r_harvey

Links

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fbi.gov/mostwant/terrorists/fugitives.htm
FBI Most wanted terrorists.

mozilla.org
Safe, secure, powerful, free Web browsers for most operating systems. Tax-deductable donations are accepted.

News

heise.de/ct/english
English translations of some articles from the German c't Magazine.

ebnonline.com
Electronic Buyers' News.

eetimes.com
EE Times Magazine.

embedded.com
Embedded Systems Journal Magazine.

infoworld.com
infoworld.com/news/thisweek.html
Infoworld is a networking-oriented newspaper. The second link is Top Stories.

maccentral.macworld.com
macaddict.com
macintouch.com
How does a PC user get news about graphic applications? Visit a Macintosh™ site.

apple.com/switch
While you're looking at Macintosh sites, you may want to let them convince you to switch. They used to have a page called apple.com/myths, with "A special message to Windows users," wherein they tried to get you to reconsider some core beliefs about computers... but they changed their minds, and decided they were wrong about it being good to be different.

newscientist.com
NewScientist Magazine Planet Science.

technologyreview.com
MIT Technology Review.

theregister.co.uk
A biased, slanted, opinionated computer newspaper. Of course everybody else is too, only The Register admits it.

yomiuri.co.jp/dy
The Daily Yomiuri - English language newspaper in Japan.

Information

projects.ex.ac.uk/trol/grol/alice/won00.htm
projects.ex.ac.uk/trol/grol/alice/glass00.htm
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, both formatted for online viewing. We used to have a very nice PDF version, but it was 1234KB, 160-pages, and illustrations were not quite as nice as in this one.

adobe.com/products/postscript/resources.html
Adobe Postscript Articles and books.

angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots. Don't blame me, that's what he calls it.

odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html
CIA World Facts Book - Yes, it's that CIA. A standard reference about geography, countries, politics, and weights and measures. Less specialized than ASCIIcat.

cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html
Global Trends 2015 A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts - National Intelligence Council Report. The Central Intelligence Agency's report about how things will likely look by the year 2015. Posted before September 11, 2001. In short: Mega-corporations and thugs (or is that redundant?) run everything, and Soilent Green may indeed be people. It sounds like a bad Bruce Willis movie (is that redundant, too?). It's an important document to read and digest, but don't try it on an empty stomach.

cybercrime.gov
cybercrime.gov/searchmanual.htm (585KB)
Department of Justice Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section ("CCIPS"). Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations.

law.cornell.edu/uscode/17
loc.gov/copyright/title17
Copyright Law.

www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/35
US Patent Law.

O gutenberg.org
sailor.gutenberg.org
ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg
Project Gutenberg archive. Just about any book that's worth reading (and printed before 1923), in text files. It's an ongoing experiment begun back in 1971, so plan on taking some time to familiarize yourself with their organizational plan, and look for a mirror site close to you before getting in too deep.

hopper.navy.mil/grace/grace.htm
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper tribute. I suppose besides showing the world just how long a nanosecond is (it's about a foot, and she used to hand out lengths of wire), she should be celebrated first for popularizing hardware abstraction metaphors. That made computing more aproachable for people who wanted to find solutions in their own fields, not just control computers. I personally don't think you can truly understand programming if you don't understand the underlying hardware, but on the other hand, you'll never get anything done until you accept abstraction.

research.att.com
cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs
research.digital.com
ibm.com/developerWorks
research.microsoft.com
sun.com/research
parc.xerox.com
Technical papers from research facilities around the world. Places like Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research are marriages of science, mathematics and vision. Take a look at how Microsoft is moving away from that '90s-Retro Operating System image.

lcweb.loc.gov/homepage/lchp.html
Library of Congress.

thomas.loc.gov
THOMAS - Library of Congress Current Legislative Information. Named after Thomas Jefferson.

fitnesoft.com/AlmostPerfect
The WordPerfect book. How software projects go right, but still fail.

uspto.gov...PN/4,558,302
June 20, 1983: "A data compressor compresses an input stream of data character signals by storing in a string table strings of data character signals encountered in the input stream..." That's from the Sperry/Unisys/GIF/LZW patent 4,558,302, which expired on June 20, 2003. You use the Internet, so it affects you.

patersontech.com/Dos/
Articles about the origins of MS-DOS. It was not created by who you thought.

www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php
A Brief History of ClarisWorks; another software story from the trenches.

en.wikipedia.org
The big, free online encyclopedia, written and maintained by... you.

