Links (was RE: [Fwd: [PLUG] O'reilly and Assoc's - Using Samba])
Kragen Sitaker
kragen@pobox.com
Thu, 9 Mar 2000 18:16:57 -0500 (EST)
(I have removed talk@clug.org from the Cc list because I am not on it
and because cross-posting between it and cglug-chat is liable to cause
flames.)
Mike Roberts writes:
> If you are a technophile, as I am, and enjoy reading about technical and
> engineering topics, higher math, and even some pseudoscience bashing, then
> follow the links on the page you sent, or go directly to
> http://www.tinaja.com. Be prepared to stay awhile.
I like www.tinaja.com. It's especially good for hardware-hackery.
> Stock market and similar sites excepted, what treasures
> have you all found on the web that you return to again and again?
My answer is at the end.
> To get things going, here are a few of mine:
>
> http://www.m-w.com - The Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Has a thesaurus,
> Cool Word of the Day columns, and lots of other interesting things. If you
> think that etymology can't be interesting, you haven't visited this site
> yet.
http://www.dict.org/ is an alternative that has the entire dictionary
database and server software (free) available for downloading, as well
as a command-line client. It has better definitions than m-w sometimes
and worse definitions other times.
I used to use m-w.com before I knew about dict.org.
BTW, www.m-w.com is an alias for mw.wip.eb.com. eb.com is Encyclopedia
Britannica.
> http://www.drudge.com - Even if you are not a conservative, you can find
> links here to your favorite columnists, from the liberal Molly Ivans to the
> conservative George Will, and almost everyone in between. My searches for
> real news include this site.
I was there once; the layout of the front page turned me off so badly I
didn't go any further. It has historical significance as the place
where the semen-stained dress story was broken, leading to the
impeachment of a president.
> http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html - News of the Weird. Chuck Shepherd's
> hobby that has turned into a cult obsession. Updated every week or so, and
> lags the dead tree version by about a week or two.
Never tried it.
> http://www.theonion.com - The Onion. Humor for people who get it.
The Onion rules. Books & Co. in Dayton carries the print version.
> http://www.oase-shareware.org/shell/scripts/categories.html - Shell Dorado.
> If you write shell scripts for Linux or any flavor of POSIX, or want to
> learn, you will find terrific examples here. Includes some tutorials on
> things like AWK and other topics. I challenge you to visit this site and NOT
> learn something useful.
Interesting. I wonder why it's "shareware"? I don't know of any
shareware Unix shells, and the scriptlets indexed here mostly lack
copyright notices.
> http://www.unixtools.com/tutorials.html
Looks interesting, despite the banner ad.
(Banner ads on web pages are a little bit like garbage on somebody's
living room floor. They do not always indicate a problem, but they're
certainly an indication of the person whose place you're visiting ---
they don't have an "ask not what the Internet can do for you" attitude,
but an "I don't give a fuck" attitude --- and they make your visit less
pleasant.)
First thing I look at is a link to "Making Sense of Java", a document
located at disordered.org with a banner ad over the top of it, despite
being apparently written by someone at SGI.
This document seems to date from 1997 or so; it discusses Java entirely
in the context of applets embedded in Web pages. It also appears to be
written by somebody clueless about garbage collection, despite having
worked at Symbolics for three years. (He thinks generational garbage
collectors reduce maximum pause time and doesn't mention incremental
garbage collectors.)
Next thing I look at: the Java tutorials. Look like links to good
places, although one of the links is two ISPs out of date.
Next thing I look at: Perl/C/C++/CGI tutorials. Not bad --- they even
include a link to the Perl FAQ --- but it would be a lot better if they
linked to the CGI FAQ instead of something on cgi-resources.com!
> http://www.muppetlabs.com/library/tech/tutorials.html - Useful (and free)
> online tutorials. Gentlemen (and ladies), update your skill sets!!
Looks like lots of great links. Some of them are broken.
> I hope that you like them, and that they make your web experience more
> interesting and productive.
Wow, I sound like a huge grump above. I guess I need to get a life.
Thanks for the links, Mike. I did enjoy them, despite what you might
have thought from reading the text above. :)
> So, what are some of your favorite links?
Well, I wrote this script to find out:
#!perl -w
use strict;
my @urls;
while (<>) {
if (/.*HREF="([^"]*)".*VISIT_COUNT="(\d+)"/) {
push @urls, [$1, $2];
}
}
print map { $_->[1], " ", $_->[0], "\n" }
sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] || $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] }
@urls;
You feed it your Netscape history file as input. If you're like me,
sorting it in Netscape takes a few minutes, and every time you visit
one of the URLs to see what it is, Netscape insists on re-sorting the
list. (If you re-sort by "last visited", this ceases to be a problem.
