One of the things that contributed to the staggering popularity of the web was the ability to seamlessly link related pages. Far be it from me to fight this trend. Below are several links to sites I find interesting.
These are pages that I read regularly, just because I find their content entertaining or informative.
Sites for coders and programming.
Well-organized collections of shareware and freeware games, and other good places to find utilities.
Sites related to my favorite games and gaming.
Since I assume that other people I know will eventually get web pages, I've created this little section.
Current and former students. If you're a former student and I've forgotten to link you here, just let me know and I'll add it. If I notice your page has gone away, I'll just remove the link; I won't bother searching very hard for a new page.
I added this section because I had a student looking for the class web pages recently and he couldn't find them on my site (even though they're linked from the teaching page and my bio). So maybe if I put them here also, it will make them 50% easier to locate.
Search engines and other valuable resources on the web.
I've compiled a little list of the utilities and applications which were, for me, killer apps - those programs that I just couldn't live without. Of course, this was back when I used to use Windows, but since I've been running Linux almost exclusively for nearly two years now, the only one of these I still use is vi. But for those of you that haven't jumped to the more nerdy O.S., hopefully these will be helpful.
vim
vim is a port of the super-excellent UNIX text editor vi. vi is incredibly hard to learn (it probably takes about a week before you can open, edit a file, save and quit with no difficulty) but is quite worth it. In fact, there's almost no limit to what can be done easily in vi if you know how. This "visual" editor features unparalleled search-and-replace functionality, powerful macro capabilities and extreme customizability. It's not for the faint of heart, but if I had to pick only one editor to use for the rest of my life, it'd be vi hands-down.
vi (in all its flavors) is freeware. I'm sure source code is freely available lots of places. You can find many different ports of vi, for lots of different operating systems, at the VI-Lover's Homepage, as well as tutorials, ideas for macros, FAQs and more.
Paint Shop Pro
Paint Shop Pro is a powerful image-editing utility that comes as close as you'll get to the features of Photoshop in a downloadable package. (And with the most recent releases, it comes pretty close!) In addition, Paint Shop Pro is a much better "pixel-pusher" package, allowing you to actually draw images a little more easily than does Photoshop. It offers lots of filters, deformations, and special effects, as well as giving you close control over colors and palettes (great for making attractive but tiny graphics for the web). It reads and writes dozens of file formats, including royalty-free PNG. A feature-rich screen capture utility is also quite helpful. Version 5 also supports multilevel undo, layers and custom brushes. All-in-all, Paint Shop Pro is a great program for far less than you'd pay for the competition.
Paint Shop Pro is commercialware ($99). The most recent release is version 8; a trial version can be downloaded from Jasc Software. The trial version will expire after thirty days (and it really does, too).
TextPad
TextPad is probably the best graphical text editor for Windows. It's not a word processor, so don't expect to see fonts and WYSIWYG desktop publishing, but it has all the features you'll ever need for simple text editing. TextPad's feature list is long, including a block-select mode (cut-and-paste columns and boxes), multi-key sorting, multi-file search-and-replace (even using regular expressions), a built-in HTML-aware spell checker, macros, and even customizable clip libraries (for pasting in templated "boilerplate" text).
TextPad is shareware ($27) and is updated frequently. As of this writing, the newest version was 4.6.2; in any case, it can be downloaded from Helios Software's www.textpad.com.
