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Amusing, interesting, and otherwise notable pages that I've chanced upon
in my travels across the net. Have fun! Should anything be redirected,
or not exist anymore, I'd really appreciate a quick note :-)
High Flight One of
my favourite poems, written during WWII by John Gillespie Magee,
Jr. The most beautiful poeticization of flight ever concieved.
Project E.U.N.U.C.H I have to hand it
to these guys... anyone that loads a freezer up with 486 bits, bottles of vodka, and
overclocks the thing to 247 Mhz deserves a link here. Only the British, only the
British...
My friend dreal's page.
He writes extremely powerful and beautiful poetry, that I think many of
us can relate to. Well worth the read.
A great C++ Library
Reference by P.J. Plauger. The legal restrictions are lame, but the
reference provides a decent, in depth explanation of the library.
OS 8
Developer Documentation. Another sunrise site, this time with a huge
amount of information about writing programs under MacOS 8.
The Macintosh
Programmer's Link Library has a giant collection of links related to
all
facets of programming and development on the Macintosh. This is another
one of those sites that you load, begin reading, and when you look up
again, the sun is rising.
The Dictionary of
Programming Languages is an attempt to catalog languages both alive
and dead for posterity. They include some amusing comments on INTERCAL,
so I like them. It's fascinating to see the multitude of ways in which
electrons can be conceptualized.
Procedures to
be followed in the wake of detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. A
document published by the SETI Institute. Very interesting and
informative reading.
SETI @ Home is a
distributed computing project that allows you to use the spare CPU cycles
on your computer to crunch radio telescope data for UC Berkeley
researchers looking for extra-terrestrial signals. Well worth
participating in... and the screensaver that runs while it's operational
is neat to look at, and a good conversation piece.
A really unusual Mac
SE, that has a clear case! It's really interesting to see pages that
document unusual versions of common system hardware.
Powerbook Utilities that look rather interesting. They're useless if
you don't have a Powerbook, but as I have one, they could prove to be
quite useful.
More cool
Powerbook links. I'm not sure how many of them are up to date, but
they look worth exploring at some point.
More electronics info than
can swing a stick at. Well, you could swing a stick at it, but that'd
result in a trip to Fry's to get a new monitor. A very comprehensive site
with links to pretty much every electronics topic in existence. You lose
points on your Geek Purity Test if you don't go here at least once.
Everything is a
collaborative weighted network. Anyone can create nodes which contain
scraps of information, then link them to other nodes in the network.
It's a fascinating project, and I'm expecting it to become sentient in
about a week or so. Go there and play before you find it coming to you
:-)
Stockmaster is a site that
provides comprehensive information on stocks and mutual funds. The level
of detail on this site is amazing, ranging from simple daily activity
tables down to the mind boggling detail of individual SEC filings,
earnings statements, annual and quarterly financials, etc. Best of all,
it's free. If you're at all interested in the market, this is a great
site to explore.
Slashdot is a tech news site and
discussion forum that tends to be very Linux focused. It's quite an
amazing resource. The fact that it gets about 500,000 hits on an average
day should give you a fair idea of just how cool it is.
AF
2025 is part of a strategic analysis by the United States Air Force of
strategic situations and operational capabilities that may exist in 2025.
If you skip past the boring flow charts, the majority of which are
unreadable anyway, there are some fascinating descriptions of military
technology given. I've yet to read the whole report, but other parts
appear to be interesting as well, so you may wish to spend some time here.
NetCopter provides an up to date,
comprehensive look at Internet-wide network packet loss and ping times.
Quite useful information if you know how to use it.
Internet Weather takes a more
visual approach to Internet 'weather' via a series of animated gifs and
java applets that display ping latencies from various locations to the
company in Austin, Texas. It's worth noting that what is now NetCopter
used to be at www.internetweather.com, but Matrix Information and
Directory Services, the trademark owners of 'Internet Weather' sued Clear
Ink, the company that runs NetCopter. You can find more info on this
particular issue at a page that NetCopter
has set up, explaining the situation.
Dictionaries
of every size, shape and color. Being the word buff that I am, this is
fascinating. It could be a great source for AI research, especially in
the field of psycholinguistics.
Textfiles is a collection of over
9000 text files that date from the 70's and 80's. There's a marvellous
and diverse collection of stuff here. Even if you weren't online in the
BBS days, you'll certainly find something interesting and humorous here.
I've only just scratched the surface of the site, and there's literally
days worth of material to read through. There's a good reason it's at the
top of this page. Probably one of the most incredible and unusual
libraries I've found on the net so far. The green and black monochromatic
layout of the site is cool also, and really works well with the subject
matter. This site brings back many many memories.
TIGRE is a Gamma Ray Telescope being
developed jointly by UCR's High Energy Astrophysics department, and NASA.
Cool!
