A collection of my favorite tools

• Astrophysics WWW Resources

  • The king of all astrophysics web stuff is the NRAO version of the AstroWeb list of astronomy-related information on the Internet.
  • To search the Astrophysics Abstract Service
  • Access Online encylopedia of physics/astrophysics
  • Particle Physics related Astrophysics from L.Montanet et al., Physical Review D50, 1173 (1994) and 1995 off-year partial update for the 1996 edition available on the PDG WWW pages.
    • A nice review of Big Bang Cosmology from the above citation.
    • A nice review of Dark Matter from the above citation.
  • AAS Job Register
  • International astronomy meetings
  • Astrophysical preprints from the SISSA gopher service
  • A list of publishers with home pages

• Physics (Education) WWW Resources

  • Double slit interference. Check out this cool and educational Java applet demonstrating Young's Double Slit Interference in a graphical and interactive way. Vary wavelength, slit separation, and screen distance. (Obviously you need to have a Java enabled browser.)

  • Other JARS Physics Java applets and some other Java resources.

  • Acoustics and Vibration Animations. A very nice collection of demonstrations of a large number of fundamental physical models and analysis techniques associated with vibration and wave propagation. The collection is compiled by Dan Russell
  • Virtual Physics Labs at the TIPTOP WWW site with a strong Java component, but some VRML and Shockwave stuff as well.

  • The Physics Chanteuse and other science entertainment from Lynda Williams.

• 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

  • Here are some MHD related searches on AltaVista

• Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Computational Magnetohydrodynamics (CMHD) WWW Resources

  • CFD resources Online
  • Max Plank - Garching CFD WWW page This Link is dead.
  • The Sci.Physics.Computational.Fluid-Dynamics usenet group.

  • PHEONICS CFD code
  • FCT WWW page with CFD and CMHD codes

• Numerical WWW Resources

  • Numerical recipes
  • Netlib is a large, well maintained and organized, repository of mostly numerically oriented software.
  • BenchWeb is part of Netlib but is directed towards a large variety of benchmarks.
  • Fortran 90 FAQ More than just F90, parallel programming, free software, etc. FORTRAN is usefull.
  • Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam (SARA)
  • Numerical Artifacts and Chaos
  • The Sci.nonlinear usenet group

• Remote Sensing/Climate Tools

  • Satellite Remote Sensing FAQ.
  • Live Access to Climate data.
  • Sea Surface Temperature. (SST)
    • NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer Multichannel Sea Surface Temperture data. (AVHRR MCSST)
    • University of Miami RSMAS Satellite Imagery .
    • NOAA HRPT SST images.
    • ADvanced Earth Observation Satellite - Ocean Color Temperature Sensor (ADEOS-OCTS) at NASDA

• Visualization WWW Resources

  • Interactive Data Language @RSI
  • Other IDL related sites.

• Mathematically oriented Web Resources

  • MathTools A technical computing portal put together by The MathWorks makers of MatLab
  • Mathematica. A symbolic mathematics package and more. I love it. The help is much better in version 3.0. I don't know about version 4.x.
  • Maple. Another good symbolic mathematics package. Better online help than Mathematica in my opinion. I have not used this system extensively.
  • Matlab. More than a numerical matrix manipulation package. I hear good things about it, but I have not used it.
  • A link to all kinds of math resources on the Web.
  • math2html, Convert Mathematica Notebooks to HTML. Requires Perl and a few other utilities for the graphics conversions (animations-mpegs, graphics to GIFs.) For an example/demonstration see Interactive Learning in Calculus and Differential Equations with Applications, from The Mathematics Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). In particular, follow the Newton's Method and Fractals link.... And you thought Newton's method of finding roots was elementary and trivial?