Software

bricklin.com
Invented in 1979, VisiCalc is the grand, grandfather of spreadsheets. Written when creating good software was still the goal—when all you really needed were VisiCalc, WordStar, and dBASE II (well, maybe Adventure, too). Visit their VisiCalc links page to find out about outliner software and other innovations that, given the chance to bloom in a fair marketplace, might have made computing very different today.

dbase.com
interbase.com
Visual dBASE. Yes, dBASE lives, but not from Vulcan or Ashton Tate, or even Borland or NASA (now that's a program with a tangled heritage). Interbase is the Borland open database project. (Was dbase2000.com) Now I'm not sure if it's open source, closed source, free or for pay, it's all been spinning around, so; if you're not sure either, just look down this page for mysql.com.

fsfeurope.org
cinepaint.org
gimp.org
gcc.gnu.org
linuxdoc.org
sourceforge.net
Project GNU is apparently a pack of '60s radicals who've rallied-around a common cause (and enemy: the folks in Redmond), offering labyrinthian links to such interesting and useful things as The GIMP full-featured picture and photo editor, CinePaint animation editor, the GCC C/C++ / Fortran / Java / Pascal compiler, and a thousand sophomoric toys. Oh, and that thing called Linux, which is exciting some and scaring the be-jeebers out of others (3 million lines and 55MB of source code—a daunting project). See how bad (but free) code drives out good (but not free); believe me, a lot of FSF/GNU code is bad, written by people who don't know that it's bad. This reminds me: when I was a kid, I met a guard at a construction site, who complained that refrigeration should have been banned because it was unnecessary and dangerous, plus it ruined the ice business, which was a core-business-that-would-live-forever (which was why he ended-up as a guard at a construction site, instead of the owner of an ice company). [How to write a sentence that seems to go on for two pages.]

freebsd.org
There's more than one UNIX-like operating system around. FreeBSD is supported by responsible adults, who have adopted a logical licensing policy. Which is why Apple uses and contributes to it. While Linux was created from scratch in a clean room environment (if you can call a college dormitory clean), FreeBSD has its roots in the real thing.

pgh.net/~newcomer/hp16c.htm
HP-16C programmer's calculator emulator for Microsoft Windows. A fanciful homage (keyboard support is limited, and hex numbers ignore the current word size), but they stopped making the real thing in the '80s.

O openoffice.org
neooffice.org
sun.com/products/staroffice
sun.com/software/star/staroffice
sot.com/en/linux/soto
Full-featured office suites for most operating systems (including NeoOffice for Apple Macintosh). StarOffice 5.2 is a 65MB download, or you can buy version 6 ($25-76, use on up to 5 computers, or free for schools). OpenOffice.org (the free version of StarOffice) is available for free download. No copy protection; no security patches; no product activation; no subscription; no "Enterprise Agreement," "Upgrade Advantage" or "Software Assurance!" It's becoming the path of least resistance for those who just want to get the job done—without licensing woes. It's a significant project (nine million lines of open-source code, three times as large as Linux). Let's be clear about this: OpenOffice.org will be more important to our future than any operating system. For a native Macintosh version, consider the NeoOffice version. Now Microsoft has changed how everything works in Office 2007, even standard things like menus will no longer work how we've all come to expect, so the learning curve to switch to OpenOffice.org may be lower than sticking with Microsoft.

mysql.com
anse.de/mysqlfront
Okay, you say OpenOffice.org doesn't include a relational database, so you'll still have to submit to "Upgrade Advantage" and "Software Assurance." Well, your database needs are greater than mine. But they're probably not beyond MySQL.

corefonts.sourceforge.net
gnome.org/fonts
For at least seven years, Microsoft distributed, free of charge, families of excellent TrueType fonts. In August 2002, they abruptly stopped. But they couldn't change the license retroactively, so you can still download the fonts elsewhere. These fonts will not be updated for OpenType or new character sets. The Gnome link is to newer Bitstream Vera fonts, which will be updated without emulating Microsoft's petty bellicosity. In my opinion, Microsoft's fonts are currently the better of the two, as well as offering greater variety. Bitstream Vera includes Serif (like Georgia), Sans Serif (like Verdana), and Sans Mono (like Andale Mono). Bitstream Vera fonts may be compressed in the BZ2 archive format; try one of the free software links on this page for a BZip utility.

