A collection of my favorite tools
Here are a few tools/resources that I find usefull in my work.
Astrophysics WWW Resources
Physics (Education) WWW Resources
Astronomy WWW Resources
- XEphem. If you
are into astronomy, eventually your going to want some data from a
good ephemeris. Xephem has become more than an ephemeris, but its'
clear that its designer/creator,
Elwood Downey, has kept astronomers in mind and an ephemeris is still at its
heart. (Update, 21 Jan 2000: This is an X-windows based program and as such
is a perfect match for a Linux or FreeBSD system. There is work on a port
to OS/2, and for the hardcore CLI junkie, the source for Ephem is available,
and can even be built for MS-DOS.)
- Link to Astronomy News,
Observational Hints, Etc.
Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) WWW Resources
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Computational
Magnetohydrodynamics (CMHD) WWW Resources
Numerical WWW Resources
Remote Sensing/Climate Tools
Visualization WWW Resources
Mathematically oriented Web Resources
Do your own Science Web Resources
General/Miscellaneous Web Resources
- TeX and
LaTeX: Publish or perish!
- BibTeX:
Well you've got to cite someone to be scholarly...
- Open Source Software, GNU, Linux, Etc.
-
Linux! (Do-Be-Do-Be-Do.... The Penguins are not just after your Beer.)
There are many distributions.
I use Redhat,
but there are good reasons to use other distributions.... Technically,
most Linux distributions are composed of a Linux kernel with GNU software
components. They should really be called
GNU/Linux systems. (How about Glinux?) See the GNU section below for some
of my favorite GNU software and other links.
- BSD, Free,
Net,
OpenBSD.
Yet More "free" Unix-like OS with some advantages over Glinux
variants. Here's an article by Bill Nicholls at Byte.com with an introduction to the BSD variants.
- Linux and PC Security Oriented Information: Firewalls, Routers,
NAT (Network Address Translation), IP Masquerade, etc., TCP Wrappers.
- Trinity OS - A Glinux variant. This guy, David Ranch, is into
making Linux more secure, alot more secure.
He's collected many fixes and configuration suggestions
into an extensive single document.
See
David Ranch's Linux page for links to his Trinity OS doocument.
If you're going to get an always-on internet connection (xDSL or Cable Modem)
you should consider looking at this document. You'll sleep better.
- Redhat's Firewall docs and resources links
- Redhat's Firewall Script
- ZDNet's Linux Security How-To.
- ZDNet's Linux Firewall on a 486 with reference to the Linux Router Project.
- PGP Freeware. This
is the MIT distribution site. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) started as a
way to encrypt files and "sign" email, but has grown into a more
extensive array of encryption and authentication systems and has a
commercial use product provided by
Network Associates.
PGP was developed by
Philip Zimmermann.
His core "idea/trick" in PGP relates to the public/private-key
and secret-key encryption method, basically PGP uses both but in a cute way.
It encrypts/decrypts the message via a strong and fast "secret-key" method
but which requires the intended recipient have the secret key. This
"secret-key" is
then sent with the message, but encrypted via the strong but slower,
public/private-key method. Furthermore, the history of the development and
distribution of PGP and the US Government's tactics against Philip
Zimmermann are interesting and instructive.
See A PGP Timeline
by Adam Back and
PGP Encryption by
Fred Atkinson.
- Glinux documentation
-
GNU: (An awesome idea that
works.) If you're interested in the person often identified with GNU, see
Richard Stallman's web pages.
There are also some
unofficial GNU sites. Not everything in this GNU subsection is
official GNU stuff.
-
Emacs
(the One True Editor) in an
Emacs FAQ.
- Emacs for Microsoft Windows NT
- AUCTeX: Clearly TeX
is God's document typesetting language. Why else would AUCTeX exist?
-
Emacs BibTeX mode:
- Ispell:
My spelling is atrocious, this helps a great deal.
``It is a poor mind that can think of only one way to
spell a word'', Andrew Jackson.
-
Ghostscript, Ghostview and GSview:
View, print, etc. Adobe Postscript documents, maybe even
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files. A miracle
of emulation virtually eliminating the need to get a true postscript
printer.
- Bug Tracking, Defect Tracking, Call Center, Project Managment,
Problem Management, Trouble Ticketing, CRM (Customer Relationship Management),
Help-Desk Management/Call Tracking, Workflow Management
Also gnatsweb or wwwgnats, a web based version, and TkGnats available in a MS windows version.
More Free Software the GNU Way
Eric's page.
