Food+Tech Connect is putting together a fun series of essays where technologists and foodies share their opinions on how to hack to the food system.

They also had a great party, with liquid nitrogen ice cream and other very cool foods.

I’m honored to have been asked to participate, especially since food and tech are two of my favorite things! I decided to write about a hack that I did about three years ago, where I wrote a parser and built a statistical model of chocolate chip cookie recipes that I crawled off of the web.

I’d like to tell you the story of the Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.

This isn’t the Neiman Marcus $65,000 cookie recipe. Nor is it the classic Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe that we all grew up with (and, though the instructions are all the same, my Mom made the best). This is a recipe learned from thousands of bakers around the world, via love and math.

Read the rest of the essay on their site. I’d love to know what you think!

Special thanks to Matt LeMay for language-clarifying edits to the piece.

I’m very excited that Far McKon has picked up the project and has a great vision for where it can go. If you’re interested in hacking on it with him, let him know!

Several months ago, on a whim inspired by an off-hand comment from Chris, I created a bot to bring the wonders of the Unix bc language to twitter.

bc is a command-line calculator that’s fast and has the capacity to do some fairly complex math.

Try it out on the command line:

echo '100 / 10' | bc -l

…Or by sending a direct message to bc_l (if you follow bc_l it will follow you back within a few hours).

I released the code under GPL, and it’s available on github: http://github.com/hmason/tweetbc.

John Cook mentions the bot and makes some great observations in his post three surprises with bc.

Why separate scripts?

My philosophy is based on the unix command-line tool model; Each script should be simple and useful alone, but when combined together they become extremely powerful.

Why don’t we have the code yet?!

I had no idea the talk would be shared beyond the couple hundred people in the audience or that it would be so popular! I started my position at bit.ly the same day I gave that IgniteNYC presentation, and I also have some other awesome projects that are competing for time.

I have to admit that the trained classifiers are all based on my personal data and were also trained mostly through tweaking in ipython. I need to finish a generic framework for people to train their own filters before I can publish that piece of the system. I promise, I’m working on it.

Keep nagging me — nagging works!

Are you going to commercialize your scripts / can I invest?

I have certainly thought about commercializing the application, but I’m uncomfortable asking people to give me access to their personal e-mail data (even if there are very interesting things to be learned by aggregate analysis).

Just imagine how much more creative, interesting work could be done if we could partially free the world from the e-mail workload… that alone is worth making the code open.

How does it work? What tech are you using?

The scripts run on my gmail account through IMAP (and should work with any IMAP interface, though I’m sure there is debugging to be done). They live on a Linode VPS and run individually via cron jobs.

Most of the scripts are in Python. I use NLTK and libsvm (in addition to my own code) for the data analysis.

I primarily use the gmail web interface (though I’ve flipflopped between Mail.app and Thunderbird for a while), and the only cost is that I have to manually reload the page to see new labels and new drafts appear.

Do your scripts go mad with power and e-mail inappropriately? Are you some kinda robot?

I have all of the scripts deposit suggested responses in the draft folder, and then I use the gmail “multiple inboxes” feature to keep the draft folder up in the UI. It’s very easy to go through and modify or delete responses before they are sent.

Of course, I only thought of that after one of the script DID go a bit mad. I’m still sorry about that, Mom.

I’m not a robot, though of course I would say that anyway! The point of the automation is to remove the stupid parts of e-mail and leave me free to personally address the interesting messages.

If you’ve read this far, there are a few things I would love your feedback on:

What’s a kickass name for this project?

More important, which features/scripts are you most interested in seeing first? The nag script is about ready to go, but I’d like to know where to focus my time.

THANK YOU!

Since almost everyone has a mobile phone already, and SMS-based solution seemed appropriate. In order to implement this we need two things:

1. An SMS shortcode
2. A system to notify when the shortcode is triggered

It’s irritating and expensive to acquire your own shortcode, but there are several services that will allow you to use one in exchange for a small fee or advertisements in your messages. TextMarks is my favorite (I used TextMarks for my WhereAmI project). While TextMarks markets their service as a system for mobile mailing lists, they allow you to reserve a keyword and define a behavior (that can include pulling data from a URL!) to occur when that keyword is triggered.

Configuring TextMarks

Sign up for TextMarks and choose a keyword. Configure the keyword to respond with the “First 120 characters on web page”, and point it at the future home of your script (you can always come back and modify this later).

Note the � as the value of the msg parameter — this instructs TextMarks to send along any additional message contents as the value of that parameter. That means if someone were to text 41411 “doorbell hi this is hilary”, TextMarks would call the script with the param msg=hi this is hilary. This can be quite useful.

The Script

This script is written in Python, but you can use any scripting language you like. This particular script just sends an e-mail to an account when the ‘doorbell’ is rung, but you could have it do pretty much anything up to and including ringing a real bell (which may be coming soon!).

