A Singular Christmas

Brian Whitman is a teacher with the Music, Mind and Machine group at the MIT Media Lab -- A group of people that teach computers how to hear music.

As a project this year, they let their system listen to as much Christmas music as it could handle.

When done it synthesized the data into sixteen new timeless classics.

http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/christmas_2004.html

A Recipe for Scones

meta-keywords: recipe, scones, food

Making scones is easy, here's how you can prepare some in under 20 mins:

Ingredients

• 4dl Flour
• 2tsp Baking powder
• 50g Butter
• 2dl Milk (or water)
• Salt
• Sugar (Optional)

Instructions

1. Mix dry ingredients
2. Add butter and stir
3. Add milk/water and stir some more
4. Shape into two roundish cakes
5. Brush with water
6. (Optional) sprinkle some sunflower seeds over the bread
7. Put in oven (250 degs C) for 12-15 mins

Enjoy while hot -- with tea if possible, but coffee works too.

Wikalong -- Wiki annotation for Firefox

Wikalong is a FirefoxExtension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet.

It's a simple and very useful approach to web annotation, based on an extended version of the kwiki wiki clone.

Install the extension, and enjoy being able to add comments (in wiki markup) ''attached'' to any web page. Annotations are stored globally as wiki pages, on the Wikalong website, for everyone to share.

Future versions will include the kwiki extension, so you can run your own private wikalong server.

Check it out at: http://wikalong.phunnel.org/

Getting Things Done - For Nerds

Getting Things Done -- GTD for short -- seems to be the productivity program taking over the world right now.

Like many others, I too have been reading the book lately, and found it very inspiring.

Merlin Mann wrote about his setup, and how he organized his set of lists -- nerd style. His [43 Folders][] blog is dedicated all things related to GTD, from a personal perspective.

A really great source of inspiring ideas for anyone interested in getting organized.

http://www.43folders.com/

Mechanize and DOMForm

Mentionable Python discovery of the day:

DOMForm is a Python module for web scraping and web testing. It knows how to evaluate embedded JavaScript code in response to appropriate events.

Basically it's a python DOM implementation with JavaScript support (using the Mozilla Spidermonkey JavaScript-C engine).

It's great for screen scraping and, apparently planned for inclusion in in Mechanize.

Mechanize

Worthy of notice is Mechanize, a stateful programmatic web browsing module. It's very useful for web unit testing.

Check it out at:

• DOMForm -- http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/DOMForm/
• Mechanize -- http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/