UPDATE: It looks like the Gmail Notifier has been fixed.  Who knows what went wrong?  I’m just glad that it’s fixed.

I thought it might have been just me, but Hawk Wings says that some people are reporting issues with the latest version of Google’s Gmail Notifier.

I’m too busy with school work right now to try and see what’s up with the app, but it seems that the Notifier gets messages very late, and, even after displaying a Growl notification, doesn’t register new mail in the Inbox.

Gmail Status seems to be working fine for now, despite a notice on the developer’s homepage about the latest version always displaying zero unread mails even when there is mail in the Inbox.

Come on Google! First you delete your blog, then you go and mess up the Notifier? What’s going on?!

Am I the only one who thinks that AjaxWrite is not only the least impressive Ajax app out there, but one of the worst ideas for a webapp, period? Probably not, but it seems to have generated a huge amount of buzz recently. Alex Russel shares my sentiments, and I’m glad for it.

First of all, yes, it uses Javascript, so technically it can be called an Ajax app, but maybe the acronym should be changed to Asynchronous Javascript and XUL. It requires one, specific version _of one specific browser! Does that not go against much of the purpose for which Ajax is to be used? The fact that a webapp that competes with a _ubiquitous Microsoft product doesn’t work in 90% of the browsers on the market speaks volumes.

Not to mention that the webapp sucks. You have a limited number of layout options, nowhere near enough features ported over from Word to make it a viable competitor, and it’s not intuitive enough from the get-go. All of the “theory” and the “demonstration of what can be done with Ajax today” only goes so far. Those benefits don’t hold water in a webapp that replicates what you could do by opening a text editor that comes with nearly every operating system. I see a need for mail that is accessible from anywhere and a calendar that can be edited and subscribed to online, but I don’t think a webapp needs to or even can be the saving grace of text editors / word processors.

Apparently, AjaxLaunch.com will launch a new Ajax app every week, replicating many PC applications. Why? We don’t need watered down versions of Office applications; we need Microsoft to reslease Office 2007 with more of the features we want, and we need projects like Open Office to keep the competiton fresh by matching what MS does. Adding an emasculated word processor to the mix doesn’t make much sense to me.

30 Boxes is a great new online calendar that has simply blown me away. At first I was confused as to what all the fuss was about, but as soon as I started using the calendar, I knew that I had met a tool that would turn even my disorganized self into an all-knowing, event-predicting paragon of preparedness. Om Malik said that “30 Boxes will be to calendars what GMail was to EMail.” I completely agree; the innovative and fresh response to event organization is going to launch this web service and this company into everybody’s lives very quickly.

Themes

First of all, the default theme was sort of depressing, so I changed it to Gmail blue. I like that they have new themes already built in. They have a theme API that has lots of potential, but I’ve yet to see a gallery of 30 Boxes themes out there.

Adding Events

Once I was registered and logged in, adding events seemed as if it would be a daunting task (as it is in most calendars, on or offline,) but as soon as I realized the power of the OneBox, as they call it, I was up to my chest in new events. “Circuits Homework 3/17 8am repeat weekly” adds an event every week for Circuits Homework. Of course, you can go to a detailed edit view, and add dates to skip for recurring events. Notes, tags (which are awesome,) and basically anything else can be added from the OneBox. There are a few bugs, but at the rate 30 Boxes has been improving over the last month, I have little doubt that those concerns will be addressed.

Tags and Syndication

I mentioned tags just a few moments ago, and I said that they were awesome. Use “tag ” to specify tags from the OneBox, and off you go. You can then create custom views based on these tags. Go tag crazy, and you can have so many calendars of different events that can be viewed instantly.

The syndication features work through tags, too, and I’m impressed. You can create any number of custom tag calendars from the Settings menu and get RSS feeds and iCal subscriptions till your heart’s content. Use the menu in the upper left of the main calendar view to highlight specific events on the calendar, or click the magnifying glass to get a popup list of all events tagged with a particular tag. I have, in iCal, my full 30 Boxes calendar along with tagged calendars for homework, projects and tests. If I want to see just what upcoming projects are due, I can choose to view that calendar in iCal. 30 Boxes also makes a Javascript / HTML badge available, a la del.icio.us and Flickr, which I have added to my front page. The output is such that you can format it any way you like; I’d look for people to start coming up with creative ways to show off their calendars.