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
doorbell.py
Created by Hilary Mason, feel free to use this code in your own projects.
"""

import sys, os
import smtplib
import cgi
import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

class Doorbell(object):
	GMAIL_USERNAME = 'YOURGMAILACCOUNT@gmail.com'
	GMAIL_PASSWORD = 'YOURPASSWORD'

	def __init__(self, msg):
		message = """
From: YOURGMAILACCOUNT@gmail.com
To: YOURGMAILACCOUNT@gmail.com
Subject: KNOCK KNOCK, someone is at the door!

%s
		""" % msg

		server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com:587')
		server.ehlo()
		server.starttls()
		server.ehlo()
		server.login(self.GMAIL_USERNAME, self.GMAIL_PASSWORD)
		server.sendmail('YOURGMAILACCOUNT@gmail.com', ['YOURGMAILACCOUNT@gmail.com'], message)
		server.quit()

		print "You knocked! You can also call us at 347-586-9270. <3, NYC Resistor"

if __name__ == '__main__':
	print "Content-Type: text/plainnn"

	form = cgi.FieldStorage()
	if 'msg' in form:
		w = Doorbell(form['msg'].value)
	else:
		w = Doorbell('There is an anonymous monkey at the door.')

And that's it! Provided you have your keyword configured to point at your script, and the script living at an accessible address, you'll get an e-mail whenever your SMS doorbell is rung and the person who sent the message will get back a cute response confirming their action.

Finally...

This setup can be easily extended such that a message containing 'doorbell hilary' could e-mail only me, or be forwarded to my phone.

I'm curious to see if having a remotely accessible 'doorbell' will encourage pranksters -- we might need to add a password.

Last weekend Yahoo came to New York for an Open Hack Day, and it was great!

I was invited to speak on a panel on semantic metadata, moderated by Paul Ford (harpers.org) along with Marco Neumann (KONA) and Paul Tarjan (Yahoo/Search Monkey). The panel was a lively discussion, and we got some great questions from the audience.

After the panel, I stayed around to participate in the hack competition. Yahoo! provided a fantastic space, with free-flowing coffee, snacks, comfy chairs and plenty of Yahoo folks and other hackers around to give advice and play foosball with. I teamed up with Diana Eng, Alicia Gibb, and Bill Ward to create the Del.icio.us Cake!

The cake is attached to a laptop via USB. A program running on the laptop accepts a delicious tag and retrieves a list of recent popular sites for that tag from the delicious API. Finally, it iterates through each URL, downloads the page, and computes the sentiment of that page relative to the tag — basically, is the content of the page positive, neutral or negative?

The signal is output to an ardiuno (hidden in the middle of the cake) which turns on the appropriate set of LEDs. There are four sets of LEDs on the cake, one in each quadrant of the delicious logo, one each for positive sentiment, neutral or inconclusive sentiment, and negative sentiment, and, of course, one to let us know that the cake is turned on.

I wrote the sentiment classifiers between around 3am and 6am Saturday morning, so they really were a hack! I trained them on movie reviews data, working with the assumption that 5-star reviews contain positive terms and 1-star reviews contain negative terms. I wouldn’t recommend this approach for a serious attempt at sentiment analysis, but it worked well enough.

We won the food/hardware hack prize, shared with the awesome MakerBot team!

We had a great time creating and presenting the hack. Thanks, Yahoo, and most of all, thanks to Alicia, Bill, and Diana for a really fantastic, silly weekend.

Further coverage:

• Yahoo’s summary of the Open Hack NYC event
• Diana’s writeup for Eyebeam
• CNN.com: Hackers Take Over Times Square

Just text 41411 with whereami <username>, where <username> is a username that you or someone you know is likely to use.

For example, if you text whereami hmason to 41411, you’ll see a response much like the image to the left.

This app works on the principle that people tend to use the same username for many applications. The WHEREAMI script will search through a variety of web services for a result for that username. All of the information is public and available without logging in.

Right now, the script will search Brightkite, then Dopplr, and finally Twitter. If you know of another site with public user location information, please comment below and I’ll add it!

Open tab count extension in the status bar

How many tabs do you have open in your browser right now?

Did you have to count manually? Are you using Firefox? Try the open tab count extension!

I created this extension because I wanted to explore memory management in browser tabs, and I was curious about the Firefox extension architecture. I’m not quite as eager to explore memory hacks in Firefox now that Google Chrome is out and handles that issue natively, but I’m still using this extension to monitor my tab (over)usage.

The extension puts a small icon in the status bar alongside the number of open tabs. If more than one window is open, the extension shows the number of open tabs in the current window / the total number of open tabs.

Please let me know below if you have any comments!

Update: An update has been submitted to Mozilla that supports Firefox 3.5, and it’ll show up on the it’s now available on the official extension page once it’s been approved.