Inspired by the example of Jason Rennie, I wrote some short notes to help me learn background during my PhD. Generally, these are 2- or 3-page simple notes that answer a question either about my work or someone else's. Others of these describe implementation tricks that may be useful for efficiently reproducing my or others' results. They are pretty old now, but perhaps they are still useful to someone.
If you find one of these notes useful, and wish to cite it, please use a citation like the following:
@misc{sutton04understanding,
author = "Charles Sutton",
title = "Understanding Why Forward-Backward is Belief Propagation in Two Easy Steps",
year = 2004,
month = "June",
howpublished = "http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/csutton/notes/"
}
(The dates on these notes are the dates that I last revised them.)