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My main hobby is playing the card game Bridge.  I am a certified ACBL bridge instructor and am happy to play with anyone including beginners.  Someday I hope to start an HCC Bridge Club, and perhaps someday we can compete in the inter-collegiate league.  Stop by and talk bidding with me!

The American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) is one of the largest bridge organizations around.  Check out their tournament schedule, tips, books, discussions, etc.

The Tampa Bay Bridge Club has home-style games plus duplicate bridge games every day.  Experienced teachers provide individual or group lessons for all levels of players.  Phone: (813) 935-0974.

One of the best bridge magazines in the world is The Bridge World.  Their web site has contests and information for players of all levels.

The Internet Netnews group rec.games.bridge is a lively discussion group where players of all levels can ask questions or give opinions.

Interested in privacy?  I am!  One standard for privacy is P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences).  These policies are available as both Human-readable as well as machine-readable (i.e., web browser readable) XML.  View this site's privacy policy. 

You can register with the Data & Marketing Association (formerly, the Direct Marketing Association) to remove yourself from many email, phone, and direct mail marketing lists by visiting www.dmachoice.org.

The U.S. government supports a Do Not Call Registry.  It is a crime to make sales or marketing calls to someone listed here.

There is excellent (and very popular) free software available to provide encryption and digital signatures for your email and files, known as Gnu Privacy Guard (or GnuPG or simply GPG).  This is compatible with the older Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software.  Find out more about GPG at www.gnupg.org.

You can download my GPG Public Key if you want to send me private email, or verify my digital signature.  Below is what you should see if you check the fingerprint for this key:

Type bits/keyID    Date       User ID
pub 1024D/779190A0 2005-06-30 [expires: 2035-03-18]
uid                           Wayne Pollock <pollock@acm.org>
sub   2048g/40E29FAA 2005-06-30 [expires: 2035-03-18]

Key fingerprint: 1181 217F 1F0B 196C D8A1  6F49 0A8D F400 7791 90A0

You can also obtain PGP/GPG public keys from www.keyserver.net, pgp.mit.edu, JoGuNet (pgp.uni-mainz.de), the.earth.li, and other sites.

StartSSL.com, Let’s Encrypt, Thawte, Inc., and VeriSign, Inc. are some of the best certificate authorities (or CAs) in business.  They provide digital IDs for websites, mail servers, and people, which are very hard to forge.  For a small annual fee, CAs provide an X.509 personal certificate which you can load into a web browser, which like any ID card certifies that you are you to the remote web server.  With a certificate installed in your email client, you can easily send and receive email that is digitally signed, encrypted, or both.  You can also use certificates to digitally sign Java applets and other software, so they can access files and resources on your computer.  A server certificate signed by a valid CA, is needed by a website to allow users to use TLS encryption (HTTPS protocol) when connecting to your site.

From a CA's homepage you can find (and download into your browser) anyone's digital ID (such as mine!) and then send that person private email.  Note that some CAs provide some free certificates.

Much of the software for PCs is compressed using the zip format.  These files can be uncompressed using the commercial utility WinZip or the free (and open source) utility 7-Zip.

Use WinSCP to browse and download software and other files using FTP.  A popular alternative is Filezilla which is also free and open source.

PuTTY is a very good free SSH client that supports telnet too.  Putty also provides pscp and psftp (PuTTY secure copy and Putty Secure FTP) as command line tools.  If you install these you can also install a GUI wrapper for these tools called winscp, that works similarly to WS_FTP.  You can get WinSCP from sourceforge.net/projects/winscp.  (Click on the Files link for the latest version to download.)

High quality email software is available at www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird.  This free email client is pretty good.

Looking for interesting software?  You can visit many places, such as Gizmo's Freeware (TechsupportAlert.com) and FileHippo.com for Windows and Linux software.

Adobe Systems Incorporated is a company famous for high quality fonts and artwork software (Illustrator).  They invented the popular PDF file format, which allows you to view files without the original application that created them.  Visit their homepage to download the PDF plug-in (and viewer program).