Lifehacker had a recent post about grabbing the ICS file each morning from the 30 Boxes server in order to use the calendar offline. While this method doesn’t really appeal to me, with wireless access in the apartment and on campus, I can see this being useful to have before going on trips or otherwise being without online access for an extended period of time. 30 Boxes hasn’t forgotten about the dinosaurs, either, by providing a CVS file for all those Outlook users still out there.

Social Networking

The most highly touted feature of 30 Boxes is its integration of buddies. When I convinced my girlfriend and my dad to finally get accounts, I saw how awesome these features really are. Buddys’ events are overlayed in a light gray in your own calendar, and can be toggled on or off from the menu in the upper left. The only feature I miss is the ability to grab a buddy’s RSS feed from their profile. If 30 Boxes could enable RSS / iCal sharing preferences, this feature would be greatly improved.

Invitations to events are pretty neat, too. You can add an email address to invite non-30B members to your events, but if you add an email address of a buddy, the event will automatically get added to their calendar.

This calendar has changed the way I organize events. The fact that I can see others’ events right on top of mine or subscribe to their feeds (after I ask them for the link, of course) is unbelievable. I have an updated subscription in iCal always open, and my RSS feed in NetNewsWire.

With 30 Boxes now putting new tips under the OneBox for people with more than just a few events (i.e. not newbies), I’m sure I’ll find more and more to like about this calendar. For instance, you can click a day to get a Day View popup, then click Print to get a nicely formatted version of that day’s events to print out. Awesome!

This webapp is going to change the way I work and browse the web, just like Gmail and del.icio.us did. The pace at which the application is improving is very welcome, and I look forward to the next big thing from 30 Boxen. Er… Boxes.

I bought and watched A History Of Violence this evening, and I was reminded that I have seen some amazing films recently.

I saw Syriana over winter break, and, while I had to see it twice to really get it, I enjoyed the film. When I saw a post on Boing Boing about Running Scared, I was immediately enthralled. I saw it opening night with my dad, and we both thought that while it was over the top, it was still a good film.

After watching the Oscars (something I haven’t done for two or three years,) I realized that I was missing some great films. I rented and loved Crash so much that I watched it twice. I also really enjoyed watching Walk The Line with my wonderful girlfriend over Spring Break, and consequently started listening to a lot more Johnny Cash!  I borrowed The Constant Gardener from my parents, and I loved that. Like Syriana, I may have to watch it again to fully comprehend it, but I thought it was amazingly well done. I also recently saw Paradise Now and A Very Long Engagement at the independent theatre The Lyric in Blacksburg, and I loved them both.

Along with A History Of Violence, which I thought was amazing, I also bought Good Night, And Good Luck. I have high expectations.

The latest offering from Los Angeles-based post-hardcore outfit From First To Last is not so much a departure as an unexpected evolution from their previous efforts. Their Aesthetic EP sounded like it had taken the standard pop-punk route that emo has been travelling down the past few years. Luckily, I was not introduced to the band via this record. Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has A Bodycount was one of the catchiest, most refreshing recordings I had heard in a long time. Not content to stick with endless drivel about relationships, titles like I Liked You Better Before You Were Naked On The Internet and subject matter like being a cowboy in the Wild West made the group’s sophomore effort a winner.

Heroine takes the sounds of industrial, metal, hardcore, and post-hardcore and, together with Sonny Moore’s distinct vocals, brings something completely new to the table of this genre that has seen so much stagnation over the past few years. The album’s production is a step above their previous album. Filled with samples and beats that are technical and catchy all at once, these tunes are enough to suck you into another world. From the opening rumbles of Mothersound onward, the album is filled with a dark underlying rhythm section, courtesy of Derek Bloom’s menacing percussion punch and guest bassist Wes Borland’s nasty, gritty basslines. As the chaotic guitar break at the end of the opener should immediately indicate, shredders Matt Good and Travis Richter (who also gives Moore some growling help on the mic) are not here to mess around. In Afterbirth, Moore’s disturbing imagery of humble human beginnings overlays some intricate guitar work that is alternately metal and progressive, while The Crows Are Coming For Us is the sort of anti-anthem that we can all chant as the crows of this world look upon us with hungry eyes.

