Useful Web sites

Links to web sites which I find really useful.

Reference

Merriam-Webster English dictionary.
Internet Movie Database: an amazing source of information on almost every movie out there.
Google varieties: image search, newsgroup search, university search.
Currency exchange rates.
Got some chain mail? You can check if it is a well-known urban legend at the Urban Legends archive.
Validate your HTML using the W3C validator or the handy WDG validator. WDG offers a free offline validator as well.

NASA's Astronomical Picture of the Day.
Photos of the Romanian village, by Mihai Moiceanu.
DPReview is an amazing web site with all you may want to know about digital cameras.
photo.net: hangout for many photography afficionados.
Gimp is a buggy but useful Photoshop clone.
Panoguide gives lots of useful advice about creating digital panoramas from multiple pictures.
A fantastic free tool to create panoramas and other digital photo manipulations is Panotools; I highly recommend using it with the PTAssembler visual interface.
A neat tool to remove noise from digital images is neatimage. It has a free version for non-commercial use.
For great photographic advice go to Luminous Landscape.

Find excellent prices for computers and electronics at pricewatch.
Book price comparison engine addall.com.
For finding cheap plane tickets: Expedia expedia.com, Travelocity travelocity.com and Orbitz.
For buying cars in the US, Edmunds.com is a standard reference.
Best discounted classical music store: Berkshire Record Outlet with a catalog of more than 11000 classical CDs.

For unsophisticated, fast and easy image manipulation use Imagemagick.
Unix tools for Windows from Cygwin. They even have an X Server based on Xfree which is a snap to install!
Graph drawing programs: VCG has better interactive features, while Dot/GraphViz makes nicer drawings.
Texpoint allows you to write LaTeX in Powerpoint documents.
The organized Free Software movement has a very interesting ideology and has produced amazingly useful things (including GNU Emacs, gcc, gdb, and bash) through the GNU Project: gnu.org.
freshmeat.net is a great archive of Unix software.
A very powerful visual interface to several debuggers is Data Display Debugger.
The Figlet server is useful to generate nice ASCII banners.
pstoedit, by Wolfgang Glunz, converts Postscript to other (editable) formats.
I use often Xfig not only to draw, but also to view figures I generate automatically from programs.
For scripting graph creation Gnuplot is unsurpassed. An excellent introduction to Gnuplot is here.
An international spell-checker by Geoff Kuenning: ispell.
flyspell is an interactive emacs interface for ispell, by Manuel Serrano.

Linux Weekly News tracks important events of the Linux community.
Scientific American is a fantastic magazine.
For weather forecasts and plane landing times check weather.com. A faster-loading page is Weather underground.

The Pittsburgh Symphony is a fabulous orchestra.
Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society.
If you like classical music you will love Berkshire Record Outlet: it has a catalog of about 11000 classical CDs at deeply discounted prices.

The sometimes very funny weekly column of Dave Barry.
My personal joke archive. Every working day, a new joke is appended to this file.
A day in the life of a Computer Science graduate student.
Model acknowledgements by Olin Shivers (his own link to the original seems to be broken, so I made a copy).
Proof techniques.
A quick introduction to cryptography.

(in compilers and architecture, my areas).

A fantastic hyperlinked bibliographic database for computer science is citeseer.nj.nec.com.
A great page with upcoming conferences in compilers, parallel architectures and high-performance computing, by Jerry Roth.
Unfortunately you have to be an ACM member to access their excellent digital library at acm.org/dl.
If you university subscribes to IEEEXplore, their web site at ieeexplore.ieee.org provides access to all recent IEEE publications.
The computer architecture web page is a good repository of information.
Who's who in computer architecture and compilers research.