a) and (b) apply to a particular student.

Personally, I'd prefer it if first year science and engineering students knew something about matrices and complex numbers before they begin their university studies, but only if what they know is correct. It would also help students who need statistics.

On the other hand, it helps nobody if certain underprepared high school students struggle, crash and burn in higher mathematics.

So, maybe discourage those who fail ordinary level mathematics in Year 10 from taking higher mathematics in Year 11 and 12 (NSW system). But, maybe encourage others, especially those who keep on going with puzzles, maths competitions, etc. (ie. mathaholics, Parabola readers).