My Cool Links List

The university where I studied.

My Department.

A very cool laboratory where I did my projects and liked to hang out in.

I became very interested in Objectivism in the past few years, so I recommend you take a look. Objectivism is a school of philosophy that deals with politics, ethics, law, and art. It has a human and freedom centred philosophy, yet is very strong and uncompromising.

The Google Directory branch (based on dmoz.org’s) is a good place to start looking for Objectivist resources on the web, and there is a lot of introductory material there.

“Neo-Tech” is an extension of Objectivism that I also became familiar with. It has some substantial additions over Objectivism. For example, it integrates psychology and business advisory into the philosophy.

Neo-Tech is commercial, but the material on the web-site is quite good to get a thorough understanding. If you are more serious about it, you are recommended to order The Neo-Tech Discovery, the main book of Neo-Tech by (snail) mail.

See my guide to Neo Tech for an explanation on how to use the material that can be found online.

Many good resources about Atheism. Includes: Why Atheism, Over Three Hundreds Proofs of God’s Existence (humorous), and Quotes from the Christian Bible.

I’m very interested in computers. For a long time I knew DOS and Windows were bad, but could not tell why. When I started working on UNIX, I realised what a good computing system should be like, and have seen the light.

I am still keeping and experiencing with Linux on my home computer. Linux is a free UNIX-compatible operating system available for PCs and other architectures. I recommend it to anyone who wants to experiment with UNIX on his computer.

The Linux’s homepage contains most of the information you’ll need to know about the Linux operating system.

I’m also a member of the Israeli Group of Linux Users - now part of the activity of “Hamakor”, the Israeli Society for open-source software.

The Haifa Linux Club (or Haifux for short) gives lectures on Linux-related topics every two weeks, and organises other events, such as “Welcome-to-Linux” sessions, and Installation Parties. I gave a few lectures on a myriad of topics there, and enjoy going to listen to the other people lecturing.

The Tel Aviv Open Source Club (or Telux or TelFOSS for short) is a club in a similar format to Haifux. Due to the fact that I had been living in Tel Aviv, I tended to attend its lectures and be more active there, instead of in Haifux.

Hackers-IL is a community of Israeli-oriented hackers (= technological enthusiasts, not computer intruders) focused on discussing philosophical computing issues and discussing other areas of science.

A web-site dedicated to open-source advocacy.

Perl is a high-level, dynamic and powerful programming language. I hope to give some resources for getting started with it especially given the fact that as of August 2012, it is easy to find outdated information about Perl in web searches.

• The Perl Beginners’ Site - a site I maintain with recommended resources for Perl Beginners.

• The Perl Tutorial Hub - recommended Perl tutorials.

• Perl Weekly - a weekly round-up of hand-picked news and articles about Perl. By Gabor Szabo.

• Modern Perl Books Blog - a blog by chromatic about Modern Perl programming.

Eric Raymond is the number one Open-Source Guru. On his homepage one can find the seminal The Cathedral and the Bazaar series (which I think every software engineer should read), and other truly enlightening articles.

Joel Spolsky is an experienced information technology worker who maintains a site in which he expresses his bold opinions regarding software management and its distribution. I don’t agree with everything he says there, but some of his articles are very enlightening. He also has a funny and amusing style of writing.

Paul Graham is an experienced programmer in LISP and other languages. His articles are insightful, interesting and thought-provoking.

An open source engineer and consultant. His lines-of-code counter program (SLOCCount) is always good for nice amusement, and his analysis based on it is much more awe-striking. Has other good articles.

His web-site contains pages with a lot of information about RAID in Linux, CORBA, clusters, bug tracking, and other topics. Also has some software he wrote, papers on software freedom and other oddities.

Net-geek for hire and Linux Guru extra-ordinaire. Contains more philosophical than technical information about Linux, but still useful stuff. Includes: why forking does not happen a lot and is not a threat, and a guide to establishing a successful Linux User Group.

His web-site contains a large collection of articles for interest. Among them there is “Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads”.

A very famous software developer, and his homepage that contains a lot of interesting information and links. See also the Wikipedia entry about him.

• Muli Ben-Yehuda

• Orr Dunkelman

• Nadav Har’El

• Orna Agmon

• Shlomo Yona

• Gabor Szabo

• Shmuel Fomberg

• Yuval Kogman

Weblogs are the latest (as of late 2003) craze in the Internet and everybody and his mother have to have one (me included). Here’s my OPML file which contains all the blogs I used to monitor. Here is a smaller list, which will probably go unmaintained eventually.

• Muli Ben-Yehuda’s LiveJournal - Random bits and pieces, Linux Kernel hacktivity, and personal life events.

