Web Week

By PETER SINCLAIR

Bliain le Baisteach: most people love the music of the falling rain, but an off-trail project by Irish composer Sean Taylor actually turns it into real music. Bliain le Baisteach (it means "a year with rain" in Irish Gaelic) was created by merging computerised satellite images with a database of over 1,000 Irish jigs, reels and polkas. Information from various counties was mapped to sections of the orchestra - violins to Ulster, for example, violas to Munster - to match the sequence of weather fronts coming in off the Atlantic. The resulting meteorological melody has been recorded by the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Greenpeace New Zealand: this New Zealand site is inexplicably hosted in Australia, but you've got to admire the webmastery as Greenpeace ditches green for brilliant orange to highlight dioxin sites accross New Zealand.

ThinkGeek: Slashdot, home of the Linux alternative, isn't about to let the US Patent Office corner the market on stupid ideas. Instead of waiting for some company like Priceline to come up with a dumb patent, think of one of your own. Why not outflank Amazon with sneaky 'Zero-Click Shopping'? - "a method of using Javascript or similar technology to produce a series of images which, when rolled over by a customer's mouse… causes a purchase to be consummated…" First prize: a $50 ThinkGeek Gift Certificate.

ExtremePad 1.1: we may be dealing with the next Bill Gates here - Blake Birkenfeld is only 16 and attends junior high in the pinpoint Texas township of Nazareth. You'll love his Windows add-on which replaces the bleak industrial landscape of Notepad with a rich assortment of customisable features – fonts, colours, hide or show toolbar, fast find and replace, word count functions and an e-mail cleanup tool to dump unwanted brackets and assorted cyber-junk. It's free, too.

Links:

Bliain le Baisteach

Greenpeace New Zealand

SlashDot

ExtremePad 1.1