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Resources: Useful Page & Sites
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This is a collection of sites and pages that I have found useful. All software development related pages and sites referenced elsewhere on MacTom.com should be consolidated here, also. Listing here does NOT necessarily constitute an endorsement.
Contents
Sites/Pages
Magazines
- MacTech: The most technical, developer oriented Mac mag I have seen to date. Remember kilobaud magazine? It's that technical.
- MacWorld: More oriented toward users than developers. Closer to Byte than to kilobaud.
Internationalization (I18N) & Localization (L10N)
Sites/Pages
Quoted text is from a statement of purpose from the site.
Organizations
Naming Standards
Miscellaneous
Books
Where possible, I provide links to the Amazon.com pages for books.
- The Unicode Consortium, "The Unicode Standard Version 3.0", Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-61633-5. This book defines the Unicode Standard. As of October 2002, the Unicode Standard is at version 3.2.0; see The Unicode Consortium site for updates; updates are generally additions and clarifications, rather than changes to previously existing standards.
- Graham, Tony, "Unicode: A Primer", M&T Books, 2000, ISBN 0-7645-4625-2. Nice primer that in some cases is a bit easier to read than The Unicode Standard. Never hurts to get a second viewpoint.
Libraries
Open Source
I18N/L10 libraries that are available for Mac OS X, or which might be built for Mac OS X. Quoted text is from the vendors' websites.
International Components for Unicode (I CU)
- Sponsor: IBM
- Description: "The International Components for Unicode(ICU) is a C and C++ library that provides robust and full-featured Unicode support on a wide variety of platforms."
- API Languages: versions available for C, C++, Java
- Platforms: Mac OS X and Unix in general. See "Supported Platforms"
Commercial
Mac OS X
These I18N/L10N libraries are available for Mac OS X, and may be available for other platforms as well.
Other Unix
These I18N/L10N libraries are not currently available for Mac OS X, but are available for other Unix platforms. Quoted text is from the vendors' websites.
Rosette Globalization Platform
- Company: Basis Technology
- Description: "... a suite of interoperable products designed for applications that analyze and process all the world’s languages. We provide solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, transliteration, data cleansing, and e-mail categorization."
- API Languages: C++ (?)
- Platforms: HP-UX/10, HP-UX/11, Solaris 2.5+
Built-In
Mac OS X
- Core Foundation String Services: "... a full suite of fast and efficient string manipulation and conversion functionality. String Services offers seamless Unicode support ..."
- Text and Other International Services:may have been largely superceded by Core Foundation String Services.
- The following are the libraries that on the surface appear to be most relevant to back-end processing (the Apple developer site also lists many display oriented references under the ("Text and Other International Services" heading):
Other Unix
Linguistic Software
The linguistic software is included largely for its application to information retrieval and in internationalization, particularly of information retrieval. Please note that I have not used all of this software, or all features of any of this software, myself; inclusion is not necessarily an endorsement.
Componentization and Frameworks
Articles
Jeaon, T., Seung, H.W., and Lee, S., "Embedding Built-in Tests in Hot Spots of an Object-Oriented Framework", ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 37(8), August 2002.
Information Retrieval
Sites
- Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). TREC's purpose is "... to encourage research in information retrieval from large text collections." Most interesting feature of the site is the availability of several small (multi-megabyte) text collections with matching queries and relevance judgements of documents in the collections to the queries.
- SearchTools.com: "Search Tools for Web Sites and Intranets". A lot of user (i.e., site developer) information about search. Especially liked:
- Jakarta Lucene: open source "high-performance, full-featured text search engine written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform." Part of Apache Jakarta.
- And much much more ...
Books
- van Rijsbergen, C. J., "Information Retrieval", circa 1979. Available online in HTML and PDF formats from the Computing Science site at the University of Glascow. It has been a long time since I read it, but I remember it as being an easy read, and a good, quick, intro.
- Salton, G, and McGill, M., "Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval", McGraw-Hill, 1983
- Frakes, William B., and Baeza-Yates, Ricardo (editors), "Information Retrieval: Data Structures & Algorithms", Prentice-Hall, 1992, ISBN: 0-13-463837-9
Professional Organizations
News & Views
- News Service: Summaries of news stories from various sources, sometimes with links to the original story. Types of stories include technical, political, business, science. This one is a "must read."
- Ubiquity: "An ACM IT Magazine and Forum"
Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
Conferences
News & Views
These are the ones that I enjoy the most and find the most useful. Order of listing is not terribly significant.
Macintosh Specific
- Apple Developer Connection (ADC) News
- Think Secret: Macintosh specific new site. Updated on most business days. Popup ads.
- MacOS Rumors: Interesting stuff. Updated sporadically.
- MacInTouch: User comments, news, new software announcements, software update announcements. Updated every business day.
- MacNN: "Mac News Network".
- MacTech: MacTech's "Mac OS News Sources" page lists several other Mac related news sources.
Computer Industry
Descriptive text in quotes is from an "about" page on the site.
- ACM News Service: Summaries of news stories from various sources, sometimes with links to the original story. Types of stories include technical, political, business, science.
- CNET News.com: Mostly oriented to the business and political side of technology, but an occassional technical story.
- InfoWorld: "... provides in-depth technical analysis on key products, solutions, and technologies for sound buying decisions and business gain."
- Computerworld: "... source of news, business and technology information for IT executives and professionals who are at the forefront of the move to e-business and adoption of new technologies."
Science & Technology
- Science News Online: "The Weekly Newsmagazine of Science."
- Public Library of Science: "The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource."
Online Stores & More
Macintosh Specific
Macintosh Departments
Sun Microsystems
General Technical
Office Supplies, etc.
- Clean Sweep Supply Company: Free shipping on most orders over $40. Great for those of us living in small towns with limited bricks'n'mortar shopping.
- Office Quarters: Free shipping on most orders over $75.
Books
Interesting/Unusual Hardware
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)
- See this article on the Adaptec site for a good, short, explanation of RAID levels. I am using the Adaptec PowerDomain 3910 in a Mac dual-G4 with a RAIDKing (a.k.a., MacRAID), and am quite happy. RAID level 3 seems to be very nice for video editing.
- MacRAID (a.k.a., RAIDKing): Variety of RAID boxes (e.g., rack mount, tower) and interfaces (e.g., SCSI, Fibre) for space/speed freaks. Up to about 2TB (terabyte) per box. Hotswappable power supplies, disks, and fans. Managed from front panel or RS-232 console. (I have a 500GB Ultra3 SCSI tower; very satisfied)
- Vanguard Ultra One: Rack mount, Ultra3 SCSI. I have never seen one, but ads look interesting. But, seems to have a MS Windows-based management utility.
Noise-Control Equipment Cabinets
- AcoustiLock: A line of sound deadening cabinets with built-in cooling. Various sizes with and without NEMA racks. If you have noisy equipment in your office or studio, these cabinets will be of interest. Spoke to one of there sales people at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference in October 2002. They are supposedly coming out with lower-end under-desk models (i.e., 28" external height) for small business and home office use. Do not see such cabinets on their site yet, though. Are NEMA racks the same as RETMA or RTMA racks? Must be, NEMA and RTMA joined to create JEDEC, according to the JEDEC site.
