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.
• Dilbert usefully sums up the mindset of anyone who works in an office.

Hardware

I'm an Apple user, mainly because I like OS X as an operating system, but also because of the lure of all that shiny stuff. It's not cheap, though. Follow the Mac-related news and help at Macworld and Mac OS X Hints.

Music software

• On the Mac, the heavyweight packages for combined audio and MIDI sequencing are:
  • Apple's Logic
  • MOTU's Digital Performer
  • Steinberg's Cubase
  • and Digidesign's ProTools.
• There's also Ableton's Live for a more loop-based approach
• Mackie's Tracktion 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 Sibelius and Finale.
• The KVR forums can also be helpful, particularly for audio plug-ins, but also for computer music in general.

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 (local CPAN mirror) with MySQL (local mirror).
• 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.