As We May Think was written by Vannevar Bush for The Atlantic in July,
1945. In it, he talks about accessing and managing information by way of
a device called a 'Memex'. He talks about the concept of hyperlinking,
and other information access concepts that are only coming into play
today. He would have loved the web.
Project Gutenburg is a library of
literature. Extraordinarily comprehensive and valuable, it's worth
bookmarking for all time as a valuable research resource.
Internet SMS (Short
Message Services) This is a pretty neat link. By keying in the cell
network, and a person's phone number, you can send a 150 character message
directly to someone's cell phone, anywhere in the world. There's a very
large number of networks supported.
Norwegian in Five
Minutes a Month This is a well laid out site that teaches Norwegian in
easy to digest bites.
Reptilian Associates Y2k
Preparedness Site Whether you're technically literate or not, this
document is a must read. Attempts to rectify problems in our information
infrastructure are being done too little, too late. Your world will change
in late 1999, and early 2000. The only question is by how much? This
document provides a thorough analysis of what's happening, what's
happened, and how you can survive. It also includes many links to related
sites.
Unfiltered Metaspy
An unfiltered look at current search terms being entered into the
Metacrawler search engine by users. Very interesting to see what people
are looking for. Click this link at your own risk. Content is unfiltered,
and may (almost certainly will be) inappropriate for children and other
sensitive groups. I take no responsibility for what you see if you click
here.
Anonymizer The
Anonymizer service allows you to navigate the web in privacy, without
leaving behind tell tale domain, browser, and other info with every site
you access. Other secure services are also offered. I'd be wary though.
They're rumored to keep very accurate and detailed records of what their
users are up to. Don't assume that you're safe, simply because you're
using them.
TUCOWS is an
awesome collection of Internet software with sections for almost every
platform. Well worth browsing through to find useful utilities and new
toys.
MP3
Masterlist is a great way to fill up your hard drive. This site has
an extraordinarily comprehensive and well organized link library of
MP3s.
PureMac is a
great, well organized collection of Mac software. Well worth checking
out!
The UCR Visual Cognition and
Performance Laboratory My place of work. The web site is screaming
for an update though.
The Altavista Photo
Finder is one of the most incredible sites I've encountered in a long
time. Type in a keyword, and it'll find photos relating to that keyword.
It can even do neat stuff like search for images that are visually similar
to those found, etc. Very very cool!!
Life without User Friendly just
wouldn't be any fun at all. A great comic strip about the wacky neurotic
characters of Columbia Internet. May the Open Source be with you.
Slashdot Lots of news
regarding Linux, Open Source, and other interesting things. I saw the
server the other day. It was big, white, and pretty nondescript, unlike
the page, which often resembles a firestorm that puts Baghdad to
shame.
The Onion... is America's finest source
of really funny (albeit fictional) news stories. Great for bringing a
smile to your face. Try it out.
Bananas at Large is a great, well
stocked music store located in San Rafael, CA. They have a friendly staff
who really know their stuff. Well worth checking out.
Macintosh Components Engineered
(MCE) Is a cool company that exclusively serves the Macintosh
Powerbook community. Lots of great products!
Cybermeals looks like a really cool
service. It acts as a digital Waiters on Wheels, and allows you to order
a meal from local restaurants over the net. I haven't tried it out yet,
but it looks like a handy link to keep around, especially as I'm usually
hungry and sitting in front of a net connection!
Bill Gates
dressed as Hitler I think I'm going to make this the desktop
picture... on my Mac :P
Cool
toys A neat little /. feature that outlines some really neat toys to
fill your pockets (and empty your bank account) with.
The ultimate nerd
workstation. I want one. Mom, Dad? :P
The UCR Psycholinguistics and
Computational Cognition Lab The lab across the hallway from ours. A
truly wacky and cool bunch of people. They have their own t-shirts, a
museum of Led Zeppelin posters, and good coffee which I've been meaning to
go over and try to snag a cup of! They do some really cool research
too. In retrospect, I should have added this link a long time
ago.
Google! is a really cool search engine
that uses referential link ranking to determine page importance. I tried
it out, and the search results it produced were some of the most relevant
I'd ever seen. Still in alpha, too! I made it my default engine. And
the best thing about it? NO BANNER ADS! (But for how long?)
The home of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
International, the de-facto standard for public key encryption over
the
net. Well worth checking out and downloading the software for. My
security information can be found at my contact page.
The one.. the only...yes, it's the INTERCAL Resource Page
INTERCAL is the official Programming Language From Hell. In the words of
Eric Raymond, "...Expressions that look like line noise... Control
constructs that will make you gasp, make you laugh, and possibly make you
hurl." Well worth checking out, even if you're not foolish enough to take
the challenge of actually trying to make a Hello World program in the
language. You'll wish you'd tried to learn machine language for the Z80
instead.
More will be added soon for your enjoyment
:-)
fib@lumiere.net
4.20.2000
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