"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up."
-- Oliver W. Holmes, Jr.
These are some of the programs for which I am in debt to their authors, and here's what I think about the freedom of information.
Operating Systems and utilities are the bridge between the user/aplications and the hardware. Most mainstream ones are pretty expensive, but there are some projects under the GPL:
- FreeBSD - I toyed with it a little, but there's too little suport, so, of course:
- Linux - the king of the hill of rogue OSes. Still, all my machines till now were too exotic for the driver support Linux had;
- Plugin - was a shareware alternative shell for Windows 3.11; I registered for it and my laptop looked more like Win98 than the Win3.11 that it uses;
- LiteSTEP - a great shell for Win95 and up. I'm just exploring this for a short while - thanks, Terry!
Programming Languages are free; the IDEs are the things developers like me pay for; that's why it's nice when the best IDE around is a good text editor, like NoteTab.
- perl - interpreted, available on all platforms, quick to learn, easy to read
- TCL/Tk - a wonderful GUI description language, available on all platforms, quick to learn, easy to read
- JavaScript - a souped-down, interpreted java implementation to move around variables in the browsers; actually MS also 'borrowed' lots of perl for JScript
- ACT-R 4.0 - a good front-end to John Anderson's act-r production-based cognitive architecture; expert systems anyone? ;)
Text is historically the main medium of information storage
- Adobe Acrobat Reader - portable documents in a solid cross-platform shell
- VNotes - pretty good post-it like messaging tool
- NoteTab Light - excellent text editor and Windows automatizer
- ... but nothing beats my MonDoc - hypertext document editor and presentation engine
Images are reputed to be worth a thousand words each; yeah, but it depends on talent, quality, compression used, etc.
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Sound is one of the media in which I need stimuli for my experiments
- CoolEdit - great sound editor; I'm planning to register this one
- WinAmp - cool mp3 player (though heavy on resources) + its Lyrics plugin
- STP - System Tray Player, a lighter mp3 player
- MP3ext - small and effective mp3 tag editor
email is a quick way of sending information
- Pegasus Mail - email at its best: choice of protocols and filters, very versatile
- Pine - for UNIX, PC and Mac; small and full of features
FTP complements that by giving access to download libraries
- WS-FTP - best interface
- Leech - confusing interface, but quick and good for getting unattended jobs done
HTML [over HTTP, [over TCP/IP or anything else]] is the best-ever potential support for conveying thought
I'm developing MonDoc to take advantage of that potential.
- Internet Explorer - the rogue: slim and sneakily integrated in Windows
- Netscape - the lizard who pioneered the Web Waves
I spent some time on IRC as Moste
- mIRC II - all you may need, from emoticons to scripting :)
ICQ, the YM and the like are too time-consuming 4 me.
If you may want to see why I consider programming a worthwhile pastime, you can consider the projects on my drawing board, or check my portfolios available now: WebDesign, Programming and Cognitive Science. .
End.