Sites of Interest

Slashdot - "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". It's the best Web resource for reader-contributed news, essays, book reviews, and on-line discussions that I've ever found. Most of the images you see here and elsewhere on my site were shamelessly stolen from Slashdot. (With appologies to Rob) :-)

Salon - (formerly Salon Magazine) An online arts / books / culture site which bills itself as being somewhat tech-savvy. They get some good contributors and have some interesting "departments". Be sure to have a gander at The Free Software Story on their site.

32 Bits Online - A site for computer enthusiasts that explores numerous different areas of computing, including "alternative" OSs like OS2, Amiga, and BeOS.

The Onion - A parody news Site that makes me laugh.

User Friendly - A comic strip about the life and times of a small ISP in Canada. Geek humor galore. Strikes a particularly resonant note with me because I work for an ISP myself.

After Y2K - Envisions a world after the year 2000 when all computers have been obliterated from the Earth. Talks about what the geeks do now that they can no longer go oline and chat, play with software, etc. The Techno-Talkin' Babes don't hurt either...

Doctor Fun - A somewhat oddball single-pane comic in the spirit of "The Far Side". Lots of "Heads in Jars" jokes.

Sabrina Online - A charming comic about an Amiga-loving skunk who lives with her roomate the squirrel and the squirrel's hubby (a half-breed wolf). Talks all about her college life, getting a job as a web designer, meeting a guy online, and the woes and triumphs of getting things done on her Amiga computer. Good fun.

Strenua Inertia - A comic featuring odd humor both philisophical, off-beat, and Unix-related (go figure).

Sinfest - Holy cow this is unwholesomely funny. Kind of like a cross between Calvin & Hobbes and MadTV. Very fresh and original.

Rhymes With Orange - An amusing one-panel cartoon that kind of reminds me of 'Bizzaro'.

Sluggy Freelance - A comic about a kid that does computer stuff. His coworker summons satan into his computer and he gets a talking rabit. Color strips on Sundays.

The Linux OS is one of the hottest hunks of software on the planet. Someday I'll post a page that talks about what I do with it, and my own thoughts and musings on this very uniqe operating system and the development model behind it.

Kernel Notes - This is where you'll find up-to-the-second info on the development of the Linux kernel.

Linux Today - A site that posts links and summaries throughout the day to Linux / Open-Source related articles on other Websites. They do a fantastic job of staying on the lookout and quickly posting links as articles become available. They also have a system in place for posting comments, and they have a Job Listing of Linux / Open-Source related jobs.

Linux Games - A great announcement / advocacy Website delivering info on both Free and Commercial games for Linux.

The Linux Game Tome - Contains a great listing of games, primarily for the Linux OS. (Chances are, you can run these games on a variety of other OSs as well.) It includes news, screenshots, descriptions, ratings, and comments from people who have tried the games. Fun stuff.

The Linux Weekly News - Every Thursday, the kind folks at Eklektix publish an online newsletter that tells about recent Linux-related happenings. Their newsletter includes sections on articles in the press, security updates, development efforts, distributions, letters to the editor, and more.

Kernel Traffic - The maintainers of this site have taken it upon themselves to read, summarize, and catalog the conversations and discussions that transpire on the Linux-Kernel mailing list. No small feat indeed. They publish a new issue weekly usually either Wednesday night or Thursday morning.

Linux Orbit - A nice digest of news from a variety of sites, as well as documentation and editorials of their own.

The X-Window System - At the heart of a Unix-based desktop is the X-Window system. It is responsible for allocating screen real-estate and drawing primitive shapes and graphical text. It also provides some powerful features like multiple workspaces, on-the-fly screen resolution changes, and remote display of graphics.

Enlightenment - A window manager is the second component of the X-Window System and is responsible for giving you window decorations like caption bars, min/max/close buttons, resize bars, etc. Enlightenment is, without question, the most visually-assaulting, eye-burning, multimedia-bath of a window manager that you'll ever find. Head to the Screenshots Gallery and lust as these drug-induced abominations peel down before your eyes.
Also, check out e.themes.org for a daily dose of beautiful/shocking themes for Enligthenment.

Window Maker - An alternative window manager for the X-Window System, and is the Yin to Enlightenment's Yang. Window Maker is modeled after the NeXT Step look and features a sleek, elegant, minimalist approach to managing windows: it runs very fast, uses very little memory, and looks very polished. It also abides by Fitt's Law very well. Numerous Dock Apps are avaliable for putting on the dock and a whole raft of themes are available for it as well. Some days I feel like Enlightenment, some days I feel like WindowMaker. The great thing is, I don't have to pick between one or the other, I can have both. There are also plenty of other window managers to pick from if the aforementioned are not to your taste. Some others I have tried and kind of like are Blackbox and IceWM .

GTK+ - The third component of the X-Window system is the Toolkit or "Widget Set". This is the library that gives you controls that you can use to build applications, things like menus, buttons, scrollbars, text boxes, toolbars, etc. Just as there are numerous window managers, there are numerous Toolkits, including TK, QT, Athena, and FLTK. But GTK+ is the one I like the most. It features a fully object-oriented design, is very complete in the range of controls it provides, has bindings for numerous different programming languages, and has been used to develop a number of popular applications, most notably the GIMP (aka the "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). Like the window managers described above, GTK also features support for a number of themes.

Gnome - The fourth and last component of the X-Window System is the desktop manager. The responsibilities of a desktop manager are to handle all the "in-between" stuff that makes for a nice desktop environment; things like cut & paste / drag & drop, filename associations, and inter-application communication via CORBA, and "session" management. Gnome seeks to create a unified desktop environment which is both powerful, flexible, and easy to use. It uses of the GTK+ toolkit (mentioned above). Just as there are numerous different toolkits and window managers, there are also a number of different desktop managers, including KDE (a very popular choice), CDE (found on most commercial Unicies), Xfce (a purely GTK+ based desktop environment), and UDE (...different).

Themes.org - This site provides a resource that is completely non-critical to the X-Window System, but a very vaulable asset all the same: Eyewash. They have themes for nearly any window manager you care to mention, an archive of icons, a vault full of fonts, and a number of nice background pixmaps.

Propoganda - A sub-division of Themes.org, this site is dedicated to making eye-popping digital artwork that can be used as your desktop background (nee "root window") or in your xterm / rxvt / Eterm / whatever-terminal windows. The attitude they tout makes me laugh.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation - A non-profit organization dedicated to the memory and works of Joseph Campbell, a great scholar and teacher of mythology. I have read The Power of Myth (a good place to begin if you've never read any of his books), The Hero with a Thousand Faces (the work that (in part) inspired George Lucas to write Star Wars), and Oriental Mythology (an uphill climb, but very rewarding, all the same). His writings and teachings have had a profound impact on my life and on the lives of many other people.

Textfiles.com - A collection of all the old-school text files that carpeted the hallowed halls of the BBS systems of yore.

Annoyances.org - If you're stuck using Windows, hopefully this site can offer you some solace. 95, 98 and MS Office are covered.

ClueTrain.com - The next generation of marketing. There's an old saying about a California-based company: "The cluetrain stopped there three times a day and never took a delivery." This site attempts to teach businesses how to get on that cluetrain.

The Simpsons Archive - "The Internet's clearinghouse of Simpsons guides, news and information, voluntarily maintained by members of alt.tv.simpsons"

All Your Base Are Belong To Us the Shockwave Flash version and The History of "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" and the hillarious All Your Smurf Are Belong To Smurf. What you say..?

Metamath - an in-depth look at the foundation of mathematics.