microsoft.com/windows95/downloads
microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/corporate.asp
v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/catalog/en
Windows 95, 98, XP updates without the automation wizard or cookies. Be sure to carefully read their license agreements before installing any of these updates.

povray.org
POV Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer appeals to artists, programmers, and mathematicians—there aren't many programs like that. Turn geometric shapes into high-quality three-dimensional images, or create your own Clutch Cargo clone.

exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html
You're still using Windows 98SE, huh? Yeah, a large percentage of us are. Frankly, it's a perfectly usable operating system, even though its owner has, er, disowned it. At the link, have a look at the UNOFFICIAL Windows98 Second Edition Service Pack, a free collection of Microsoft patches and updates, to improve reliability, security and usability.

Programming

bell-labs.com/history/unix
History of the Unix operating system.

cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD
acm.org/classics/oct95
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002) offers manuscripts in longhand about programming and mathematics. Everyone still cites Mr. Dijkstra's famous 1968 letter to the editor: Go To Statement Considered Harmful, when debating the merits of structured programming.

agner.org
Agner Fog is a programmer/philosopher (and who isn't?) with a nice article about code optimization.

borland.com/products/downloads/download_kylix.html
borland.com/bcppbuilder/freecompiler
How to experiment with C++ without becoming emotionally (or economically) involved: Register, then download Borland's 32-bit ANSI C++ compiler and linker, free of charge, no strings, no limits... and no IDE. It's a professional-grade compiler, too, with undocumented switches (and a penchant for unnecessary stack frames). You'll need a text editor, and you'll definitely have to get a book or two. If you like the free compiler, consider Borland's C++Builder; the standard edition is innexpensive, and it includes a Pascal compiler. Borland added truly Draconian, intrusive and bizarre licensing restrictions to some releases; be sure to read the license agreements!

research.att.com/~bs/C++.html
Bjarne Stroustrup's C++ page.

intel.com/software/products/compilers/c50/linux/noncom.htm
Intel's Free Linux C++ compiler. A few years ago, Microsoft stated in court that Intel writes poor-quality code. That didn't go unnoticed by developers—or Intel, who then invested a billion dollars in projects like this to help users migrate from Microsoft products to Linux.

cygwin.com
gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html
sources.redhat.com/cygwin/setup.exe
mingw.org
openbsd.org
ftp.sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/cygwin/cygwin-b20/full.exe
What about GCC (C++, Fortran, Java compiler) for Windows users? Cygwin, a division of Red Hat, includes loads of Unix-style utilities. Redhat is a good place to begin, since you can get just a loader, then later select modules and server (if you don't select, you get over 50MB).

bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dev-cpp
dl.sourceforge.net/dev-cpp/devcpp4.zip (8MB)
Dev-C++ is a free Windows-based editor/IDE, debugger and GCC compiler, in a surprisingly small package that seems to work. I haven't considered the long-term repercussions of trying to use this thing for real programming (the name Bloodshed Software gives one pause). If you want to try GCC anyway, you could get Dev-C++ first, since it includes the most useful parts in one painless download. The editor should work with Borland's C++ compiler and linker.

ddj.com/articles/2001/0165/0165f/0165f.htm
Graphics Programming Black Book, by Michael Abrash. The whole 70-chapter book, now out of print (obsoleted by time, technology, or the same thing that killed all the Elm trees in the '20s) and a whopping 153MB download. Not to worry about size, since it's chopped into several PDF format files. Lots about code optimization, and even more philosophy.

cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/ralf/pub/WWW/ralf-home.html
Ralf Brown maintains the famous Interrupt List.

www-cs-staff.Stanford.EDU/~knuth
Donald Knuth.

bruceeckel.com
Here's a free C++ book you'll need to go with your new free C++ compiler.

gnu.org/software/gcc/readings.html
C++ reference links.

developer.apple.com/techpubs
UNIX was vitally important, then as it approached its thirtieth birthday, it was forgotten by the mainstream. It's back in the forefront; and it's about time.

cuj.com
ftp.uu.net/published/cuj
C++ User's Journal archive.

O msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/ppack/default.asp
Ahoy! Ahoy! Get MASM 6.15 before it slips away. The Visual C++ 6.0 Processor Pack includes MASM 6.15, the first chapters of the Quick Reference manual, a compiled HTML help file about later CPU instructions, and some files that we don't need. Run the 1.2MB setup program with the /C switch, which lets you specify where to extract files—no copyright notices or license agreements necessary. If you don't need KNI, WNI or 3dNow! (or you've never heard of them), you might as well stick with MASM 6.14 (unless you're worried about finding 6.15 sleeping with the fishes).

microsoft/msdn
32-bit Windows programmers need at least part of the giant Platform SDK. The link opens a maze that eventually leads to the download page. When it says the latest version, it supports only the latest operating system; it probably doesn't support Windows 95, 98, Me.

nexit.no
Nexus Mainframe Terminal - Tn 3270/5250. Dedicated to quality. Tell them I sent you.

ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu
NCSA Software Development Group tools.

sunset.usc.edu
University of Southern California Center for Software Engineering. Great resource!

turing.org.uk
If you don't know about Alan Turing, and you're looking at programming links, you probably should. Here's also a 1950 article, called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".

unicode.org
Unicode information, standards, fonts.

vim.org
vim.sourceforge.net
vim.sourceforge.net/download.php
Based on the classic Vi editor by Sun's Bill Joy, the free VIM is a smart, configurable programmer's editor. It's a bit '70s and a bit cutting-edge, so it'll take several days to get the feel for it. The interface is fairly opaque, which distracts from the task at hand (creating text).

sourceforge.net/projects/jedit
Another free, multi-platform text editor; this one actually will run on anything, since it's written in Java. If your computer is very fast, has lots of memory, and supports the latest version of Java, JEdit may fit you like a glove—a big, slow, Swiss Army glove. If JEdit doesn't do what you need (and it probably already does), it's extensible with new code written in... Java (you were expecting maybe VB?). JEdit will probably soon replace a lot of other editors for a lot of people, unless they decide to use Eclipse.

eclipse.org
Created by IBM and released for us all to use without charge, it's an editor and integrated development environment for programmers; lots of programmers—it's quickly becoming something of a standard. And all this time I've been trying to figure out VIM.

Hardware

scisita.org
SCSI Trade Association.

promise.com
arcoide.com
We avoid hardware links, but Promise folks offer solutions to questions we didn't know to ask. We really can run more than four IDE devices or do RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives).

spinrite.com/clickdeath.htm
ftp://grc.com/tip.exe
grc.com/UnPnP/UnPnP.htm
Iomega Zip drives Click of Death, and "Trouble In Paradise" test for (allegedly) faulty drives. According to Mr. Gibson, "The FBI has Strongly Recommended that All Users Immediately Disable Windows' Universal Plug n' Play Support; " that's what his free UnPlug n' Pray utility is for.

tinaja.com
Don Lancaster’s Guru’s Lair - An originator of books-on-demand publishing (BOD, as opposed to BSOD, which is another thing entirely). Do you remember the '80s? Hah! Newbie! This guy was using computers back when software was sold on 5.25- and 8-inch floppies in plastic bags, hung on pegboards (when I was trying to scrape-together enough to buy an HP calculator). That was the '70s, when The Whole Earth Catalog was the paperback version of the Internet, and guys like Lancaster were inventing tomorrow—which I guess means today.

Internet

builder.com

browserwatch.internet.com/stats/stats.html
Browser Statistics. Cruise-in and be counted, and see what browser everybody else is using. If your browser isn't listed, go there again-and-again to cast your vote for the underdog.

ecma.ch
ECMA European Standardizing Information and Communication Systems. Just because something is called a standard, doesn't mean we should think of it as the best or only way; a small, simple, proprietary solution may be a better choice than something that takes several million lines of closed code to implement.

hwg.org
HTML Writers Guild.

w3.org
World Wide Web Consortium. Documentation about Internet standards, spread around several megabytes of files. Like the ECMA, these folks sanction unwieldily standards that are nearly impossible to implement. Take a look, then come back here for a copy of HTMLcat; it's so much more convenient.

