For 15+ years I've used PC's running MS Windows. Then I got a Mac and started exploring the vast range of Unix-like Open Source software available. This led me to the world of Linux, where I settled on grml, a Debian based distro. I've found a framebuffer console can be quite fast and usable running applications like Mutt, Vim, Irssi, elinks, w3m and VFU in a screen session. When the need arises for more graphical applications, X-windows running a light-weight window manager like iceWM, Fluxbox, or xmonad along with the ROX-Filer file manager seems to work fairly well.

Below is a smattering of computer/software related links. My configuration files and shell scripts are here: code

internet / webdesign

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
An organization charged with developing common protocols for the World Wide Web. Check out their html 4.01 Spec.

Bare Bones Guide to HTML
Concise guide for looking up the correct forms of tags when creating Web pages.

Index DOT Html & Css
Lots of information on HTML and CSS

Characters and encodings
Character code issues, special characters in HTML, character problems in web authoring, ascii control codes, ISO 8859 character sets, guide to the unicode standard, characters in SI notations

IRT.org
articles, FAQ’s and other resources on a range of internet related technologies.

A List Apart
“…explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards.”

Web Style Guide
Online book covering many aspects of website design

Domain Name System
What the DNS is and the importance of universal resolvability.

Country-Code TLD WhoIs
A list of international top-level domains by country, including liks to sponsoring organization's name, and technical and administrative contacts.

The Internet Society (ISOC)
Organization home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards “…provides leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet…to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world.”

ICANN
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers “...responsible for IP address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic and country code Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions.”

traceroute
Links to hundreds of different points of access for the traceroute utility, probe the paths data packets take through the Internet.

Mother Earth Mother Board
An essay on the global net of cables and wires spanning the continents and oceans, connecting the world wide web.

Free / Open-Source Software

Freshmeat
“...index of Unix and cross-platform software... Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license, are meticulously cataloged in the freshmeat database, and links to new applications are added daily.”

SourceForge
“...Open Source software development web site. SourceForge.net provides free hosting to Open Source software development projects with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code.”

BerliOS
“The goal of BerliOS is to provide support for different interest groups in the area of Open Source Software (OSS)...the developers and users...commercial manufacturers...as well as support companies.”

Vim
Highly configurable, efficient text editor, evolved from the vi editor. Great community, open source & free. Check out the documentation and the wiki. Available for Unix, Linux, Macintosh, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Amiga, OS/2, and other platforms. Mac OS X 10.3 and later comes with a terminal version of Vim, and a carbon GUI version is available here: Mac Vim. My decision to settle on using the Vim editor was largly influenced by reading My life with text editors.

w3m
text-mode web-browser, an excellent alternative to browsers like lynx or links. “supports a robust set of features including: frame and table rendering, Japanese language support, locally run cgi scripts to test html output (requires *no* webserver), small memory footprint...quite fast, colour :), SSL support thru the openssl library, cookie support...” Also supports viewing inline images. Fast, lightweight.

ConTeXt
A macro package for TeX, an alternative to LaTeX, providing the advantage of being compatible with Plain TeX, ie, you can write a document mixing ConTeXt and TeX syntax (LaTeX isn't compatible in this way). Here's a Help Page for ConTeXt beginners.

Stx2any
A structured text syntax and conversion utility “...combines the benefits of structured markup (mid-level semantic markup such as DocBook or HTML) with the ease and readability of plaintext...a distribution of software tools for...(converting Stx) into HTML, man, LaTeX and DocBook XML formats”

Markdown
Text-to-HTML formatting syntax and Perl Script that converts an easy to read & write plain text formatting syntax to XHTML or HTML. Also, SmartyPants translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities. Plug-ins available for BBEdit, Movable Type, and Blosxom. Free.

pandoc
A general markup converter, converts files from one markup format to another. It can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, groff man, RTF, DocBook XML, and S5 HTML slide shows.

ImageJ
Image processing and analysis, Open Source Java application, Mac OS X & OS 9, Linux and Windows.

GMT (Generic Mapping Tools)
Open source mapping software for generating maps, UNIX application requiring command line input. A gui option is provided by iGMT, with an X11 window interface. Online Map Creation is a web based application of GMT running on a server.

Celestia
Real-time space simulation of a 3-D universe, travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or beyond the galaxy…. Free, General Public License (GPL), available for Windows, UNIX and OS X.

MediaWiki
The software used by the Wikipedia free content encyclopedia and others, released under the GPL. More about Wikipedia this interview with founder Jimmy Wales.

SlashCode
The source code and database originally used to create Slashdot, customizable bulletin-board/message-board system using Perl, Apache and MySQL. Released under the GPL. Related links: Working with Slash Part 1 & Part 2, Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards, and Slash’s Wiki Plugin

OpenEEG project
Plans and software for do-it-yourself EEG biofeedback devices, available for free (GPL).

Beowulf Clusters
Scalable computing clusters running Linux “as simple as two networked computers each running Linux and sharing a file system, or as complex as 1024 nodes with a high-speed, low-latency network.”

Building Packages From Source

Windows-to-Linux roadmap From IBM’s website, for developers making the transition to Linux

Linux Newbie FAQ

Understanding Open Source Software
Explanation of free and open source software, comparison of various licenses (groklaw).

Comparison of free software licenses (wikipedia)

Open Source License Quick Reference Chart

FOSS Licensing / How to Make the Source Free or Open (Wikibooks)

Free and Open Source licenses
A chart comparing the major attributes of the most popular Free and Open Source Software licenses.

Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
O'Reilly Open Book -- full text freely available on line (in PDF)

GPLv2 vs GPLv3
The Two Seminal Licenses, Their Roots, Consequences and Repercussions

General Public License v2.0
GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

General Public License v3
GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Creative Commons Licenses

Philosophy of the GNU Project
Philosophy of the Free Software Movement (“free” pertains to freedom, not price).

Free as in Freedom
A book that “interweaves biographical snapshots of GNU project founder Richard Stallman with the political, social and economic history of the free software movement.”

The Cathedral and the Bazaar
A book by Eric Steven Raymond about the implications of the Open Source software revolution.

Open Source Initiative (OSI)
“dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community”

Greplaw
Interactive forum for dissemination and discussion of legal news concerning information technology, a production of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

EFF
Electronic Frontier Foundation - “ lawyers, volunteers, and visionaries working to protect your digital rights.”

Software Freedom Day

International Open Source Network
An initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

mac stuff

MacUpdate
Good place to look for Mac software, includes reader ratings, reviews/comments on a wide range of Mac software.

Mac Open Source Software Directory
A list of open source software available for Mac, from O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter.

FINK
A system for installing unix software on Mac OS X. FinkCommander, is a native OS X program that provides a very easy way to use FINK.

Cheap Impostor 2
PDF Page Imposition software

XeTeX
(say ‘zeetek’ ) - a merger of TeX with Unicode and Mac OS X font technologies, for using complex fonts like Arabic, Hebraic, Indic, etc.. Also, see LaTeX and OS X.

Smultron Open-source text editor for Mac OS X. Written in Cocoa, requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later. Free. Features: “...easy selection of the opened documents, line numbers, syntax colouring for many different languages, support for text encodings, code snippets, a toolbar, a status bar, HTML preview, multi-document find and replace with regular expressions...command-line utility...”

BBEdit
Proprietary text editor for Macintosh, good HTML features. Related links: BBEdit Version control, and BBEdit UNIX Support Part 1 & Part 2.

TextMate
Proprietary Text editor for OS X, includes features such as tabs, foldings, and macros.

Interarchy
File transfer software for Mac OSX

Algekalk
Factor numbers, convert decimals to fractions, find algebra-style square roots, OS X, free.

Eigenmath
“a free computer algebra system for people who like math and physics.” available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Frakkalk
Add, subtract, multiply, & divide large fractions, provides the results of its operations as simplified fractions, OS X, free.

iMass
Molecular mass calculator, periodic table of the elements, isotope distribution graph, OS X, free.

fonts, typography

On snot and fonts a LOT of info & links about typography and fonts on this site!

FontForge An Outline Font Editor, allows you to create and modify postscript, truetype and opentype fonts, save fonts in many different outline formats, and generate bitmaps. Open source, runs in the X Window System (X11), under Linux, OS X, and MS-windows (cygwin).

Fonts for Programmers from Typographica, an on-line journal of typography, a discussion of what a good typeface for programmers might be.

Finding the Best Programmer’s Font from Kuro5hin.org, a listing and review of available fixed-width or monospaced fonts.

Gentium a typeface family, “…supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.”

Free UCS Outline Fonts “This project aims to provide a set of free outline (PostScript Type0, TrueType, OpenType…) fonts covering the ISO 10646/Unicode UCS (Universal Character Set)…released under GNU GPL.”

Electronic Font Open Laboratory “The Open Laboratory for exchanging information about electronic fonts. We also develop electronic fonts and related programs.”

XFree86 Font De-uglification HOWTO “How to improve X Window fonts. Various tips for improving font handling for XFree86, including sections on TrueType fonts, Mozilla, font servers and related topics.”

Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources “Unicode and Multilingual Support in HTML, Fonts, Web Browsers and Other Applications” Includes lists of characters to test the Unicode support of your Web browser and fonts.

spam

CAUCE
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email

Why Am I Getting All This Spam?
A Research Report on unsolicited commercial E-mail, “a project to attempt to determine the source of spam”, by the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Essays on Junk E-mail (Spam)

Enkoder
When posting an email address on a webpage, this application can help foil email harvesting robots by converting the address into encrypted JavaScript code. (view the source code of my contact page to see an application of this)

misc

Nature Oriented Computing
Discussion of how to make more efficient use of computer resources, advocating the environmental advantages of using light, small, efficient software over ‘heavier’ software.

Linux Ecology HOWTO
Discussion of ways to use Linux computers as a means to protect our environment, using its features to save power or paper, and making use of old computers.

Software That Lasts 200 Years
Discussion of the need to develop software more attuned to the long-term needs of society.

Grid Computing FAQ
What grid is and how it's different from other technologies such as Clusters and P2P. A directory of applications using Grid computing can be found at EnterTheGrid.

Quantum Computing
Scientists control a single electron’s spin in an ordinary commercial transistor chip “With 100 transistors, each containing one of these electrons, you could have the implicit information storage that corresponds to all of the hard disks made in the world this year, multiplied by the number of years the universe has been around” Evidently it has something to do with a qubit.

O’rielly Books
Publisher of quality computer reference books.

Gentium
Free multilingual serifed font, a typeface family covering a wide range of Latin-based alphabets, includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode. Archaic Greek symbols and full Cyrillic script support.

A Nice Screensaver Image
Saturn’s C and B Rings From the Inside Out, a recent image from the Cassini mission. Try the 200.4 kB jpeg.

Kinesis Contoured Keyboard
A computer keyboard with excellent ergonomics. Takes a little while to get used to, but very comfortable to use.

Hole in the Wall
“We gave access to state-of-the-art personal computers to several thousand children in urban and rural India. The computers were placed outdoors, usually mounted on walls and, hence, often referred to as ‘Hole-in-the-wall’”. Minimally invasive education experiments conducted by NIIT.