All in all, this album is refreshing enough that you don’t feel as if you have ever heard anything like it before, but catchy enough to be played over and over again.

Listen to this album. By morning your soul will be gone.

Snowy Valentine’s Day Weekend Originally uploaded by tupton.

What a wonderful picture! Especially on this wonderfully hot and spring-like day!

Over the past few days, I have been making the transition to Wordpress for my blogging fix. I’ve heard some great things about the open-source software, and I wanted to see for myself whether or not I could make the switch. My hosting company doesn’t really put a limit on MySQL databases, so I had a few handy. Installation was a breeze; the five-minute installation took about four minutes, download included.

By far the hardest part of the transition was the theme. I found a basic theme that just contained the core of the necessary template, and edited from there. I put all those files into a separate directory and added my theme[](http://thomas.fiveuptons.com/bluetop-v1.0.zip) to Wordpress so that I could keep the basic theme for the future.

Some of the typography is slightly different, and I have no idea why, but the header and the sidebar are mostly the same. I’m going to be adding some new features in the near future, and Wordpress should make that a whole lot easier.

Last.fm, what would I be without you? A man with a lot more hard drive space, that’s for sure. The amount of music I have come across because of this amazing social service is staggering. The official iTunes count is 13837 items, 35.8 days, 56.23GB. And, thanks to Last.fm, I can track how much of that I actually listen to and enjoy.

That’s the thing. I can see my charts, and I can see my top artists. It’s awesome. It’s not as awesome as some people think it could be, though. With the help of the increasingly awesome / useful Firefox extension Greasemonkey, I now have access to so many music and listening stats that I could spend hours looking at them… Not that I do that. The image at the top of the post show’s my father’s profile with all the userscripty goodness attached. Here are the Last.fm Greasemonkey scripts that I use.

Last.fm Prettifier (Right-click to install) First up, we have my own concoction. This script changes the links in Last.fm charts to block elements so that they take up the whole row and makes them Audioscrobbler Red (#D20039) on hover. It’s a simple change, but it’s effective, especially with a wide screen.

Last.fm Percentages This displays a percentage next to the number in all Last.fm charts. It’s useful to see how big a chunk a certain band can take up in terms of your listening habits. I changed the color to a more neutral grey. My wish for this script: Make the weekly percentages out of the total number of songs played that week, not the total number of songs played in the profile. Also, if there was a way to extend the chart rows to always accomodate this new information, that’d be great. Sometimes the percentages bleed over into the white of the page when the chart is too narrow. Shouldn’t there be a way to fix this?

Last.fm User Statistics This script inserts a daily / weekly / monthly average of tracks played beneath your total stats on the left side. I modified this script to change the format of the data. I’m averaging 68.9 tracks a day after seven months of tracking. That includes the iPod tracks, too. I have a life.

Highlight Same Artists This awesome script highlights Top 50 artists on other profiles that you share with that particular user. I changed the CSS to make the highlighted artists AS red and bold so they stand out a lot more.

Last.fm Chart Changes This absolutely incredible script tracks (via a server-side script) changes to your charts from week to week. The relative position to last week is shown to the left of the artist, and appropriate notifications are made for new and stagnant artists. This script is unbelievable. Good work, Mr. Wilkinson.

Geek Tool (use JAW Software’s Tiger build for OS X 10.4 or later) is a versatile tool to output different shell scripts, text, and images to your desktop.

At first I was just using Geek Tool to output my Crash Reporter log and Console.log to the desktop so I could see if / when Quicksilver crashed silently and what my computer was doing, respectively. I added System.log to the mix, and left it at that until I found a rather old article on Mac OS X Hints that explained how to use Geek Tool in more depth.

In the Mac OS X Hints article, they mention an iTunes output that displays the currently playing iTunes track. Even though I have Quicksilver monitor tracks on change, I still need to press a button to see the track info. This method seemed like an easy, low memory-usage method of always knowing what I was listening to. Unfortunately, the information in that article left the script a bit buggy, i.e. iTunes would open right back up again as soon as the script is called, there is no output when iTunes is paused, etc. I edited the script using bits and pieces of my own knowledge and an excellent Now Playing script for Adium. I put this script in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/iTunes and called it every ten seconds from Geek Tool using

<code>osascript /path/to/scripts/iTunesName.scpt | iconv -f utf-8 -t ucs-2-internal</code>

et voilà, the song I am listening to is on my desktop AND I can close iTunes without it opening back up again. You can get the script I used here[](http://fiveuptons.com/thomas/iTunesName.scpt.zip).

In addition to the logs and iTunes, I display the output of

<code>ps xm -O %mem</code>

truncated to just the first five processes, and the cal output mentioned in this Mac OS X Hints article. I also display the contents of my Desktop and Download directories on my Powerbook’s display when I am at home on my 20” Cinema Display so that I can see what is contained in those folders when I am doing something fullscreen like watching a movie.

Last summer, I ran out of room on my Powerbook. I woke up to a system alert telling me that there was no more room on my boot disk, and that I needed to make room. I deleted some files to reclaim a few megabytes, but I needed a more permanent solution. What was taking up all of my 60GB hard drive? Music. I ended up buying an internal hardrive and enclosure from Newegg, and it has been amazing. I moved all my music and movies over to the external drive and have loads (~20GB) of space left on my Powerbook.

There is, however, a drawback. If I don’t have my hard drive plugged in, then I do not have access to my music. After some careful consideration, and some prompting from this AskMeFi thread, I came up with what I believe to be a solution to keeping some music on my Powerbook while simultaneously keeping a majority of my library on my external drive. The rest of this post is based on my answer in the AskMeFi thread.

When I unplug my external drive and open iTunes, the Music Library folder is automatically changed to ~/Music/iTunes. Since the iTunes Library XML file is stored locally, I think iTunes automatically chooses the location of this file as its new music folder when the default is unavailable. If I connect my external drive and restart iTunes, the folder changes back automatically. This is the key to this whole method.

Make sure the option to copy music to your iTunes folder and the option to keep your iTunes folder organized are both checked. This makes it far easier to keep track of what is stored locally as opposed to what is on the external drive.

Move all the music you want on the external drive to a directory on that drive and make that directory your iTunes folder. As I mentioned earlier, when I moved to an external drive, my iTunes library files stayed on my local drive so that when I opened iTunes I still had a listing of all my songs.

Keep / move the music you want on your Powerbook to your internal drive, into ~/Music/iTunes. You may have to manually tell iTunes the location of the moved music if you already had it on the external, but that’s just a sacrifice that has to be made, I’m afraid. You do this by double clicking a song in iTunes that you just moved, and then you can browse for the new file. I know of no batch method to do this procedure. Maybe someone can come up with an Applescript that would automatically move the files to a new location and tell iTunes that the file had moved?

Now, when you have your external hard drive plugged in, you’ll be able to play music as usual. When you are not plugged in to your hard drive, all your songs will be listed in the library, but only the songs that you elected to keep on your internal drive will be playable.

If you want to put music on the external drive, make sure you’re plugged in when you rip or add music. If you want music on your Powerbook, make sure you are not plugged in when you rip your music or add it to the library.

Drawbacks

You have to tell iTunes where that locally placed music is located. That could get tedious if you want to have more than a few albums on your Powerbook’s drive. Fortunately, iTunes is scriptable, and I’m sure that it cannot be that hard to put something together that automates this task. Another drawback that goes hand in hand with this one is moving music back to the external drive when you run out of room on your local hard drive or decide that you don’t want it on there anymore.

You have to pay attention to what drive you are adding music when adding. This shouldn’t be too hard though.

Advantages

This method is transparent. You shouldn’t have to do anything more than decide what drive you want to put music on.

This is easy. There is no scripting, or advanced wishy-washy computer voodoo, and, besides having to tell iTunes where your moved music is, relatively work-free.

I have, in the course of writing this, realized that I have done this by accident in the past: I added some downloaded tracks without being plugged in to my external hard drive, and I went for weeks before realizing that the music was playing from my internal hard drive (I realized when I started playing music and my hard drive was not turned on.) This method works, and it works with minimal effort.

Again, if anyone has any information or helpful comments on the state of a script to move the location of iTunes files, the sharing of that information would be greatly appreciated.

And yes, I know that this is not exactly five step by step instructions, but hey, it got your attention didn’t it?