The Computer Is Your Friend

Computing news

• Slashdot is self-proclaimed "News for Nerds". How can I resist?
• The Register has more of an eye on the business end of things.

Music software

• The main heavyweight packages for combined audio and MIDI sequencing are:
  • Apple's Logic
  • MOTU's Digital Performer
  • Steinberg's Cubase
  • and Avid's Pro Tools.
• There's also Ableton's Live for a more loop-based approach
• Mackie's Tracktion or PreSonus' Studio One for ease of use
• and Propellerhead's Reason which provides a self-contained package of software synths and samplers.
• While for anyone writing music notation on computer, the choice is between Dorico, Sibelius, Finale and Notion.
• Create Digital Music does a good job of keeping up with the computer music news.

Website building

• Straight from the horse's mouth comes the W3C's page on HTML. This includes the Recommendations on:
  • the HTML 4.01 spec
  • the XHTML 1.0 spec
  • the CSS 2 spec.
• For creating dynamic webpages, I tend to use Perl or Python with MySQL.
• Try out the W3C's MarkUp Validation Service if you want to check your XML/HTML is compliant.
• There is life beyond ASCII. Check out the Unicode homepage and the UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ.