Links

18th September 2011

• The Zthes Profile for navigating hierarchical thesauri with Z39.50.
• The Net::Z3950 module for writing Z39.50 clients in Perl.
• ZOOM: the Z39.50 Object Orientation Model.
• The Self-Appointed Grammar Police.
• zSQLgate, the generic Z39.50-to-Relational Database gateway.
• ZeeRex, a mechanism for Information Retrieval databases to explain their functionality, and that of other databases.
• My ZING site, including various contributions to the ``Z39.50-International Next Generation'' initiative.

Here are links to some of my favourite places on the web:

• Andrew Rilstone is the most consistently insightful and funny commentator I know of. His site is an eclectic mix of Tolkien analysis, film reviews, UK politics, critiques of the educations system and rambling diatribes about whatever happens to catch his attention. If you read nothing else, you should definitely read his piece on How to Misread The Lord of the Rings.

• Paul Graham is a rather brilliant analytical writer with interests in all sorts of things including computer programming, painting, education, how to create wealth and spam-filtering. His essays are long but fascinating, and well worth the time to read.

• Bob the Angry Flower is just way and away the funniest cartoon strip ever produced. Everything about it is just perfect. Check out Yes and I'll get the tongs if you don't believe me.

• Duperdickery (originally "Superman is a dick") is a work of genius, yes it is, yes. And what makes it so much more brilliant is that it was built by standing on the shoulders of midgets. It's a gallery of covers from superhero comics showing just what a, well, dick Superman can be.

• Barry's Temple of Godzilla speaks for itself.

• The Guardian's football coverage is rather good, and it has an up-to-the-minute ``breaking news'' section, as well as a daily quiz, some interesting columns, etc.

• Againt all expectation, Liverpool football club's official site turns out to be pretty good. In addition to all the obvious things (match reports, newswire and so on), it has very good coverage of the reserves, fans' ``eyewitness reports'' to complement the officially sourced ones, and links to several players' own pages. Although, in accordance with universal ``official site'' dogma, it's laid out like a dog.

• AltaVista's magnificent automatic translation facility might not sound like a bundle of laughs, but you can have a lot of fun getting it to translate your material from English to, say, German, and then back again. If you don't think this sounds very funny, here is a copy of an old version of my home page that's been through the double-translation process (sadly, the links don't work). What could possibly be more fun?

• The Guardian Notes & Queries is an area full of fascinating questions, and reasonably well-informed answers - a lot like a small Usenet for Guardian readers. There used to be a particularly fascinating discussion of what really happened in Tianamen Square, but the link I had, http://nq.guardian.co.uk/cgi-bin/nqcgi.pl?&j=4&source=info&query=1334, seems to have gone away. If anyone can find it, please let me know!

• Jakob Nielsen's web usability site is the best place I know for simple, clearly reasoned and utterly compelling arguments in favour of user-centered web design. His bi-weekly Alertbox column is a consistent fount of up-to-the-minute but down-to-earth wisdom in making your web site work - as opposed to merely making it ``cool''. Unfortunately, his personal arrogance drips from the site - he quotes others describing him as ``the guru of Web page usability'', ``the smartest person on the web'', ``the Web's usability czar'' and more - but don't let that put you off. The accolades are deserved.