webmastersonly.com
webreference.com

Photography

city-net.com/~fodder/bolex
Bolex movie cameras. They're no longer in production (killed by video tape), but 16mm motion pictures documented most of the 20^th century. A rotary shutter singing at 64 f.p.s. is one of the sweetest sounds imaginable.

canon.com.my/archive/photography.htm
Canon's The Art of Photography.

canonfd.com
The Canon FD Documentation Project - Manuals, brochures and books from the 1960s through the mid-'90s, mostly as scanned images combined in PDF files. Maintained by Christian Bollinger. Note: that site has recently added multiple cookies and multiple pop-up advertisements; we may therefore remove this link at any time.

edward-weston.com
The Edward & Cole Weston site

fiberq.com/cam
Field Cameras of the United States: 1879-1930. See the "Korona View Camera, Variation 2" page; my first experience with view cameras was with a 5x7-inch Korona; when you look at it, keep in mind that with the bellows fully extended, the camera is about thirty-inches long.

geh.org
George Eastman House Museum of Photography and the GEH Photography Collection online

kodak.com/global/en/service/library/tips
Kodak's Tips/Techniques/Reference

leica-camera.us
Beautiful camera catalogs. The bad news: they've updated the place, so even if you can read the squinty little gray text, you can't tell where you're going or what you're clicking, or if you're downloading a file or doing nothing at all. It's quite a challenge to try to open pages in separate browser tabs. Even if they don't know how to build a usable Web site, I think their cameras are still well made.

nemeng.com/leica
Leica FAQ, Compiled & edited by Andrew Nemeth.

Miscellaneous

aardman.com
pixar.com
When we lost Mr. Disney in 1966, soon followed by Termite Terrace, it looked like the music had died (not one to miss an opportunity to mix metaphors, I). The vultures that followed, promised a bleak legacy of anti-science Day-glow Trons and blur-motion™ lizards; they were wrong. Today, the Plasticine-based Aardman and pixel-based Pixar are shooting paper clips at the vultures (a Termite Terrace reference that I won't explain). Stop by these sites for movie clips, then get in line early when their movies play at the local googolplex.

adbusters.org
Lately I've pondered the decline in morality, civility, compassion... you know, the usual stuff. I thought I had tracked it down to the introduction of television, then maybe the Industrial Revolution or Gutenberg, but it's probably to do with the invention of language—or taxes, whichever came first. These folks blame the symptoms, not the disease, but, hey, a little self-righteous indignation is cleansing, or something like that.

campagnolo.com
The art and science of bicycling, expressed in alloy.

city-data.com
Statistics about and pictures of your home town.

firstworldwar.com/audio/index.htm
Answer the musical question, "Mademoiselle from Armentieres, Parley-voo?" Vintage Media of the First World War, available for free download in MP3. Come for the music, stay for the history.

grc.com/steve.htm
Steve Gibson is the author of the SpinRight disk tool, and a fan of Assembly Language. He's obsessed with writing everything in Assembly, which probably explains why his code is good, and how little of it he can actually ship.

hpmuseum.org
HP Museum - My car is older than most of these calculators, but it isn't in a museum. However, my car didn't invent handheld computing or help NASA with the Space Shuttle. See why these tools were worth up to $800.

huemer.com/animate7.htm
I found DISPATCH FROM DISNEY'S at a used book sale when I was a kid. This pamphlet, created in 1943 for Disney employees serving in the war effort, begins with Donald Duck™ throwing a tomato at Hitler's eye. There's even a drawing of Walt Disney smoking! Yes, he did smoke, and he swore; he did both when I met him (I was a child, and it left quite an impact). Oh, if you want to see more of DISPATCH, follow the link.

farnovision.com
Biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who invented television.

spanky.triumf.ca/www
Fractint

kleinbottle.com
Have you ever seen a piece of paper that has only one side? How about a bottle that has neither an inside nor an outside? Klien is to bottles what Mobius is to strips of paper. Cliff Stoll (yes, that Cliff Stoll—the guy who's all arms and legs and hair when you see him on television) sells Klien bottles.

Last edited: (Oh, never mind, nobody ever remembers to keep this kind of thing updated). If you have a link to recommend, it had best be very interesting (not Basic or Dilbert or Victoria's anything).