Also, if you set your expire time to something reasonable, it ceases to
be a problem. My history file has 35,749 entries in it.)
Unfortunately, Netscape saves the file in a relatively unreadable
HTML format, so the script above reformats it.
So here are several of the top (well, bottom) few results:
4653 http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/hotlist.html
-- my hotlist, which I have set as my home page. Conveniently warns
me if I've accidentally left JavaScript turned on (it used to say,
"You idiot! You left JavaScript turned on!", but I changed the
message to something more polite when I realized other people were
visiting this page.) and also has links to the sites I visit most
frequently.
1852 http://vsd.pennwellnet.com/Home/topnav/topnav_main_banner.cfm?Section=home
-- I have no idea what this is, but it's annoying. I first visited
there this January, but I can't imagine why I could possibly have
visited there 1852 times.
802 http://www.altavista.com/
-- was my favorite search engine. + and - are your friends. Google
gives better results most of the time, though, and has a much more
pleasant layout.
726 http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/
-- images from the Web selected at random.
629 http://slashdot.org/
-- everybody's favorite journalistic institution. I have a shell
function in /etc/profile:
/. () {
links slashdot.org
}
so I need only type /.<Enter> at the prompt to visit here. (I wrote a
shell script for Google, too.)
416 http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/
-- my own home page.
366 http://www.lwn.net/daily/
-- daily updates from Linux Weekly News.
308 http://www.google.com/
-- my new favorite search engine.
262 http://cachedot.slashdot.org/
-- once upon a time, someone set up a cache for slashdot to take some
of the load off their servers.
206 http://www.scripting.com/
-- a lot like /., but this is by Dave Winer.
151 http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/
-- the Alan Cox weblog. (A "weblog" is a site like scripting.com or
slashdot.org.)
101 http://www.lwn.net/bigpage.phtml
-- Linux Weekly News. Tends to be more in-depth than Slashdot or LWN
daily updates.
97 http://photo.net/philg/site-history.html
96 http://photo.net/
-- the site history and front page for photo.net, obviously. There is
a superb book on building web sites here (online; called successively
"How To Be a WEB WHORE Just Like Me", "Database-Backed Web Sites", and
"Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing". You can buy it in
bookstores, too. Do!), many excellent photographs and resources for
photographers, and the software Philip uses to build web sites for his
customers.
85 http://cortex.unice.fr/cgi-bin/jerome/listeslog.pl?vote=121&langage=All
-- hmm, looks like I must have been stuffing a ballot box, voting for
a really obnoxious Linux slogan. I seem to remember that I wrote the
web-page author suggesting some changes in his practices (and pointing
out my forged votes, which he helpfully canceled).
50 http://www.cristine.net/~cristine/writings/index.html
-- Christine Lee's writings. Also a weblog. Intriguing.
44 http://www.useit.com/
-- Jakob Nielsen's web site, where he writes his column on usable
information technology. (Human-factors design and human-computer
interaction are other names for this field.)
42 http://www.flash.net/~dtribble/text/
-- many intriguing texts here, although he seems to have no index.html
and has apparently renamed them since the last time I read them.
42 http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=LNUX&d=5d
-- how's VA Linux stock doing?
39 http://www.debian.org/
-- everybody's favorite OS.
38 http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
-- and even if you don't use it, it's useful to find out (a) what a
given program does; (b) what programs do a given task; (c) what
updates the Debian folks have had to make to the programs.
37 http://linuxtoday.com/stories/4938.html
-- the Mindcraft tests. Classic Kragen Sitaker Is Wrong quote:
You know, you'd think that it would be pretty easy to refute
these nonsensical performance results by doing some real
benchmarks with sensibly-configured Linux systems. I wonder if
any of the Linux-hardware vendors have considered doing this?
-- Kragen Sitaker
Linuxtoday used to be a site I went to a lot, but I stopped. It's a
lot like slashdot, but (a) there are many more articles (58 already
today, as opposed to ten on slashdot) and (b) there are essentially no
comments.
It started out as Three Point's Linux News, but changed its name when
Three Point Consulting became less prominent than the Linux News
part.
36 http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/ttt/
-- I visited this a lot when I was building it.
36 http://www.cristine.net/~cristine/pictures/wedding/
-- Christine's wedding.
35 http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/
-- the book I mentioned earlier. If you build, browse, or talk about
web sites, this book is required reading.
33 http://www.gnome.org/
-- everybody's favorite GUI.
