Entries from October 2004 ↓

Index of /delicious

Finally someone did this. This is a bundle of Python scripts that “parsing a Mozilla bookmarks file and sending the bookmarks to del.icio.us via its REST API.

“It uses the attributes from the Mozilla bookmarks to flesh out the post to delicious. In addition, bookmarks are tagged according to their position in the folder hierarchy: each bookmark will receive one tag for each folder it is embedded inside (see comments in BookmarksToDelicious.py for details). Each will also be tagged with Mozilla bookmark keywords (if they exist) and any comments will be retained. Post date is set to the date when the bookmark was created.

At this year’s Society for Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting, a group led by Dr. Eric Wassermann from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke presented an interesting result which shows that after 20 min of 2mA DC stimulation, “verbal fluency improved significantly with anodal and decreased mildly with cathodal DC without effects on working memory or psychomotor speed”. Given around 90 seconds, most people get around 20 words. But when the authors administered the current, volunteers were able to name around 20% more words than controls, who had the electrodes attached but no current delivered.

The authors believed the results suggestted that “DC polarization of the prefrontal cortex may be a safe and effective way to improve cognitive function in patients and healthy individuals.”

At this year’s Society for Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting, a group led by Dr. Eric Wassermann from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke presented an interesting result which shows that after 20 min of 2mA DC stimulation, “verbal fluency improved significantly with anodal and decreased mildly with cathodal DC without effects on working memory or psychomotor speed”. Given around 90 seconds, most people get around 20 words. But when the authors administered the current, volunteers were able to name around 20% more words than controls, who had the electrodes attached but no current delivered.

The authors believed the results suggestted that “DC polarization of the prefrontal cortex may be a safe and effective way to improve cognitive function in patients and healthy individuals.”

Dietrich Ayala | Foxylicious – Firefox and del.icio.us bookmark integration



A long-waited extension for Firefox. It is based on Bookmarks Synchronizer extension and it just imports your del.icio.us bookmarks.

This plugin can be used in nearly all platforms to control various music players, and it support multi-languages which is an important feature. Just enjoy the music in Firefox.

Thomas DeMarse, the University of Florida professor of biomedical engineering, used neurons in culture dishes to study neurocomputing. He used a multi-electrode array, which is located at the bottom of the dish , and laid over rat cortical neurons, which form a more or less ‘brain’ comprised of 25,000 neurons. Then he linked the array with a flight simulator and watch what would happen.

“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”

Although the brain currently is able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated aircraft in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to stormy, hurricane-force winds, the underlying goal is a more fundamental understanding of how neurons interact as a network, DeMarse said.

UPDATE: University of Florida published this news at UF SCIENTIST: “BRAIN” IN A DISH ACTS AS AUTOPILOT, LIVING COMPUTER”.

Spreadfirefox.com is running a campaign to raise money for a full-page ad on New York Times for the release of Firefox 1.0.

The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of Firefox.

Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/19/1338254) turned spreadfirefox.com server into sluggish, and you may notice this at spreadfirefox.com with “Please bear with us while we weather a Slashdotting!”

I may donate a few bucks for this event, but I must find out a way to buy a copy of that edition of NY Times.

Now people can use their feed arregators to read emails form their
Gmail accounts.

Just use http://gmailuser:gmailpass@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/
or https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom for this.

This maybe something great to average computer users, but such things can’t offer you reliable secure as it should be. It is not impossible that some guy hacks its protocol and try to grap some digits which just are your credit card number. Do you remember someone hacked Apple Airport Express encryption scheme this summer?

What’s more, open source programs are now offering something Google Desktop Search offers. For example, Docco, which is built on top of Apache‘s indexing and search engine Lucene, “is able to index local hard drives and everything mounted into the local file system, such as Windows or Unix network drives.”

Docco support the follwing formats:

* plain text
* HTML
* XML
* OpenOffice/ StarOffice 6.0 documents
* Word (with POI plugin)
* Excel (with POI plugin)
* PDF (with PDFbox or Multivalent plugin)
* UNIX man pages (with Multivalent plugin)

Screenshots of Docco at work can be found here.