You should run a firewall and antivirus software, all the time.  There are many good and free security tools available.  For example, at avg.com you can find AVG anti-virus software.  A free version is available.

Microsoft releases (frequently) a malicious software removal tool that looks for spyware and other forms of malware.  (You probably have this already.)  To run enter “mrt.exe” at a DOS prompt (or use "Start—>Run...").  However, another tool couldn't hurt.  Microsoft provides pretty good antivirus and firewall utilities.  Other malware removal tool information can be found at cnet.com, such as for Malwarebytes.

Some places to visit: The USENIX Organization, LISA conference, and The Open Group (unix.org).

A Tampa area Linux Users Group website is meetup.com/Suncopast-LUG.  You can read and post to their friendly forum, at list.suncoastlug.org.

Most of the free Unix and Linux software is actually GNU software, a project of the Free Software Foundation.  To find out about supporting this group, or to get the latest versions of some of the best software around, visit them at www.gnu.org.

To find information on (or download) the best-known free Linux distribution, visit www.ubuntu.com (based on Debian Linux).

You can get various Linux distributions (CD images, you download these, burn CDs, then boot from those) such as Fedora and Red Hat, from iso.LinuxQuestions.org.  A lot of information on various Unix and Linux distributions, including rankings, news, and links, can be found at distrowatch.com.

Listen to how Linus Torvalds (the inventor of Linux) pronounces “Linux”: 

See the description of the eight levels of Unix mastery.

Poem about using vi for the first time.

Visit the Linux Documentation Project for HOW-TO guides and other information.  Visit linux.die.net for searchable man pages in HTML format.

Visit linux.com and linuxquestions.org for links for software, documentation, and news, updated regularly, and well organized.  You should check these sites when looking for information or software.

Search for RPMs and download updates from RPMFind.net.

See other on-line syllabi for classes I have taught in the past (note these may not be current syllabi, or even HCC courses anymore):

CGS 1000 (Intro to Computers and Technology)

CGS 1555 (Intro to the Internet)

CTS 1305 (Intro to Networking)

CGS 1701 (Computer Operating Systems)

COP 1332 (Visual Basic, Beginning)
COP 1220 (C Programming) 
COP 2224 (C++ Programming) 

COP 2800 (Java) 
COP 2805C (Advanced Java)

COP 2939 (Computer Programming Capstone)

CTS 1106 (Intro to UNIX / Linux)
COP 2344 (Shell Scripting)
CTS 2301C (UNIX / Linux Administration I)
CTS 2322 (Unix / Linux Administration II)
CTS 2311 (Unix / Linux Security)
CTS 2333 (Unix / Linux Networking)
CEN 2939 Networking Capstone (Unix/Linux Section)

CTS 2441(Oracle DB Admin. Fund. I)

View my collection of bookmarks

HTML4 layout table, the weather icon and links in one row

Click for weather forecast	Current Tampa, FL weather, courtesy of www.wonderground.com.

Lost?  Need help to find your own house?  Use MapQuest or Google Maps to produce detailed street maps for any place in the world.  Or view Dale-Mabry Campus map and driving directions.

Dale Mabry Campus Computer Science home page 

HCC home page

Textbooks are expensive!  You might save some money by exploring your options.  In addition to used copies, students may be able to get free shipping from an on-line vendor (Amazon.com has (or had, last time I checked) free second day shipping for textbooks, for students.  However you must opt-out of the deal before one year has passed, or you'll be charged around $80.00.) You may be able to rent the book for the term, from a variety of vendoes.  Other options you should look into include purchasing an e-book copy instead, or even find a copy in the library.  The HCC bookstore also has some cheaper options in some cases; just ask!

In the mood for some adventure?  Try the Mystery Link.  (Goes to a different URL each time you click on it!)

Joke of the day link goes here...

Need help?  Do you have some questions on education at HCC or on any of the subjects I teach?  Please send comments and mail: