Damnit. Remembering to write a blog is hard work.
Research: well, it still seems like you have to do at least three times more non-research stuff to get to do any real research stuff. And that's just non-teaching non-research stuff.
Still, this Institute of Physics book chapter is going OK. My chapter is about non-intelligent, pretty-bad-at-adapting classification of colon cancer slides. The book is about intelligent adaptive systems in medicine. At least I have the medicine bit. And it's a month late - so far.
Jack: I wrote a sample auditor that uses Jack for output, libsndfile for audio file loading, secret rabbit code for samplerate conversion, FFTW to create a pretty spectrum analyser and ncurses because it's all wrapped in a character-based interface.
You can find it here (GPL, obviously) but be warned - it was as much the product of playing around to refresh my c coding as it was an intentional devolopment project.
PyGame: This is so cool. I made a crappy platformer in about an hour - from first using pygame to having a little guy run and jump on blocks. Try it. It's fast.