Iraq Blog Count

This page keeps track of how many Iraq blogs there are, people actually reporting from the ground in Iraq:
Iraq Blog Count

The number is now 209 blogs. I have been a frequent reader of Healing Iraq for quite a while now, but it's obvious I will now have to look at others as well...

wanted gmail enhancements

I just finished moving all my mail from IMAP mac.com account to gmail during the last couple of days (with help of a very useful Python script). I have become rather tired of using mac.com, especially considering their terrible webmail interface and the fact that they are just not getting up to speed with the online offerings. When a paid service can only give you 1GB of storage, and a free version gives you 3GB you know there is something out of whack.

Anyway, Mac.com offers a lot of goodies by tying Mac OS X up to the web, but I have come to realize that I use very very little of it. The verdict is still out if I will keep my subscription this fall or not... That said, I have also found several shortcomings with the gmail solution, of some I'll try to list here:

Improve Contacts! - It is seriously lacking right now. Give me the option of merging several contacts into one, importing more complex files than .csv (what about vCards?)

IMAP connection - Yeah, I know it might be challenge considering that gmail does not store in a traditional folder structure, but why not make the labels appear as folders in the IMAP version?

Paid, commercial-free solution - I would be happy to pay a couple of bucks a year to avoid seeing the ads, and additionally knowing that no-one reads my emails (although I know it's just a algorithmic parsing)

Build Growl support into the Gmail Notifier Mac version

Some way of synchronizing Contacts on your computer (either Mac OS X Addressbook or Outlook Contacts) and the gmail Contacts list. I have been considering writing a Mac app for this myself, we'll see if I have time...

To-do's - Starring emails is good, but sometimes you only need a line or two from an email and just want to store that as a to-do. Make To-do a link right under "Starred".

Add Chat support in Safari(!)

Integrate with Notebook

Ok, let's see how many of these will be implemented a year from now :)

New blog

So, this will be my new blog. I will change the face of vikingstad.com pretty soon. It was kind of scary to have my ramblings plastered on the front page of vikingstad.com, so I think I will be a little more comfortable posting stuff here.

This week is off for me. Actually the only week of summer-vacation this year. I had an internship at Lucent Technologies for 10 weeks and got a good taste of corporate america. Interestingly, Lucent will be "devoured" by french Alcatel within the next year, so there is a lot of anxiety there regarding who gets to keep their job and who gets moved where.

School starts in a couple of weeks, but I will return to my graduate research assistantship at NCPAD next Monday.

Ok, that should be enough personal updates to keep you happy. Now, let's return to my ramblings... :p

5 HTML elements you probably never use

I found this article rather interesting:
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1282

Some of these HTML elements are very useful...