Steve's Software Trek
Before I purchased the kargs.net domain and hosted it at Bluehost, I used this site to publish information about software engineering. I now post to my blog at steve.kargs.net. I no longer maintain this website - but have left it here in case it might be useful. Caution! Historical content follows.
Since I write software for a living, I thought I should dedicate some web space for some stuff that I have worked on. I mostly write embedded C for PC based controllers, but I have dabbled in a few other areas as well.
Software Projects
Favorite Software Places to Visit
- Best of breed - my favorite open source applications for the PC. I use OpenOffice software for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawings. I use Mozilla for browsing and e-mail. I use FileZilla for FTP client and FTP server on the Win32 platform. A nice, full featured graphical text editor with syntax highlighting and many other bells and whistles is Vim, or Vi IMproved - a programmers text editor. I like a full featured graphics editing tool called the GIMP - the GNU Image Manipulation Program. If you like to play or edit sound, Audacity is a good, simple audio editor suitable for recording, mixing, and editing ordinary tracks of CD-quality audio, on many platforms including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. A fun game for kids and adults is Tux Racer, and there are lots of other games written using the Simple DirectMedia Layer, a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device.
- BACnet - dedicated to providing the latest information on BACnet - A Data Communication Protocol for Building Automation and Control Networks. Developed under the auspices of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), BACnet is now an American national standard, a European pre-standard, and a potential global standard. The protocol is supported and maintained by ASHRAE Standing Standard Project Committee 135. I help out on the committee, and also on the open source Visual Test Shell, an application for testing the BACnet functionality of various devices used in building automation systems. Project members are working on various enhancements to VTS as well as routine maintenance. I also participate in the BACnet Testing Labs Working Group, and the BACnet Lighting Applications Working Group. Aren't standards bodies wonderful?
- Extreme Programming - Extreme Programming , or XP for short, is a code-centric discipline for getting software done right, on time, within budget, while having fun along the way. The XP approach is to take the best software practices to the extreme. Another XP site has a great tutorial which includes an introduction and overview. Chuck Allison wrote a great article in C/C++ Users Journal about the The Simplest Automated Unit Test Framework That Could Possibly Work. It included test frameworks written in C, C++,and Java and opened my eyes to doing best practices to the extreme. What? You're not programming in one of those languages? You can download Test Frameworks for other languages.
- My computer dual boots Windows or Linux using LILO. I put together a firewall with DHCP and IP masquerading using Coyote Linux. They also have a help forum where I volunteer. For news I like to browse CNN, NewsForge, or SlashDot. For software I like to browse TUCOWS, FreshMeat, or SourceForge.
- Geek Tools If you are always looking for a way to have all the external network resources that you use often, at your fingertips (and all sorts of cool tools that seem to be in different places that kept moving and disappearing as people moved around the net, from company to company), here is a website, capable of being used by any browser including LYNX, with minimal color (16) and minimal resolution (640 x 480), with no cookies, or Java.
- Software Snippets - The SNIPPETS collection started out in the late 1980's as a personal project to collect useful snippets (hence the name) of C, and later C++, code which would be free for reuse in a personal or commercial environment. Over time, it has grown to more than 94,000 lines of code in over 700 separate files. The goal of SNIPPETS is to collect and disseminate the best C/C++ answers to "How do I...?" programming questions.
- Joel On Software - This is the very strange world of Joel on Software, written by Joel Spolsky. Almost everything on the site is written by Joel, and it reflects his unique sensibilities about software development. Joel is a software developer in New York City. He's worked at Microsoft, Viacom, and Juno Online Services. He now has his own company, Fog Creek Software, which makes CityDesk, the software used to publish his site. You can learn more about him personally from his creaky old personal web site. But the best way to get to know him is to read what he writes.
- The Stellation project at IBM Research is working on developing programming environments that support collaboration between members of programming teams. Tigris.org is a mid-sized open source community focused on building better tools for collaborative software development. It provides information resources for software engineering professionals and students, and a home for open source software engineering tool projects.
- C++ Programming - The software at Quadralay Corporation is written in C++, so they have dedicated these pages to C++ and related topics.
- Alta Vista Search Tool - an evolving search service that is an invaluable tool for finding information on the Web. Also has translation facilities that have made it possible for words, phrases, and even entire web sites to be translated into many different languages.
- Google - a very fast and often accurate search tool. Of course, you might need to use it in your native language. Try Elmer Fudd Google, Klingon Google, Pig Latin Google, or Swedish Chef Google. There are also other creative outlets at Google Labs, Google's technology playground. Google labs showcases a few of their favorite ideas that aren't quite ready for prime time. There is also Google Groups, which is used to post and read comments in Usenet discussion forums. Google offers a complete 20-year Usenet Archive with over 700 million messages. Wow!
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