Links
You should find some interesting links on this page, well that's the idea anyway. I also use Delicious, which is a social bookmarking site, so if you want to see all the exciting pages I've bookmarked why don't you look at my account page.
Friends' Websites
- Halo3Forum.co.uk
- A website run by Pete Connor and co. The number 1 place in Europe for competitve halo
- Richard Clarke's website
- Richard does a lot o Ruby code so I presume that's what this site will be running when it's up.
- Matt Wilson's website
- Fellow Comp Sci at Uni o' Southampton.
Linux Distributions
- Gentoo Linux
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Gentoo Linux is my current distribution. It's harder than Ubuntu and I wouldn't recommend it to new users of linux. I would recommend it to people who are familiar to linux and want to get to know it better.
Although there are GUIs you can install, a lot of configuration is done by directly editing configuration files.
Gentoo uses portage to manage packages. The thing that separates Gentoo from a lot of other distributions is it compiles packages from their sources. Other distros such as Ubuntu use binary packages which are already compiled for your system.
The nice thing about compiling from source is that you can choose (to some extent) which features of software are available to you. So for example, if you want an audio player that will play most formats, but you never use ogg, you can tell portage not to compile ogg support into the program.
If you want more information on portage see Gentoo's portage guide.
- Slackware
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I've not really tried Slackware before, but it looks an interesting distro.
Slackware's package manager uses gzipped tar archives. It's a binary distribution so packages are precompiled, unlike with gentoo. What seems to happen is, each archive contains the directory structure and files of the package relative to root, and when you install packages, the archives are simply extracted into /.
I had a quick go with Slackware before I put Gentoo on my laptop. One of the thigns that attracted me to it is that it just uses the vanilla kernels, i.e. unpatched kernels straight from kernel.org, which means you can get newer kernels faster, but has the disadvantage that you have to patch everything yourself.
One of the main disadvantages I found to slackware was that it's package manager didn't resolve dependencies, meaning you had to do it all yourself. This may not seem too bad but I'd prefer dependencies to be resolved for me as some packages can have lots of them.
- Ubuntu Linux
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Ubuntu is probably one of the easiest to use Linux distributions available. This was my distribution of choice for 3 years, only changing because I wanted to get deeper into linux and the terminal.
There are many flavours of Ubuntu. Ubuntu itself is based around the GNOME desktop environment; Kubuntu is based around KDE; Xubuntu is based around XFCE; and Edubuntu is still based around GNOME but is aimed at educational institutions.
Programming Sites
Here are some sites that I use when I'm coding.
- PHP Manual
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The PHP manual is very useful for looking up the PHP API. It contains all of the predefined variables (i.e $_SERVER[...] etc), and all of the standard PHP functions (and a few more)
- MySQL manual
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The MySQL manual is very useful for looking up SQL/mySQL syntax (as can be imagined).
- W3Schools
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This site is excellent for people wanting to learn CSS and (X)HTML. It has tutorials and references for folk who already know CSS or HTML and just want to quickly look something up.
- Dev Shed
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A good site for web development tutorials, not used this site in a fair while but it was a really good resource when I was first learning PHP.
- Sitepoint
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Anoter web-dev site, these people have lots of good articles. And do quite good books. I learn't the basics PHP and mySQL from a set of sitepoint articles, which they have now released as a book, and have a CSS book from them which I used as well as w3schools to learn CSS.
- Java 1.5.0 API
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The Java 1.5 API, not much more to say really. Useful for finding classes and their methods.
- Crackmes.de
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A site where people post up binaries that they have made for you to try to crack. They're all legal (as far as I'm aware), as they're all made specifically to be cracked (i.e you won't be cracking any proprietary software for anybody). It's just good fun to do, check it out.
See radare in the section below (or click that link). That has a good editor with a disassembler built in.
Programming Tools
Here are some tools that I use or have used to develop code
- Eclipse
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Free to download, I mainly use this for developing Java, but can install plugins for other languages (C++ for example). Other tools that I use and plug into eclipse are Visual Paradigm and IBM Rational Software Modeller.
- SciTE
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A nice graphical editor (i.e an editor that uses a gui).
- Vim
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A really powerful editor, I generally use this now as it's nice and light compared to eclipse, and I just generally prefer using the terminal.
- Visual Paradigm for UML
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Visual paradigm for UML is UML modelling software which can either run standalone or plug into eclipse. While using this for a second year project I found a few frustrating bugs and that it was really quite heavy, but the advantage over using this compared to IBM Rational is that it'll run under Linux.
- GDB: the GNU Debugger
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This is a C and C++ (among others) debugger. This has a CLI and, if you prefer, the option to use a GUI. This was exteremly useful in our operating systems coursework, which involved writing a program to write and format a floppy disk with a fat12 filesystem.
- Radare
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A set of tools for fiddling about with binaries. If you ever attempt anything from Crackmes.de radare comes in very useful. I think its just interesting looking inside the binaries though.
Hosting/Net
A few hosting companies that I've used
- DomainSite.com
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These guys are really cheap for .com, .org etc. All of my non *.uk domains are registered through them. My only .uk domain is registered through UKReg, which is owned by the same folk that run fasthosts (see below).
- Open Hosting
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These are my current hosts, I'm using a VPS from them, which is something like $20/mo. You get so much CPU time, RAM and Bandwidth per month. I've never come close to using all of my allocated resources though.
- Media Temple
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MediaTemple is an American hosting company. Your site is hosted on a Grid, which means that your site should never go down, or slow down. If your site is under high demand, then traffic is redirected to other servers on the grid, which also contain your data (at least this is what I think happens. Check their site for more info).
The good things about Media Temple are that you can choose to run PHP 5 (which I did), and the resources they give you are Massive. I think it was something like 100 MySQL databases and 1TB Transfer wihen I joined. Hard disk space was fairly huge too, I think about 100GB. Also you get SSH access.
The downside was I found their servers could sometimes be slow and they are quite expensive for what I needed.
- Dataflame
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These guys are incredibly cheap and I don't remember having any problems with them. The only slight niggle is they didn't seem to provide SSH access.
- Fasthosts
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These folk are pretty good, although fairly expensive for what they offered when I used them.
They do have SSH Access, but only had one domain per account (unless you wanted to pay more). They did allow 200 sub-domains, which was pretty good.
Graphics
- Inkscape
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Inkscape is a Scalable Vector Graphics editor. You can most probably compare it to Corel Draw or Xara for windows.
- The Gimp
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The Gimp is a raster image editing program. I don't do that much with it to be honest, every so often I enhance photos I've taken, that's about it.
Music Sites
These sites are all legal as far as I'm aware :-)
- Artist Server
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Artists upload their own music to this site. There aren't any mainstream bands, but there are still some pretty good songs.
- Creative Commons
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There are a few Creative commons licenses depending on what you're allowed to do. E.g with some you can download and redistribute freely and use the data in other compositions. For more information see their site.
- Jamendo
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This site has lots of Creative Commons music which is available either to download direcly from the site or if you're feeling a bit more generous, bittorrent and other peer to peer networks.
General Fun
These sites aren't really useful, but are just quite fun
- Weebls Stuff
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This site has lots of amusing Flash animations. Home of the Badger Badger Badger song, Weebl and Bob and of Magical Trevor.
- XKCD
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A web comic that I usually read.
- Dilbert
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Another web comic :-P
- Comics.com
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Saves me telling you every comic I read, most of them are published on this site (including Dilbert).