• IEEE:
  The IEEE is one of the best professional organisations for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Computer Scientists, and IT professionals, and has societies focussing on many areas of technology. Here is a semi-random set of links to on-line resources:
  • IEEE-CS/ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics;
  • IEEE eBooks.
  • Spectrum Tech Alerts.
  • Computer Society offers subsidised student (and recent graduate) membership for students of all forms of electrical engineering, Computer Science, and Information Technology. See also IEEE Distributed Systems Online.
  • IEEE CS continuing education: CSDA (Certified Software Development Associate);
  • Communications Society offers tutorials (some free) on topics such as Broadband Wireless Access: The Next Wireless Revolution.
  • IEEE Innovation Institute.
  • IEEE History Center.

• Industrial R&D sites: IBM alphaWorks; SUN Microsystems Research.

• Industry Training:
  • Sun Micro Educational Services.
  • IEEE/ACM on-line distance learning. See also http://www.todaysengineer.org/.
  • See also IBM and CISCO offerings.

• Quick Reference Cards: www.digilife.be provide Quick Reference Cards on languages and operating systems (collected from various cited sources).

• Typesetting: A local snapshot of the teTeX documentation is available at http://mirriwinni.it.jcu.edu.au/doc_texmf; the current seminar preparation subsystem for LaTeX that I use is prosper and it is available at http://prosper.sourceforge.net with an introduction available from http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/667/&e=747. Display of pdf slides from prosper (which supports scalable fonts and drawings) can be done via acroread and also pspresent which is available from http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~matthewc/pspresent (the author of pspresent also wrote rdesktop and a UNSW wireless client for linux). HTML can be generated using latex2html.

• Computing:
  • Virtual Library resources on: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Computing, General Engineering.
  • UNIX History is interesting reading.
  • The archive for all FAQs is at http://www.faqs.org (The FAQ Consortium).
  • Information is available for UNIX (FreeBSD) and UNIX-like (MINIX) operating systems.
    • Soekris Engineering manufacture small embedded systems that run FreeBSD;
  • Sites with FreeBSD related projects: Daniel O'Connor.
  • Bloat is a common artifact of certain vendors' software development tools. Read this item and learn how to turn a 45K utility into a 450K utility (or, just maybe, vice-versa).
  • There is an Australian mirror of THE RISKS DIGEST at http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/.

• Real-Time/Embedded Systems:
  • FreeBSD and NetBSD can operate as applications servers in the real-time RTCoreBSD environment from FSMLabs;
  • RTAI is a neat RealTime Application Interface for Linux which inserts an interrupt handler into "the system" so that it can manage interrupts and have the linux OS treated as a background process. For an introduction, see documentation.
  • The HARTES Project supports complex real-time embedded system design. See also the entry for scicos in the Signal Processing page.
  • QNX is a light-weight real-time UNIX-like operating system from Canada: QNX home, QNX Cookbook from the embedded systems company PARSE.COM.
  • The Atmel AVR32 MCU/DSP platform provides a modern real-time platform for embedded systems that use an operating system. Various tools and starter kits are available.

• Language Resources and Compilers:
  • Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK).
  • C Standards, Literature, History and Culture (quut.com).
  • AMD provides Optimizing Your C/C++ Applications by Alan Zeichick, Part 1 and Part 2.
  • The visual paradigm application provides an integrated set of software engineering tools. It is coded in JAVA and is quite portable, with some links into similar applications.
  • The Central Connecticut State University's Computer Science Department provide language tutorials (JAVA, MIPS assembnly, etc.) free at their Computer Aided Instruction Project web site including:
    • quick basic
    • JAVA
    • MIPS assembly
  • Compilers
    • http://gcc.gnu.org - pervasive compiler suite (common backend tools and UNIX-inspired libraries). Has sprouted the CYGWIN project at http://www.cygwin.com and also helped make possible the XFree86 X-windows project at http://xfree86.cygwin.com;
    • http://llvm.org/ - LLVM Compiler Infrastructure is an approach to improved compiler tools (can be used to replace parts of the GNU tool chain for "typically 33% faster execution").
  • The C++ Portable Types Library (PTypes) is claimed to be a simple alternative to the STL that includes dynamic strings, character sets, variants, lists and other basic data types along with threads, synchronisation primitives and IP sockets. It is portable across modern operating systems and includes a sample HTTP daemon as a demonstration.
  • FreePascal compiler and tools are being developed by the people at http://www.freepascal.org (also known as http://fpc.planetmirror.com).
  • JAVA: setting up emacs to control JAVA source code development is described at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-emacs. This old set of links has pointers to topics of interest.
  • C/C++ Programming has pointers to tutorials and free compilers for various computing environments.

• CPU core designs and Computer Architecture:
  • The OpenCORES Project is developing OpenRISC 1000;
  • http://www.sandpile.org -- extensive technical information on many types of x86 processor;
  • Some Multi-cores/multi-thread designs: Tilera, Tensilica, Sun (UltraSPARC T2...);
  • TOP500 Supercomputer Sites;
  • No longer updated: http://www.fpgacpu.org -- free CPU cores and FPGA application information.

• Interactive Communications Tools:
  • Stanford has The Interactive Workspaces Project: Experiences with Ubiquitous Computing Rooms, described at http://swig.stanford.edu/pub/publications/iwork-overview-layout.pdf;
  • Access Grid and MBONE links: www.accessgrid.org documentation; US DoE Lawrence Berkeley National Lab MBONE guide; MBONE on FreeBSD.

• PC User Survival:
  • UNIX environments are possible on win-32 platforms - search for information on the cygwin project, and also ports such as the unix utils for windoze.
  • Multiple operating system use is possible from a single disk (it is easier with separate disks): repartitioning tools such as FIPS and partition magic allow windoze file systems to be adjusted to allow other file systems onto a disk, multiple operating system booting is possible via utilities such as booteasy (from FreeBSD), lilo (from linux), GAG multi-boot, etc.
  • For an X-windows environment in a UNIX like environment, consider using cygwin and Xorg from http://x.cygwin.com/ (the installation is now managed by a setup.exe).

• Hard Core [tops-10]:
  • You haven't lived until you use TECO ... start here!

Jun 18 2009