• Orr Dunkelman’s Diary at Advogato - Mostly academic, Haifa Linux Club or Vipe sys admin stuff.

• Orna Agmon’s LiveJournal - mostly personal stuff, literary impressions, etc.

• Gabor Szabo’s Journal at use.perl.org - kept strictly related to his Perl activities. As a result, it has a high signal-to-noise ratio, but it’s not updated often.

Netcasts (or Audiocasts/videocasts/vlogs/podcasts) are irregularly updated blogs with music or video attachment. These are the netcasts that I follow:

• Perlcast - an audiocast about Perl. The first netcast that I started listening to regularly, and still one of my favourites.

• FLOSS Weekly - an audiocast with interviews related to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (or FLOSS for short).

• PC Load Letter: Two Guys, One Mic - an audiocast by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick (of Subversion fame) where they discuss various open-source issues. It has a very cool opening music.

• Zulo Podcast - an Israeli and Hebrew podcast about Free Software and other Tech issues.

Refer to this link, for a page about my favourite open source.

Who says all commercial software is bad? Here’s some of the non-free-as-in-speech software I came to like.

• Microsoft Excel - the best spreadsheet program I’ve worked with. Excel 95 was nice; Excel 97 and especially 2000 were buggy as hell and in general hideous. Excel XP was finally a new decent version. I am now mostly using Gnumeric instead.

• Corel-Draw - an excellent vector graphics program for Windows (with a lesser Linux availability), which is very easy to use and yet very powerful. The only limitation I found in it was that it does not (or at least did not) support Alpha translucency well. (For a program with this capability, my favourite is the open-source Inkscape.)

MOD Files are music files that are based on recorded instruments, played at various frequencies to generate the various notes. MOD files can be played on every machine that has a digital audio channel, and generate music with up to 32 simultaneous channels.

Here are some links with software and information about MOD files:

• The Aminet MOD archive - (almost) all the MOD files you’ll ever want.

• MOD Archive - and more.

• The alt.binaries.sounds.mods FAQ - a very comprehensive FAQ that answers common questions about MOD files, and includes links to MOD software and archives.

• MOD Resources Index
• MikMod - a portable MOD-playing library.
• xmp and libxmp - powerful open source MOD player.

• Garfield - a fat cat with an attitude. (And a stupid owner and some friends.) Lots of slapstick and cheap humour.

• Luann - a comic strip about adolescence. Very funny.

• Ozy and Millie - a comic strip about two young foxes, along with their fellow company. Very funny humour, with a nice plot, and many Zen-like discussions.

• User Friendly - a very funny comic strip about an unusual Internet service provider.

• HelpDex - a funny strip about Linux.

• Bob the Angry Flower - Jokes about Science, Philosophy, Fiction, etc. I don’t always understand the punchline.

• FoxTrot - a comic strip about a funny family. Lots of geek humour and stuff.

• xkcd - “A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math and Language” - a geek webcomic which is published once every few days, and features thoughts about computers, culture, language, mathematics and other geeky subjects. Hint: there’s a tooltip for every cartoon with an extra insight, if you hover above it with the mouse cursor.

• Everybody loves Eric Raymond - another geek comic about the Linux world’s celebrities and current events.

• Mythtickle - a cartoon about various Mythological figures and their thoughts.

• Working Daze - a comic strip about a crazy IT workplace. Lots of geek humour.

• Grand Avenue - this is a comics strip about a grandma raising two grandchildren and their adventures.

• Noise-to-Signal - a philosophical comic strip about the social web. Updated very irregularly so just subscribe to its RSS feed.

• Us the Robots - an entertaining (and irregular) 3-D cartoon strip made using open-source software. Funny, surreal and philosophical.

• A Softer World - containing related photos, with typewriter-style words indicating funny thoughts. I don’t always get it, but when I do, it’s pretty nice.

• Spiked Math - Daily Math Webcomic - a comic strip about mathematics. Sometimes my puny brain is incapable of understanding it, but it’s still often funny.

• Calamities of Nature - a regular philosophical web-comics that is beautifully drawn, geeky and can be very insightful.

• Just 1 Random Guy - a “webcomic/blog/visual social commentary” that contains computer-drawn images with random thoughts. Pretty funny.

• Number of Linux Distributions Surpasses Number of Users

• Five Reasons Not to Use Linux

• Things that You Learn about Computers in the Movies

• If Linux Distributions were Airlines

• “What if Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus?” - an Empirical Study

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation - an insanely funny cross of both The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• Everybody’s Free (to Ping Timeout) - a very amusing spoof where the 90’s anthem “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)” meets the IRC world.

