Links - nuwen.net

graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/DualPhotography.pdf
This 2005 paper demonstrates how to illuminate a scene with a video projector and capture real images with a camera in order to generate a virtual image from the point of view of the projector.

gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
Performance matters again.

cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf
Garbage collection is garbage.

aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf
A conclusion contrary to accumulated folk wisdom.

nuwen.net/files/links/reflections_on_trusting_trust.pdf
Almost any compiler can be modified to receive Ken Thompson's Help.

www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf
This 1963 Ph.D. thesis describes "one of the most influential computer programs ever written by an individual", in the words of the attached 2003 preface that describes how Sketchpad fits into history.

freshmeat.net/articles/view/175/
Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination.

research.att.com/~bs/DnE2005.pdf
The Japanese translation of The Design And Evolution Of C++ contains this extended foreword. (This PDF is in English.)

stepanovpapers.com
Stepanov created the STL and saved the world.

research.att.com/~bs/hopl-almost-final.pdf
This large paper contains an overview of C++'s history unlike any other.

events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591-paper_xbox.pdf
A fascinating story.

daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf
An attack so clever that even the Blight would envy it.

cs.washington.edu/research/security/usenix07devices.pdf
Variable bitrate encoding leaks information even when encrypted.

www.icir.org/vern/papers/cdc-usenix-sec02/
Imminent death of the Net predicted.

citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf
DRAM retains its state for longer than you might expect.

www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
A 1996 paper that examines how hard it is to completely erase the data on a hard drive.

cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf
An excellent look at secure software engineering.

www.cs.princeton.edu/~sudhakar/papers/memerr.pdf
Virtual machines are not as impervious to attack as some people would like to think.

people.seas.harvard.edu/~rachna/papers/why_phishing_works.pdf
I can't decide whether the part about the animated bear is funny or sad.

home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/research/fieldman.pdf
How to build working nations.

aei.org/docLib/20070419_Gaidar.pdf
This is the best explanation of the Soviet Union's collapse that I've read.

mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2006.31.2.42
Now, if we could just get the terrorists to read this.

mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html
Read this now.

wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/111-3.pdf
Vernor Vinge's 1993 article, with January 2003 annotations.

www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0696.html
Dropping Big Rocks On One's Enemies

spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6306
Will computers ever be as smart as humans? Yes, but only briefly.

caib.nasa.gov/news/report/volume1/chapters.html
Spaceflight is unforgiving.

www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf
Nuclear fission is unforgiving.

wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/
This is the smallest universal Turing machine.

www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf
This PDF was enormously helpful to me when I was applying to graduate schools.

secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=atkins_18_2
Why science succeeds and religion fails.

steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html
Java considered harmful.

kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html
And there will be a picture of a bunny.

catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
Boredom and drudgery are evil.

www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
This talk is really interesting.

www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
Reverse the polarity!

antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/
Everyone's doing it wrong.

home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
GCC contributor Nathanael Nerode nuclearates the GNU Free Documentation License.

prospect.org
A liberal political magazine.

electoral-vote.com
The Votemaster uses nonpartisan polls only.

fivethirtyeight.com
Electoral Projections Done Right.

news.google.com
Google continuously scans for the latest news articles, previewing them on a single page.

nytimes.com
The best newspaper, both offline and online, and my main source of news.

washingtonpost.com
A good newspaper.

www.accelerando.org/book/
And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower - maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath.

catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/
An interesting explanation of the Unix philosophy. However, disregard everything that ESR says about C++.

catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/
An excellent usability guide. The power curve is the key insight.

gutenberg.org/etext/972
CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
OUTDO, v.t. To make an enemy.
NONSENSE, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

gutenberg.org/etext/201
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

shamusyoung.com/shocked/
A complete, free, online novel based on System Shock.

fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
A free online book about weight control written by John Walker, the founder of Autodesk. The Hacker's Diet cuts through the mumbo jumbo traditionally associated with weight loss and arrives at a few simple principles that make permanent weight control possible: strict caloric monitoring combined with exponentially smoothed moving averages of measured weight.