33 http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/sw/
-- software I've written.
31 http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/patents.html
-- a page I wrote recently.
30 http://www.patents.ibm.com/
-- IBM patent database. Search US patents and PCT pubs (among others)
and read the full patent text.
30 http://www.foad.org/~abby/
-- Abby Franquemont-Guillory, one of the Internet's many heroes.
29 http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/nov98/index.html#144
-- FoRK is a superb mailing list for techno stuff.
29 http://arsdigita.org/contest/contest-voting-list.tcl?domain=ad%5fprize
-- Philip Greenspun of photo.net founded a charity foundation to
encourage kids to do cool web sites. These are the entries for their
first contest.
There are perhaps 250 more pages I've visited more than ten times.
Taking a different tack, here are the domains I visit most often; the
last number on each line is the number of visits I've paid to all URLs
in the domains, and the number before it is the number of URLs in the
domain I've visited.
www.dnaco.net 425 6499 -- my own pages are hosted here.
www.altavista.com 1460 2517
vsd.pennwellnet.com 21 1895
slashdot.org 938 1889
www.google.com 615 1063
www.jwz.org 94 993 -- Jamie W. Zawinski's pages.
photo.net 312 899
www.userfriendly.org 326 783 -- I read them all, I think.
www.lwn.net 215 720
discuss.userland.com 355 704 -- scripting.com's discussion section.
www.peterzale.com 281 684 -- another UF-like cartoon lives here.
kernelnotes.org 322 501 -- Linux-kernel mailing list archives here.
www.debian.org 252 489
www.geocities.com 279 462 -- sadly, I, too, have been infected with
GeoCities web-page viewing from time to time.
x37.deja.com 289 431
cachedot.slashdot.org 114 413
www.zdnet.com 273 407 -- I go there when /. links them.
xent.ics.uci.edu 231 391 -- FoRK-archive is there.
www.securityfocus.com 239 376 -- archives of BUGTRAQ live there.
www.siemens.de 8 325 -- I have no idea why I visited Siemens so many times.
www.uwsg.indiana.edu 234 299 -- another Linux-kernel archive.
x1.dejanews.com 165 280
dictionaries.travlang.com 240 278 -- interlingual dictionaries: German,
Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Swedish,
Finnish, Norwegian, Frisian, Afrikaans, Hungarian, Czech, Esperanto,
Latin. Very handy when babelfish.altavista.com is insufficient.
I racked up all these hits translating a short Dutch newspaper article.
arsdigita.org 106 275
www.cristine.net 152 257
www.deja.com 129 253
rst.gsfc.nasa.gov 105 247 -- a superb introduction to remote sensing,
which is in some sense what I do for a living.
linuxtoday.com 145 235
www.scripting.com 23 230
www.e-pix.com 208 220 -- CPU WARS is online here. "Eat flaming death,
minicomputer mongrels!"
www.amazon.com 178 219 -- good source for info on books. I look up
ISBNs here and order through my local bookstore at higher prices.
www.beowulf.org 147 219 -- if you want to build a supercomputer in your
basement.
freshmeat.net 160 206 -- for information about software for Linux.
About 90% of it is free software. About 80% of it is crap.
www.cs.rice.edu 122 195 -- information on learning Scheme is here,
along with info on a HotOS conference.
www.linux.org.uk 23 189
x32.deja.com 161 176
www.xml.com 108 172 -- all sorts of good info on everybody's favorite
markup language. (Is everybody's favorite epithet getting a little
tired by now?)
www.useit.com 76 171
members.xoom.com 73 167 -- see comment about GeoCities.
www.cs.may.ie 78 165 -- introduction to genetic algorithms.
www.fourmilab.ch 72 165 -- all kinds of great stuff here. Univac lore,
Speak Freely, AutoCAD history, etc.
www.geda.seul.org 84 159 -- a GPLed EDA system using Verilog.
Coordinated by Ales Hvezda, who I went to high school with.
www.hp.com 89 156 -- lots of interesting stuff here, including
Hewlett-Packard Journal.
research.microsoft.com 75 154 -- a very interesting set of slides from
a talk on the history of Cray.
www.pricewatch.com 27 148 -- the place to go when you want to know what
computer hardware costs.
www.wired.com 135 146 -- a magazine that used to have some interesting
articles, most of which are still online.
www.gnu.org 81 140 -- a project to create a new operating system, now
in the final stages of creation.
www.patents.ibm.com 59 136
members.aol.com 85 128 -- see comment above about Geocities, although
this is not quite as bad.
--
<kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08. Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either. :)