• Do your own Science Web Resources

  • Society of Amateur Scientists - SAS

• 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
    • Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux. A nice general introduction with technology base considerations
    • GNATS The GNU bug tracking, defect tracking, or problem management system 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.
      • Yahoo's Perl Index
      • CPAN Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.
      • Perl.org
      • Perl.com documentation.
      • Perl regular expressions at perl.com.
      • Perl Monks tutorial
      • Picking Up Perl A freely redistributable Perl tutorial book. This tutorial may not be finished (last updated Oct 1999) .

    • PHP

      • PHP.net
      • PHP Tutorials
      • PHP Intro from Zend
      • WebMonkey's PHP/MySQL tutorial
      • DevShed's Introduction to PHP3
      • PHPBuilders Get Started with PHP3
      • PHP presentations
      • melonfire's PHP community
      • EvilWalrus
      • CodeBeach
      • PHP Builder
      • Sablotron: XML, XSL, XSLt and PHP
      • The Yahoo index on PHP server side scripting

    • Python

      • 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

      • Some interesting Java (and Javascript) at Gamelan
      • JARS (JAva Review Service).
      • JavaSoft's home page.
      • JavaWorld Magazine's home page.

      • Learning Java:

        • Gamelan's HowTo page.
        • Sun's Java Developer Connection learning Java resources.
        • Java(tm) Pages. A huge wealth of information on Java books.
        • Java Coffee Break's's home page.
        • Java Books reviewed. My current favorite listing of reviews of Java books.
        • Sun's online Java Documentation. Information on Java straight from the horses mouth. Try the search option!
        • IBM's Java developers site
      • Yahoo index on Java

    • Javascript (not Java)

      • Javascript guide at Netscape
      • Javascript reference at Netscape
      • Jeremy Wray's Javascript Tutorial"
      • Some interesting Javascript at Gamelan

    • Other Web Languages and Script Resources

    • Hot Scripts collection of web development programs, scripts, etc. Show me the Code.
    • DHTML Scriptomania

  • Various interesting Web/computer software technologies

  • XML (eXtensable Markup Language)

    • The XML portal from NorthernLight

  • (Virtual Reality Modeling Language)

    • The VRML repository at SDSC (San Diego Supercomputer Center) and one of its ``mirror site'' in Switzerland. Everything you wanted to know about VRML but were afraid to ask. I've listed a few browsers below but here is a link to a complete list of VRML Browsers. Also, they maintain a nice list of other VRML resources.
    • Chaco Communications, Inc. VR Scout VRML Viewer.
    • Silicon Graphic's (SGI) VRML Gallery + and Cosmo Player VRML 2.0 Viewer. Also Silicon Graphics puts together a serial VRML cartoon called Floops (Floopsiphylus Arachnovrmlite). See the next item.
    • Get Floop. You'll need to get a VRML viewer/plugin (The above Cosmo Player is good) for your browser, and the files are a bit big (about 200-300KB for both the images and the sound files) for modem connections, but they are fun in a peculiar, serial cartoon, sort of way. I've become a fan.
    • Intervista's Worldview VRML viewer (Version 2 seems to use Microsoft's DirectX technology, so I don't think it will even run on any platform but Windows 95. A strong negative in my opinion.)
    • Some VRML 2.0 Worlds

  • Generating animated 3D content.

    • Yonowat's Amapi Creative 3D workshop.
    • Fractal Design's Ray Dream Studio.
    • MetaTools Bryce Terrain software.

  • Collaborative Filtering

    This is an incredibly powerful idea for both consumers and producers. Watch out! Check out these sites:
    • LikeMinds
    • GroupLens
    • Gustos. Uses Java!

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    • As an example: Movie Critic

• Then there is always the World Wide Web and its Search Engines

  Ultimately, when in doubt search the World Wide Web!
  • AltaVista is my favorite at the moment, but others (Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrawler) are good too. Here is a quick gateway into the AltaVista search engine.
    Search the Web Usenet and Display the Results in Standard Form in Compact Form in Detailed Form
    

  • Here are some MHD related searches on AltaVista

• PC Resources.

  I have a page with a few links to PC (IBM compatible) resources I find usefull.