OK, I ran across this page one day in my WWW travels... If you're into
science and/or mathematics check it out. My hat is off to the
author:
Eric W. Weisstein , he has a far far better web site than I.
(I measure mostly by information content.) Warning: If
you are one of those people who gets lost in encyclopedia(s/ae?) reading
all kinds of interesting articles, this page and its links could chew up a
few hours. But it would be worth it.
Want to create your own WWW pages? HTML help, Graphics, Etc.
- CNET's Web Builders Resources
-
Carl's HTML secrets. This looks very good, with lots of links to
many other resources.
- The HTML
Reference guide.
-
The Revised Intro to HTML.
-
The Web Developers Virtual Library.
- Graphics for your Web page from
Icon Depot
Free graphics (buttons, dots, bars, backgrounds, borders, etc) ,
copyrighted, along with instructions on adding them to your pages.
- Graphics for your Web page from
Ender's Realm Design Graphics.
Free graphics (buttons, dots, lines, backgrounds, textures, etc).
-
Yahoo's index of Web Page graphics. Go crazy! Check them all out!
- LAL's (@BYU) many, many,
more buttons, etc.
- Make your own graphics and animations with
Gifcon from Alchemy Mindworks.
- For Windows/Intel machines Jonathan recomends
Sausage Software's
HotDog
text-based Web Editor. It provides an integrated environment, with
some drag and drop functionality.
They have many other web site feature creation and maintainence
resources at their site.
- For Windows/Intel machines
John C. Dvorak highly recomends
MicroVision Development's
WebExpress
web editor. Cool.
- Also for Wintel machines checkout
PC Magazine and their
March 97 review of web-page editors. They consider
visual-based as well as text-based editors.
- NIMPC Warning: I've recently become aware of a "problem" with
Microsoft's FrontPage. It seems that it will
generate "proprietary" pages, meaning that the web server must have
special extensions to serve these "proprietary" FrontPage
generated web pages. As a result some Virtual Host services, or other
web server providers either charge more or cannot serve those special
web pages. I have not experienced this myself, and perhaps it is
possible for this "feature" to be turned off. I believe this is one more
example of why Microsoft's ActiveX is a bad idea, and
JavaSoft's Java is a much better idea. Besides
Microsoft's ActiveX proprietary nature, another reason to
avoid ActiveX is security. ActiveX has too much access to
your data and resources. Just Say NO to
Microsoft's ActiveX . I'd also avoid Microsoft's Internet
Explorer unless one can turn off its ActiveX feature.
Not In My PC.
Other tools I've heard good things about
- Spyglass's Visulization products: Transform (I don't know
what's happened to Spyglass's visualization products. I cannot find
these products on the WWW anymore. Anyone know? Let me know.)
- gnuplot
(not GNUplot). A very nice general purpose plotting program that is
freeware. Judging by the number of platforms supported and natural
language translations of the documentation, very useful.
Computer/Web Tools/Languages
-
Perl - The Swiss-Army Chainsaw
Perl is ``Way Cool''. As an example of this, Perl was not developed
with the Web in mind but, because of its power, it has become the
default CGI script language of the Web. I've slowly but surely started
to use it for all kinds of things. It's a language; but mostly a system
tool or script language. If you know Unix then you almost certainly know
about Perl.
If you develop programs and/or maintain large systems you will love
Perl. I first ran across Perl as a clearly better ``sed'' (a Unix stream
editor) and ``awk'' (another good, but less powerful, script/system
tool language from the Unix world)
At the moment, the thing I like the most about it is the very
powerful regular expressions (pattern matching specification), and
the ability to use them with a consistent interface. There is so much to
Perl, I don't know it all and it would take too long to explain it all
here, Various ports are available, including to Win32 systems and Mac
systems. Here are some resources.
-
-
- Python (Named for Monty Python's Flying Circus) is an interpreted,
interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared
to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java. It is being used to develop some very
intriguing and powerful applications, and web applications
(like Zope which
itself is used for generating "wiki wiki" web sites.....).
Python.org is home base for all
things Python.
- An online Python tutorial.
- An article about
Python & VPython written by Martin Heller for his Byte column
"Mr. Computer Language Person"
- The requisite
Yahoo index on Python
Java
Javascript (not Java)
Other Web Languages and Script Resources
Various interesting Web/computer software technologies
Then there is always the World Wide Web
and its Search Engines
Ultimately, when in doubt search the World Wide Web!
PC Resources.
I have a page with a few links to PC (IBM compatible) resources
I find usefull.
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