An Assortment of Interesting Web Sites

Here are some interesting resources that we found on the way to looking up other things.

Guide to Grammar and Writing

Hosted by Capital Community College, this guide is a free, quick reference covering the basics of grammar at the word, sentence, and paragraph level. It's not the most comprehensive reference by any means, but the materials is presented with a "grammar is fun!" attitude. Many of the examples are provided using famous quotations and there is also some interesting historical information. Glory for grammar geeks. http://cctc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm

Part of Speech Tagger

The Cognitive Computation Group at the University of Illinois is dedicated to research about the relationship between human thoughts and computer processing. One of the research studies is centered around a software tool that parses a sentence into parts of speech. The online demo does not have a practical use, but it's a bit of fun for language geeks. You type in any sentence and it returns an analysis. Go to this URL, then Demos, then Part of Speech Tagger. http://l2r.cs.uiuc.edu/~cogcomp/

Free Online Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC)

If you've been hearing your colleagues talk about a server-side include and you're tired of feigning knowledge of it, this is a useful reference. The FOLDOC contains a lot of good definitions for terms commonly used in the software industry. There are also a lot of cross-references (maybe too many) to related terms. It's a volunteer site, so you may not find it as comprehensive as you might like. http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.html

PC Biography

If you've always pined for your faithful Commodore 64 computer, this is the place for you. PC Biography is an online museum of classic (and not so classic) personal computers. The rapid changes in the computer industry make historical record sites like this very important. The TI99 was my first PC purchase. With 16K of RAM, hooked up to a TV and a cassette recorder, it really smoked the competition. Even if all it was really good for was learning how to write BASIC. http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/

The Wayback Machine

Another museum site is providing the valuable service of creating a historical record of how the Web looked. With a printed book you can put a copy on your shelf for posterity. But what do you do with a web site? The Wayback Machine archives web pages and makes it easy to look them up: you just type in a domain name it presents you with a list of pages that have been archived. You may even find a record of your own web site. http:// www.archive.org

FlightTracker

Trip.com is an online travel agency that has a great free tool called flight tracker. You just type in the number of particular flight and it displays the up-to-the-minute current status. The graphical display shows where on the world map the plane is located, the departure time, and the ETA. It's much handier than trying to use the phone support of the airlines if you need to pick someone up at the airport. If you're an air tourist, you can use this tool prior to your flight to find out what you're likely to see from the window seat. http:// www.trip.com/trs/trip/flighttracker/flight_tracker_home.xsl

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics

At this government site you can find out pretty much all there is to know about the health and wealth of the U.S. workforce. There are price indexes, wages rates, demographics, etc. The Occupational Outlook Handbook has a section on Writers and Editors. http://www.bls.gov