catb.org/~esr/jargon/
The definitive collection of unusual terms used by hackers. Extremely informative and insanely funny.

promo.net/pg/
The definitive source of public domain electronic books in plain text format.

sjhw.net/suzvoy/fanfic.html
Interesting and beautifully well written fanfiction. (suzfanfiction.com/indexx.html contains a new series by the same author, but not the old stories.)

catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Required reading for anyone who has technical questions.

www.anta.net/misc/nnq/nquote.shtml
This quoting style is superior not only on USENET but on forums and in E-mail as well.

erdani.org
The godfather of modern C++.

asimovonline.com/asimov_FAQ.html
The greatest writer who ever lived.

www.berkshirehathaway.com
Warren Buffett's annual reports are awesome.

www.clancyfaq.com
My favorite Clancy novel is The Bear And The Dragon.

www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~peter-f/
A data compression researcher interested in the Burrows-Wheeler Transform.

paulgraham.com
Allow me to praise Paul Graham with faint damning: he is a poorer essayist than Isaac Asimov.

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
The legendary computer scientist.

www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/
The huge and poorly organized, yet highly interesting, website of the inventor of Lisp.

schneier.com/blog/
There are no such things as Carmichael numbers. There are only primes that Bruce Schneier has beaten factors into.

www.antipope.org/charlie/
The awesome SF and fantasy author.

research.att.com/~bs/
The designer and original implementor of C++.

cs.helsinki.fi/u/ukkonen/
The inventor of the online algorithm for constructing suffix trees in linear time.

fourmilab.ch
The founder of Autodesk. Walker's extensive website inspired the creation of this site.

www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html
That whole smash.

citeseer.ist.psu.edu
The CiteSeer Computer Science search engine rules. It has lots of extensively cross-referenced CS papers in multiple formats, and it's completely free.

www.fnal.gov
The most powerful particle accelerator in America.

pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/02/01/how_not_to_do_it_ruining_stuff.php
Awesome stories of mishaps in science.

mathworld.wolfram.com
A treasure trove of mathematical information.

newscientist.com
A good, although occasionally gullible, source of scientific news.

research.att.com/~njas/sequences/
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 31.

physicsworld.com
The latest physics news.

unitednuclear.com/magnets.htm
Try dropping a neodymium-boron-iron cylinder magnet down a copper pipe which has an internal diameter barely larger than the magnet's diameter.

campaigngame.us
Democracy at its finest.

handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/
In the "tower defense" genre, you build towers that fire weapons at passing monsters to prevent their escape.

eyezmaze.com
The Grow series of games is a genre unto itself.

www.addictinggames.com/thelaststand.html
Zombies. Zombies!

wesnoth.org
A fun GPLed turn-based strategy game.

nethack.org
You kill the poor kitten! You hear the rumble of distant thunder... This kitten corpse tastes terrible! You feel that eating the kitten was a bad idea.

www.monkkonen.net/notrium.php
A fun freeware 2D game.

sc2.sourceforge.net
Star Control II was a game that was released in 1992; its sales were modest, but it is now regarded as a classic. Its source code was released in 2002, and The Ur-Quan Masters is a port of it for modern PCs. When you download The Ur-Quan Masters, make sure to get all of the remix packs. You'll be glad that you did. You don't need to download them separately. The main installer is one of those little things that then goes and snarfs the necessary files from the Internet. Ordinarily, this is bletcherous, but it allows you to select which optional remix packs you want. Check everything - the remixed music is awesome. The game is larger than you might expect for something that was released in 1992, which is partially due to the new music and partially due to the voice acting for all dialogue.

The game will very effectively introduce you to its story. It has aged very well and is ridiculously fun. However, the learning curve is a little steep for those used to modern games with tutorials and difficulty levels. To get around this, you should consult the Ultronomicon. Pay attention to The Spoiler Warning Of Now And Forever! Head over to the Non-Spoiler Hints first.

shrapnelgames.com/Digital_Eel/WW/WW_page.html
Weird Worlds is a really neat game. You command a starship on a mission lasting ten, twenty, or thirty years (your choice), exploring a sector of space with many stars. Each star system might contain artifacts, lifeforms, or aliens (both hostile and friendly). Along the way, you can build up a small fleet of ships and confront hostile aliens with some awesome firepower of your own. Best of all, each game is randomly generated and takes ten to thirty minutes (an hour at most, maybe) to complete. There's a lot of replayability here, since if you get blasted to atoms in the unforgiving blackness of deep space (and you will), it's so easy to start again and explore a whole new sector of stars. Weird Worlds is cheap ($25 for the full game) and a demo is freely downloadable.

tim-mann.org/xboard.html
The chess client that I use with the Free Internet Chess Server.

freechess.org
Two people, each running WinBoard, can play chess with each other through FICS.

worldofwarcraft.com
The most polished and addictive MMORPG out there.

gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml
This article is so right.

aleatools.com
These magnetic markers are insanely useful for playing D&D 4^th Edition.

boardgamegeek.com
A wonderful site with ratings and reviews of board games, especially German-style board games.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurikabe
Like Sudoku, but better.

bungie.net
Stop Destruction Of Human Race: In Progress...

gamasutra.com
A site devoted to game development; Gamasutra is associated with the magazine Game Developer and the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

gamespy.com
A gaming news and reviews site.

www.futurecrew.com/skaven/tracker_music.shtml
The soundtrack to Bejeweled 2 on the Xbox 360 is Beyond The Network by Skaven. He has made the original multi-part IT, as well as MP3s, available.

ccmixter.org
Lots of music available under the Creative Commons licenses.

lockjawlabs.com/blog/?page_id=5
The soundtrack to Hexic HD on the Xbox 360 is part of the Hexophilia album by Jerry Schroeder. He has made MP3s of the album available. The eight songs used in the game are Belkell, Underlow, Cobblers, Slartisfgh, Lubax, Badback, 54, and Oilyn (which is the first song played).

jonathancoulton.com
Welcome to my secret lair on Skullcrusher Mountain.

www.medievalfuture.com/precursors/
The Precursors have been remixing the music of Star Control II to form the soundtrack to The Ur-Quan Masters (a port of Star Control II for modern PCs). I am say best word *awesome*. Maybe you do not know. *Awesome* be *ethereal* and yet *solid*. So good!!!

stanlepardmusic.com
Among other things, the theme to Xbox Live Arcade UNO is available here.

amethystium.com
All of Amethystium's songs are incredible. Their CDs, which I highly recommend, can be purchased through Amazon.

auratrance.com
One of the few artists I follow that still has a full archive online. My favorites are Destination Skyline and Naked Angel (Northern Chant Mix).

tcpmusic.com/e107/news.php
The Cynic Project was the first artist I ever discovered on mp3.com and is still one of my favorite artists. I think that his best song is Grid II (Trance Mix), though I like almost all of his nonvocal tracks. He sells a CD collection that is close to a full archive.

labworks.auratrance.com
Essentially another name for the same artists behind Aura. Labworks also has a full archive online (in fact, it is larger than what used to be available on mp3.com). I suggest listening to All That I Want and Ibiza Sunrise (Original Mix), among others.

raymondwave.com/index_rw.html
Raymond Wave's songs are fantastic. He has made his songs from mp3.com available online, including the excellent Wishing Well.

poynton.com/notes/colour_and_gamma/ColorFAQ.html
All about color reproduction.

poynton.com/notes/colour_and_gamma/GammaFAQ.html
All about gamma correction.

msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997636.aspx
How to create icons with the Windows XP look and feel.

hubblesite.org
Neato space pictures.

larabiefonts.com
Ray Larabie provides a large number of free, high quality fonts.

