My Cool Links List

Studies Related

Current Workplaces

Past Workplaces

Philosophy and Politics

Linux and Free Software

Software “Gurus”

My Friends’ Home Pages

• Ken Housley - talked with him about his Toggle-Squares puzzle and later about BeOS.
• Tom Holroyd - contacted me about my Freecell solver, due to the fact he also wrote one.
• Michael Keller - Games enthusiast and maintainer of the Freecell FAQ. He contacted me about my Freecell solver.
• Andrew (Drew) Dexter - met him through Slashdot. A not-too-technical guy who’s using Linux because it works better.
• Beth Skwarecki - “beth” on irc.freenode.org.
• Shoshannah Forbes - an Israeli Open Source/Linux activist. Has plenty of experience in software debugging.
• Oleg Goldshmidt - active in the Israeli Linux online community.
• Ido Kanner (also see his blog) - Linux enthusiast, Pascal fanatic, Perl lover, and all-around-nice-guy.
• Sjors Gielen (Dazjorz) - open source enthusiast, programmer of servers, web-sites and other stuff, and inventor of countless rounder wheels. (Warning: a lot of the site is in Dutch.)
• Ryan McDougal (q[ender]) - open-source projects. Talked with him on Freenode.
• Alan Haggai Alavi - an Indian open-source enthusiast. Met him on Freenode, too.
• Pythack - a French open-source enthusiast, contributor to Freecell Solver and lover of Pythons (the snakes, not the programming language). Blog is mostly in French.

Haifa Linux Clubbers

• Guy Keren
• Muli Ben-Yehuda
• Orr Dunkelman
• Nadav Har’El
• Orna Agmon

Israeli Perl Mongers

• Shlomo Yona
• Offer Kaye
• Gabor Szabo
• Shmuel Fomberg
• Yuval Kogman

Weblogs I like to read

Weblogs are the latest (as of late 2003) craze in the Internet and everybody and his mother have to have one (me included). I used to be quite a sporadic in my weblog and news-site reading, until I installed an RSS aggregator, which fetches RSS feeds for the new entries and allows me to view them. This has changed my life and now I can read much more news blog entries, etc. without visiting dozens of sites. Here’s my OPML file which contains all the blogs I 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

Netcasts (or Audiocasts/videocasts/vlogs/podcasts) are irregularly updated blogs with music or video attachment. These are the videos 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 isssues. It has a very cool opening music.
• Zulo Podcast - an Israeli and Hebrew podcast about Free Software and other Tech issues.

Favourite Pages for Searching and Locating Resources on the Web

Interesting Reference Sites

• The Internet Movie Database - an on-line database with a lot of film-related information.
• WWWebster - a useful on-line version of Webster’s dictionary of the English language.
• The Linux Documentation Project - documentation on all aspects of the Linux operating system.
• The Jargon File - a dictionary of computer geeks’ jargon.
• Slashdot - a really cool computer-related news page.
• The Wikipedia - a world-viewable, world-editable encyclopedia that is very comprehensive and getting better and better all the time. (feel free to contribute something of your own!).

Software

Open Source Software

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

Non-open-source software

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 haven’t encountered an open-source product that’s quite up to it, but I’m hopeful something up-to-par with it will be developed in the future.
• 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

Humour

• The Friends’ Café - a nice site about the T.V show.
• Complete Friends Page - and another one.
• The Bastard Operator from Hell - A really funny story, for those who know about UNIX.
• Humorix - Linux-related humour items.
• Divisiontwo Magazine - a great collection of parodies of the Internet Life. Includes “Windows vs. Linux on the Server and on the Desktop” by Jorge Lopez, MCSE and a parody of bad web pages.
• Things my Girlfriend and I have Argued about - a page with some very funny stories.
• The Uncyclopedia - an Encyclopedia which consists of 100% False (and funny) information. Also a parody of the Wikipedia. Includes an article about Redundancy.
• www.BGP.net Jon’s Humor Collection - contains several directories of various jokes.

Cartoon Strips

• 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.

Funny Stories

• 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.
• 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.)

Funny Pictures

• 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.

Funny Videos

• 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 Anyways?”. I don’t speak Dutch, but it’s very funny. (Thanks to Dazjorz.)
• Fixed Gear Blog: Future Generations
• Kitten riding tortoise - adorable!

Funny Music

• Weird Al Yankovic - “Don’t Download This Song”
• Musical Geek Friday - on catonmat.com.

Online Games and Puzzles

• 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.
• Project Euler - solve mathematical problems using the computer.

Wallpapers and Other Pictures

• cerberus.cc’s Wallpapers - contains galleries of Anime, art, cartoons, cities, nature, sports and miscellaneous wallpapers.
• digital.org - Digital Art - a hub for computer graphics with some wonderful pictures.
• Cowboys’ Cowgirl Pinups.
• Skins.be - Female Celebrity and Model Wallpapers.
• Desktop Girls - contains pictures of beautiful women, often edited with interesting effects.
• SexyDesktop.co.uk Wallpapers - pictures of female celebrities, male celebrities, cars and pictures from space.
• WallpaperBase.com - Your source for free wallpapers
• Pictures of Dragons.
• Photos from Port Alexander
• Polykarbon’s Gallery - interesting Manga graphics and sketches.
• Pictures from Brazil - Pictures of Brazil from a trip by an IRC correspondent.
• BSDs Wallpapers - Wallpapers based on the icons of the BSD operating systems.
• TopWalls.com - Wallpapers from various categories - categories include arts, animals, nature, places, TV & Movies, Anime and Cartoons, Games, Music, and Male/Female.
• Best Quality Wallpapers - contains high-quality, high-resolution wallpapers. Also see the links on the front page to other similar sites.
• Xtremewalls - contains several different categories of wallpapers.
• Wallpaper Pimper - Wallpapers from several categories, some in high resolutions.
• KDE-Look and GNOME-Look and other of their sister sites (see the footer) provide many user-contributed wallpapers.

Music to Buy and Download

• GarageBand.com - a site for Internet bands and their music. Many quality music recordings for download.
• Israeli Music - a site for International orders of CDs of Israeli artists.
• Magnatune - a record label that publishes artists whose songs are under a freely redistributable licence.
• Last.fm - a social music service, which learns what you like and allows you to listen to music based on tags, or related to a certain artist. A great way to discover new music.
• Jamendo - a showcase site for musicians. Download and listen to many albums, of many genres, legally.

Free Musical Downloads

• “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”.

Web Design and Programming

• W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium - the standard body for defining the current and next generations of web technologies.
• Zvon.org - The Guide to the XML Galaxy - a site with many good “teach-by-example” tutorials for XML related technologies.
• HTML Dog HTML and CSS Tutorials - excellent and modern HTML and CSS tutorials by a good expert on the topic.
• The PNG Alpha Transparency Page - a demonstration of what you can achieve on the web using translucent PNGs. Supported by all popular browsers except Microsoft Internet Explorer below version 7.
• HTML Color Names -a list of the HTML color names that are accepted by the browsers, and will be part of CSS 3.0.

Various Sites of Interest

• Presentation Helper - a great site dedicated to the various issues of giving and preparing a presentation.