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sites i frequent/ 've found worth recommending |
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favourite links |
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To the left are shortcuts to some of my favourite sites, intended mainly to be my portable bookmarks. Further description can be obtained for each link by hovering the mouse over each image.
I'm a cartoons junkie and going over the cartoon strips as well as the editorial cartoons is among my favourite parts of the day. And I never fail to check out You Said It!, the daily strip by R K Laxman, India's premier political satirist. The Amul Topical, the world's longest-running ad campaign and the brainchild of Eustace Fernandez and Sylvester daCunha, has come to be a very precise and eagerly awaited mirror of the event currently holding the nation's fancy in India.
Some of the sites which have the best compendia of Hindi songs or links to Indian Music sites are raaga.com, Chaitime.com , DesiMusic, TeenStation, Sriny and the Indian music site at about.com . And did you know, there's even a site devoted to the game of Antakshari, and I'm told it's a popular game onsome of the chatsites frequented by Indians.
I like web designing and have created two other websites, one for Vertech International Inc. and the other for the Field Analytical Chemistry Laboratory at NJIT. My previous website, btw, used to look like this. There are just too many sites on web design, as there are examples of good design, to be faithfully listed. Among the sites worth checking are the home page of David Siegel, the guru of internet design and pioneer of web tricks like the fixed width table and the spacer gif. Mind you, this page was made in the days of Netscape 1. Another site which stood out to me was the Elliott|Dickens website, for its unique design idea.
I've used a large number of resorces on the internet in learning HTML and web design aspects - and, as an aside, it is as a learning and research tool that I see the greatest value of the internet, more so in my field of Java programming. There's an incredible amount of help available on just about everything. [Don't believe me? Try this link.] While on the subject of tutorials, each topic has its own sites which are best, but the webmonkey is a very good place to start on many topics for both its good quality and dummies-like easy style. And on Perl I especially liked the tutorial by Robert Pepper. Other than the Java Tutorial on Sun's site, the best online resource I found on Java was the Thinking In Java book by Bruce Eckel. Bruce allows the entire book to be downloaded from the web, and this book handsomely beats many of its priced counterparts (in fact, it won the 2001 JavaWorld Editor's Choice award for best book on Java). His Thinking In C++ book is equally good. A somewhat high-level but very good book on Swing available online is this one by Matthew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev. On the subject of Java, I have found that this layout of the Java API documentation makes it a bit easier to navigate and read than Sun's way of doing things, at least if you maximize the window anyway. What do you think?
If, like me, you too long for the convenience of Unix-like utilities on Windows, here are the links to some of my favourite ones: BK Replace 'Em is the best product I've seen for multiple-files- and directory-wide search and replace operations. WinMerge is great for file (version) comparisons and merging. Infobear.com allows IP address look-ups with its nslookup utility. The Unix Power Tools support webpage is a very good compilation of useful utilities for Unix. So is this ftp site on vi tips and tricks. I mostly go Notepad for HTML editing, falling upon Allaire Homesite (payware alert) more for organization of multiple files than raw editing ease. I found CuteHTML to be a very good mix of features, size and lack of clutter, but it's no longer freeware. If you've always been using WinZip for archiving and unarchiving on Windows, PowerArchiver not only does everything WinZip can, but is freeware and can split up archives into multiple files, a boon when large executables need to be stored on floppies. A very useful tool I found on the internet is the pdf distiller at Andy Babinszki 's site, to convert PS files to PDF. Adobe's site offers the same service. Everyone has a favorite search engine. My own these days is Google. They got the internet searches deal right. And AskJeeves, for its second-generation search capabilities. For news on India, while Samachar is perhaps the most visited site, I much like the Rediff website, as it's the only dedicated Indian webzine, which means among other things it updates more than once a day. And it has some very pleasant layout. Some other very useful utilities on the net which I use pretty often are bookmarkbox , to store bookmarks online, and jump.com to store addresses. And yodlee.com is a wonderful place to consolidate web accounts. Actually, these days I think Netscape 6 can handle most of what these sites offered. For storing addresses online I have moved on to zaplets which are a much nicer idea as they can be mailed, don't impose the hassle of logging in if you don't want it, and allow far greater customization, as in my address book on this site. The Lynda.com site has this excellent chart of a web-safe color palette.
Of my friends at IIT, Bangal exhibits his trademark tempo throughout his site, and also does a very good job moderating Rachna resorces. Bhardu had started out with some very good documentation of Indian history, but abandoned the cause midway. Lamboo was probably trying to relive the past days. Of my past roommates in NJ, Omkar's site has some very good photographs. Sameer's site is best viewed if you have a love and patience for all things wheeled. Naushad displays some of his excellent photographs on his website.
The Indian Defence and the Defence and Space Research establishment have long been a source of pride and inspiration for me. The official website of the Indian armed forces is at armedforces.nic.in, and links to many sites related to the Defence establishment are maintained at bharat-rakshak.com . The Indian Army maintains a website on Kashmir at armyinkashmir.org, which is notable also because it is very well-designed for this class of a website. Exhibiting its increased media-savvy, the army also created a website on the Operation Vijay in Kargil at vijayinkargil.org.
Now here's one link rather NOT have you exploring!
They even have a multi-university project named after me! Here's the website for Project SUMIT . |
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