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/
The National Space Science Data Center's Photo Gallery has images of planetary bodies and astronomical objects taken by Apollo, deep space probes, and the Hubble Space Telescope.

transfuse.deviantart.com/art/One-Girl-in-All-the-World-40975299
There are two kinds of women in this world: those that look good in the rain and those that don't.

transfuse.deviantart.com/art/Samus-Aran-44059164
Beautiful powered armor.

getty.deviantart.com/gallery/
I wish I were better at this.

visibleearth.nasa.gov
A massive repository for high-resolution images of the Earth.

flickfilosopher.com
MaryAnn Johanson's movie reviews are wonderful.

imdb.com
Print is dead.

movies.yahoo.com/mv/upcoming/
A site with detailed information about movies which will be released in the future, as well as recently released movies.

epguides.com
A comprehensive resource for the titles and airdates of thousands of television series.

thefutoncritic.com
News and reviews of television series.

gateworld.net
An excellent Stargate SG-1/Atlantis site.

youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE
It turns out that the anime Black Heaven and Jonathan Coulton's song Code Monkey make a really awesome anime music video.

youtube.com/watch?v=AJzU3NjDikY
The special effects and plot of this video make it more entertaining than many multi-million-dollar movies.

exactaudiocopy.de
The CD ripper that I swear by.

id3-tagit.pluemper.name
The mass ID3 2.3 tag editor that I use on my MP3s to keep them organized on my iPod. On Windows, I organize my songs in a folder hierarchy, but the iPod has no concept of a folder. Therefore, to keep my songs efficiently navigable, I have to label them all by Genre.

nvidia.com
Yummy ForceWare drivers can be found here.

virtualdub.org
Digital video is incredibly infuriating to work with; most programs are incompetently programmed, incredibly fragile, and difficult to use. VirtualDub is the one exception. It's the only video editing program that I like. It's GPLed, very robust, and intuitive. I use it for transcoding all the time.

winamp.com
The music player that I swear by.

microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/
The video player that I swear by.

un4seen.com/xmplay.html
Although I use Winamp to play music, it can play only the first part of a multi-part IT. XMPlay can write out each part of a multi-part IT as a separate WAV.

bzip.org
The Burrows-Wheeler Transform compressor that I use; it is significantly more efficient than ZIP.

dban.sourceforge.net
To securely destroy all data on a computer's hard drives, burn a CD of DBAN and boot the computer with it.

liquidninja.com/metapad/
The freeware text editor that I use in Windows for basically everything. For example, I write this site and all of my C++ programs entirely with Metapad. Metapad is an incredibly cool program which offers all sorts of useful features. Most importantly, it's very simple, since it's a clone of Notepad.

mirc.com
The Internet Relay Chat client that I use. It sucks, but everything else sucks more.

nano-editor.org
The text editor that I use in GNU/Linux for everything.

pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/
A highly useful tool that losslessly recompresses every type of PNG.

entropymine.com/jason/pngrewrite/
Another highly useful tool that losslessly removes redundancy from 8-bit PNGs. pngrewrite (when applicable) should be used before pngcrush.

www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
The freeware Secure Shell (SSH) client that I use. SSH is like Telnet in that it offers you commandline access to a remote system. However, Telnet is rampantly insecure whereas SSH is encrypted and safe.

spamassassin.apache.org
If your ISP doesn't use SpamAssassin, ask them to begin using it immediately. If that doesn't work, get a better ISP.

winscp.net
The freeware Secure Copy (SCP) client that I use. SCP is like FTP, but SCP's transmissions are encrypted. So, unlike FTP, SCP passwords and files are not sent in the clear. SCP also supports transparent compression. I have switched to using SCP whenever possible. I recommend WinSCP highly as it has an intuitive interface and is reasonably fast.

microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
The little things that make life worth living.

ps2pdf.com
A free, fast, online converter which takes PostScript files and produces Portable Document Format files.

xe.com/ucc/
Because sometimes you need to know how many zorkmids a buckazoid is worth.

download.plt-scheme.org/drscheme/
The Scheme interpreter that I highly recommend. DrScheme's GUI is extremely easy to use.

gcc.gnu.org
The GNU Compiler Collection has been ported to almost every platform under the sun.

mingw.org
I maintain a distribution of this.

upx.sourceforge.net
The executable compressor that I use; it is fast and effective.

boost.org
Free portable C++ libraries that complement the C++ Standard Library. Many Boost libraries may become part of the next C++ Standard.

libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
The official reference library for Portable Network Graphics.

opengl.org/documentation/
Now I'm going to show you how to draw a kitty.

libsdl.org
A portable multimedia library.

zlib.net
A freely available, unpatented, portable, general purpose, lossless data compression library. Compared to libbzip2, zlib is faster but produces larger output.

open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/
All sorts of neat information is available from the Standardization Committee. They maintain lists of issues with the core language and the standard library. A new C++ Standard is under development which will add new features and fix many of the issues with the current Standard.

webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/product.asp?sku=INCITS/ISO/IEC+14882-2003
Standardization organizations like ANSI and ISO fund their activities by selling copies of their standards, which are copyrighted like any other book. Once you have purchased a copy of a standard, you are free to implement anything based on that standard without ever paying ANSI or ISO another cent. The 2003 C++ Standard is available in unencumbered PDF form for $30. After paying by credit card, you can immediately download the file.

open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1836.pdf
TR1 adds new libraries to C++03, most of which were derived from Boost and will be in C++0x.

open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/
C has been standardized twice, first in 1989 and again in 1999. The Standardization Committee is still collecting defect reports for the 1999 C Standard.

open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1256.pdf
The 1999 C Standard, with Technical Corrigenda 1, 2, and 3 integrated, is available freely as an unencumbered PDF.

open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n897.pdf
Explanations for why the Standardization Committee did the things that they did.

csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips197/fips-197.pdf
Setec Astronomy.

csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips180-2/fips180-2withchangenotice.pdf
Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 180-2 (with change notice) specifies the algorithms SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. Attacks better than brute force are known against SHA-1; it should no longer be used as a cryptographically secure one-way hash algorithm.

libpng.org/pub/png/
Portable Network Graphics is the best file format ever devised.

libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/png-1.2-pdg.html
The definition of Portable Network Graphics at the binary level.

jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Validate your Cascading Style Sheets as CSS 2.1 using this simple online tool.

validator.w3.org
Validate your documents as XHTML 1.1 using this simple online tool.

useit.com/alertbox/
Jakob Nielsen has been publishing this column since 1995, and has been so very, very right where almost everyone else has been so hideously wrong. Everyone who works on a website should read and follow his advice.

opendns.com
Fast, reliable, free DNS for clients. It takes less than a minute to set up.

www.granitecanyon.com
Free DNS for servers.

rackspace.com
Rackspace hosts this website.

statcounter.com
Free invisible web analytics.

dpreview.com
The only place with digital camera reviews that I trust.

extremetech.com
A mainstream hardware and technology news site.

hardocp.com
A hardware news and reviews site.

theinquirer.net
A computer industry news and rumors site that usually has accurate information about upcoming developments. However, it is written in an incredibly annoying style.

segway.com
I own a Segway i180.

storagereview.com
The best site for hard drive reviews. Their knowledge is comprehensive and their methodologies are impeccable. Unfortunately, their site is infrequently updated.

amazon.com
Amazon Prime is the greatest thing ever.

theringlord.com
Everyone needs chainmail supplies.

resellerratings.com
Always consult ResellerRatings before purchasing from an online retailer that you haven't used before.

newegg.com
Widely regarded as the most trustworthy online retailer of computer hardware, NewEgg carries a wide selection of parts. Given a choice, I prefer to buy my hardware from them rather than from anyone else.

performance-pcs.com
I can't find quad USB 2.0 brackets anywhere else.

sidewindercomputers.com
Focused on fans, heatsinks, and other cooling accessories, Sidewinder often carries specialized parts that NewEgg doesn't carry. I've ordered parts from Sidewinder several times and I've been very happy with all of my orders.

techonweb.com
Highly rated, TechOnWeb carries Serial Attached SCSI hardware that I can't find anywhere else.

home.ingdirect.com
The online bank that I use for my savings account, which is FDIC insured and provides a very high interest rate. Opening and using an Orange Savings Account involves no nonsense whatsoever.

onesuite.com
The dial-around long distance provider that I used when I had a landline.