• Geotechnical Engineering
• Web Development
• Marine Construction and Navigation
• Bible Software
• Macintosh Software

Ever wonder how these diverse topics tie themselves together? Click here for one answer.

Geotechnical Engineering

Pilewave

After the many years of development, there are many excellent wave equation programs available to predict pile performance during impact driving.  However, the result of these programs is very quantitative; it does not necessarily good for a more qualitative view of the problem, or for instructional or demonstration purposes.

Pilewave is an excellent program for Windows machines which demonstrates wave propagation in piles graphically, for a wide variety of pile shapes and soil conditions.  It also can show the effects of defects in the pile. It is distributed by Piletest.

GeoStudio

A complete analysis suite for geotechnical enigneering, including the following:

• SLOPE/W for slope stability analysis
• SEEP/W for groundwater seepage analysis
• SIGMA/W for stress and deformation analysis
• QUAKE/W for dynamic earthquake analysis
• TEMP/W for geothermal analysis
• CTRAN/W for contaminant transport analysis
• VADOSE/W  for vadose zone analysis and soil cover analysis.

The Student Edition is provided free of charge by GEO-SLOPE International, Ltd. It is licensed exclusively for educational and learning purposes; however, with a paid license, the same program's complete features can be unlocked for professional use.

Slide Rule Era

A site where you can find a wide variety of engineering documents we don't host on vulcanhammer.net, vulcanhammer.info or chet-aero.com. As you can tell, we're more in the "HP-35 Calculator Era..."

Spears Engineering and Technical Services, P.S.

A Washington-state base geotechnical firm which offers for free download one of the niftiest Excel spreadsheets we have seen for soil analysis. Analyses data for water content, liquid and plastic limits, sieve and hydrometer analysis, Proctor analysis, and more. Suggests a soil classification as well.

Web Development

Dynamic Drive

This is an excellent site for Java Scripts which include banners, slide shows, and other special effects that are just about a necessity for a successful web site. All are available for free.

HotScripts

A great resource for all kinds of scripts, both server and client side, including PHP, CGI, Perl, JavaScript and ASP. We use many of their scripts (or modified versions of them) on our sites.

Marine Construction and Navigation

NOAA's Historical Chart Collection

We may be showing how weird we really are, but we think this is one of the coolest sites on the Net. It contains the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Historical Chart Collection, containing charts and maps from the beginning of the U.S. as a nation to the late 1980's. This includes Civil War maps and maps from the exploration of the continent. We use it for many of the background charts that appear on our sites. Anyone who wants to do something--web site or otherwise--in "nautical" motif cannot pass up this site.

Bible Software

There is a great deal of excellent Bible software available today, both commercial and free. Needless to say, we prefer the latter! There are four programs we suggest you take a look at:

• e-Sword, for Windows (desktop or PDA)
• Online Bible:
  • Online Bible for Windows
  • Online Bible for Macintosh
• Olive Tree, for your PDA (Windows or Palm, and now the iPhone)
• Palm BiblePlus, for Palm only. This is an open source program, which makes distribution and contribution a little easier.

All of these also feature languages other than English as well. The Online Bible (Windows) and Palm BiblePlus offer Tyndale's New Testament, the first translation into English directly from the Greek.

Macintosh Software

Our Macintosh Software page is one of our more popular features. Some of the open source programs are, for a variety of reasons, impractical for us to host. A few of interest are:

• Audacity, for editing of audio files, including MP3 files
• Bean, a basic word processor with some MS Word compatibility.
• Firefox, Mozilla, Sea Monkey, Camino and Thunderbird, internet browers and email clients
• The Gimp, the open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop
• NeoOffice, the true Mac version of the OpenOffice.org office suite. Take a look at it as a substitute for Micro$oft Office.