• GNU Visual Basic - Richard Stallman switches from LISP to BASIC.

• Top 12 Things you were Likely to Hear if you had a Klingon Programmer

• Norse Creationism - the scientific theory for the formation of the World vs. what the Norse Mythology says.

• “Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation” - from the Onion.

• A Girl’s Guide to Geek Guys

• The 12 Days of Christmas Letters - what the Christmas carol means in practice. ( Local mirror. )

• Over Three Hundreds Proofs of God’s Existence.

• Web 2.1 Demonstration - the new version of the Web.

• “Mocking Everything” - rhesa’s exit on the plethora of similar CPAN modules

• How to Interpret Red Marks - via Mulix. The author’s homepage seems to contain other amusing stuff.

• Things to Say When You’re Losing a Technical Argument - an amusing list of counter-arguments to use in a technical discussion. Via Chen Shapira on Hackers-IL.

• What should I Do if the Internet goes down? - 10 useful things to do.

• The World’s Dullest Blog - a humorous blog about dull activities, that receives many (often amusing) comments.

• Perl on Poles - the world’s most powerful web development framework - start believing the hype! (via gaal).

• “Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns” - a story about Javaland, the Kingdom of Nouns. (Spotted in this Joel on Software post.)

• Islamic Pick-up Lines - some are amusing and some I don’t understand yet.

• Chuck Norris Facts - many facts about the toughest man in existence. An Internet Meme.

  • Bruce Schneier Facts - an even geekier collection of facts about the most unbreakable crypto and security expert.

  • Eric S. Raymond Facts - a collection of facts about the most, well, most something, geek in existence.

  • Jack Bauer facts (in UNIX fortunes format) - also about a tough man.

• History of the Internet

• Linux Genuine Advantage - make your Linux system genuine now! (via Whatsup.org.il). Also featured on Digg.

• How to Make Square Corners with CSS - it’s much harder than it seems.

• How Many Newsgroup Readers Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb - Usenet fun.

• Lisp at Light Speed - Common Lisp fun.

• “Uncomfortable Questions: was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?“ - a conspiracy theory set in the Star Wars world. Expect the book about it soon. (Received over 2,400 diggs!)

• Ubuntu Christian Edition Facts

• Browser Showdown - Firefox vs. Internet Explorer

• Firedfox - a parody of the Firefox site.

• Stupid Shit People Actually Put On Their Resumes - via gaal’s LiveJournal.

• Notepad - The World’s Best Editor.

• Welcome to the Food Chain - by Ben Collins-Sussman and his (then) two-years-old son.

• “If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port...” - if Dr. Seuss were a technical writer.

• The Worst Band Names of 2007

• “English is a crazy language” - we park on driveways and drive on parkways. More items like this in Stephen Jacob’s Humour Archive.

• LOL Cat Bible Translation Project - translating the Bible into kitty pidgin.

• “Perl 6 Schedule Frequently Asked Questions [Satire]” - by chromatic.

• “Do it Yourself Yahoo Resignation Letter”

• Grad Student Humour - contains the famous Rabbit joke, as well as “Why God didn’t receive Tenure”, and a lot of other funny stuff.

• “Great Quotes from Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds”

• “189 Funny UNIX Error Messages”

• “How to Know You’re Dating a Free Software Guy?” - on Lior Kaplan’s blog.

• Top 10 Most Bizarre Programming Languages Ever Created

• If Programmers Knew Kung Fu

• The Invention of C++ - a Nice Bit of Net Lore

• The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer - many ways to write a factorial function.

• Ido Kanner: “Ten Rules for the Beginning Hacker” (in Hebrew)

• “If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide.” - a deliciously useless (but amusing) rant.

• System Administrators’ Aphorisms

• “A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages”

• “The S stands for Simple” - about SOAP, the so-called “Simple Object Access Protocol” - from Pete Lacey’s Weblog.

• REST vs. WS-* (SOAP): A Parable

• “Carrier Pigeon Faster than South-African Broadband” - on OSNews.com.

• Ben Collins-Sussman’s “Git”

• azekeil: “F%^&ing Windows!” - how easy is Windows in comparison to Linux.

• How to Make Windows Faster than Linux - easy, but is it recommended?

• “If Linux was a car (Hater’s edition)”.

• Web Library Generator - example: “BigJavaKeyize - the accessible, eager-loading, schemaless bigtable-backed key-value store state machine-as-a-service for JavaScript”. Many more are available there. (Thanks to Su-Shee for mentioning this link.)

• “Children warned name of first pet should contain 8 characters and a digit”

• “Richard Stallman to Launch His Own Fashion Line”

• “Top 10 reasons why Darth Vader was an amazing project manager”

• Motherfucking Website - “This is a motherfucking website. And it's fucking perfect.”

• “How many software developers would it take to change a lightbulb?” - by Tom Morris.

• Ayn Rand’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (via Reddit).

• “What If Drivers Were Hired Like Programmers” (via one of my Facebook friends).

• “New system call: leftpad()” - post to the Linux kernel mailing list on 1 April 2016.

• “How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016” - “It’s 2016. No one does X any more.”.

• Why you should Never Post your Picture on the Internet (via Mulix)

• Linux Distributions’ Motivational Posters.

• Computer Enhancers - you wish you had them. (Via Mirshet-Net.)

• Crazy designs for everyday items

• “Y, R & U ARE FUCKING LETTERS!” - image posted to Reddit.

• FizzBuzz - npm edition (via Su-Shee from Freenode’s #perl channel). (Local mirror.)

• Herding Cats

• Firefox Flicks - Videos for promoting the Firefox browser.

• The Ultimate Showdown - via Wil Wheaton’s Blog. Here are the mp3 and the lyrics.

• Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel’s (Canon in D major) Rant. The sound by itself is also funny.

• Writing Perl Using Vista’s Voice Recognition - hilarious! Spotted on the perl5-porters mailing list.

• Minesweeper - The Movie

• Star Wars Asciimation - Star Wars IV rendered using text.

• Popstar by James at War - a song parodying the lives of some young female pop stars. Very funny.

• The Klein Four Group - “Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)” - a mathematical love song. Here are the lyrics with hyperlinks to articles explaining them.

• Bunny letter opener

• Mom’s Overture by Anita Renfroe

• “Hug a developer today”

• Camelot - Star Trek meets Monty Python (via Wil Wheaton’s Blog)

• Professor Wikipedia - “the funniest video of the year [Citation needed.]).”

• Awkward Rap

• The Matrix Runs on Windows

• The Mean Kitty Song - adorable! I spotted it on the YouTube Promoted Videos.

• The Lamas’ Millionaire Quiz (with English sub-titles) - The Lamas (Dutch for “Llamas”) is the Dutch version of “Whose Line is it Anyway?”. I don’t speak Dutch, but it’s very funny. (Thanks to Dazjorz.)

• Fixed Gear Blog: Future Generations

• Kitten riding tortoise - adorable!

• “ANIME IN REAL LIFE!!!!” - via a post on Facebook.

• “We're Gonna Build a Framework”

• DAILY GRADVICE - tongue-in-cheek sex advice (there are follow-ups on YouTube.).

• The Blender Films - free/open films made using open source software. I especially like Big Buck Bunny, the Caminandes films and Sintel.

• Conan the Librarian - almost as scary as the real librarians were during the 1980s and 1990s.

• Gandhi II

• Spiderman Parody

• "Terminator Vs Jesus HD The Greatest Action Story Ever Told Mad Tv 1996 - YouTube"

• “Hitler Finds out Chuck Norris is Coming” - crossover with Chuck Norris factoids.

• “Fresh Prince theme song: Google Translated”

• Weird Al Yankovic - “Don’t Download This Song”

• Musical Geek Friday - on catonmat.com.

• Logic Mazes.
  

  • Click Mazes - especially see the Plank Puzzles.

  • See also my LM-Solve program, which is a solver for some of these mazes.

• Bloxorz - manipulate a 2*1*1 brick across a board of blocks. (Puzzle)

• 3-D Logic Game - connect endpoints on a cube’s surface.

• Nurikabe - an engaging type of puzzle game. The site contains unlimited 5*5 puzzles and daily 9*9 ones.

• Brain Bashers - lots of daily puzzles and games with good user-interfaces.

• Nurikabe - contains numbered Nurikabe games of various sizes. The Network of such sites (links at the site) contains other such games.

• “Untrusted - a user JavaScript adventure game - a game that requires writing code.

• Project Euler - solve mathematical problems using the computer.

• “Castle Crashers” - music from the video game

• General Fuzz Tunes - instrumental soothing electronic music. I downloaded and can recommend “Soulful Filling”.

• Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV - Here’s the torrent for the full album

• Nine Inch Nails - The Slip

• “Thing a Week” by Jonathan Coulton - Coulton is a musician and an open-source/open-content enthusiast, who provided an original .mp3 each week for a year. Here’s the torrent for the entire collection. Some of the songs there are very nice.

• “Harvey Danger - Little by Little” - a free download album by the alternative pop group “Harvey Danger”.