Adam Lowe

Fast, Focused Ruby Koans

2012-01-05T14:43:00.000-05:00

I really enjoy Ruby Koans by EdgeCase and recently started tinkering with watchr. If you place the following watchr script in the root directory for ruby koans watchr will run the tests AND clear the terminal window on each write so you only see the currently broken test. This has helped me to have a faster more focused workflow which makes it more fun to run through the koans more frequently and subsequently keeps you sharper.

Open up a new terminal window or split pane if you are using iTerm2 and start working through the koans. Whenever you write to the file the watchr pane will clear the window and run the tests to display the result of the first failing test.

See it in action:

Faster, focused Ruby Koans from Adam Lowe on Vimeo.

Video showing ruby koans with watchr in split pane iTerm2.

Life and reciprocation

2011-11-12T23:40:00.001-05:00

If you let reciprocation dictate your actions then you will most certainly live an immensely boring, self centered life or an immensely disappointing life.

Training Etiquette

2011-10-05T09:39:00.000-04:00

Some etiquette I've picked up as I've worked to get back in shape.

slurper gets ssl support

2011-08-02T23:29:00.002-04:00

A big thanks to Jesse Cooke (@jc00ke on the twitters) for his contribution to the slurper gem adding ssl support.

To use it simply add a new line to your slurper_config.yml like so:

project_id: 1234
token: 123abc123abc123abc
requested_by: Jane Stakeholder
ssl: true

Grab the latest version of slurper from rubygems.org

gem install slurper

And everything works just like it did before, except it doesn't blow up if you have ssl enabled.

A Scholar And A Gentleman

2010-11-22T12:54:00.001-05:00

I am on vacation this week but even so I found myself thinking of my friend and now former co-worker John "the Dude" Larkowski. A few years ago when I discovered Ruby on Rails I met a guy from Wisconsin here in my corner of Jacksonville, FL hanging out at a local Ruby user group. He befriended me and got me watching the Hashrocket book club that he facilitated as I worked from home. In doing so he connected me some amazing people in the Ruby community. He then got me pairing on open source work at Hashrocket which eventually turned into a full time job. It has been quite a journey the few years since I met The Dude and I know my life is the better for knowing him. I will sorely miss him and his fervor for connecting people, knowledge and the occasional White Russian. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Work won't be the same without you.

slurper and slurper.vim both go 1.0.0

2010-09-07T22:03:00.006-04:00

A big thank you to my fellow Rocketeer, Bernerd Schaffer for jumping in and contributing some great new features slurper and slurper.vim. They both have reached what feels like a solid 1.0.0 marker as fairly full featured tools that scratch the itch we were feeling. The quick list of features is below along with a quick screencast.

slurper
- just a general clean up of the project to streamline things and make contributions easier.

slurper.vim
- has a proper auto-indentation file
- story macros now work inside of a story and will automatically jump to end of current story to insert an additional story
- story folding to view the list of stories as title only

A Year As A Rocketeer

2010-07-13T15:02:00.002-04:00

Today marks my one year anniversary at Hashrocket. It was almost 18 months ago when I met Jon Larkowski and Jim "Big Tiger" Remsik at a RubyJax user group meeting. At the time I was working for a fortune 500 company as a consultant on a lot of enterprisey .NET and Sharepoint applications. As it is in most of those environments I spent most of my time sitting through meetings and squeezed as much work as I could in between. The work itself was mostly fighting through the bureaucratic quagmire to try and deliver some modicum of value. Insult to injury, this was all while wearing the usual corporate get up required in a cube farm. It was taking a toll on me. I realized that this was not a long term solution for my family and I to enjoy our life.

After some soul searching I decided I wanted to switch platforms, switch venues and build Rails applications. I started spending my lunches and nights for the next few months working to learn Rails and get back up to speed on Linux. I took advantage of every opportunity to go to the Hashrocket offices to cowork and spend time on open source projects. The more time I spent with the Rocketeers the clearer it became that I wanted to be a part of this amazing group of people who share such a passion for craftsmanship and delivering valuable, working, tested applications all within in the context of a sustainable pace. I had a long way to go. For those of you not familiar with Hashrocket's hiring process we have applicants pair with our team for a week to audition rather than a traditional interview. I was an exception to that rule. I had to take a step back in life from consulting on multimillion dollar engagements to be an intern for 8 weeks. It was a big decision for us as a family. Thankfully I have an extremely understanding wife. She allowed me to take an indefinite break from lucrative consulting work in the middle of one of the biggest recessions in our nation's history for an unpaid internship. At that point there wasn't even a discussion about a job at the other end. It was the best decision of my professional career. I spent 8 weeks pairing with my fellow Rocketeers and was blessed to be surrounded by people like Stephen Caudill who took additional time out of their evenings to get me up to speed. At the end of the internship I managed to snag a spot among the Rocketeers.

Working here has been the best year of my professional career. My fellow Rocketeers are more family than coworkers. I am challenged every day. I learn new things constantly. I work on really cool projects. I get paid to do something I love and its at the beach! Sometimes you have to take a step back or switch paths all together to get where you really want to be. If you don't like what you are doing then follow your passion and don't settle for anything less. I found a home for my passion at Hashrocket.

slurper turns 0.4.0 and slurper.vim turns 0.3.0

2010-02-05T14:23:00.002-05:00

I'm excited to announce new releases of slurper and slurper.vim with a big feature update and a number of changes to take note of. Support is now included for generating and slurping chores, features, releases, and bugs. With slurper turning the big 0.4.0 and adding support for multiple story types we decided it was time for a refactor. You'll notice that now the story format only calls for a == at the beginning of each story rather than at the beginning and the end. If you are using slurper.vim to generate your story templates this shouldn't be a big impact as it is updated to match with the story templates it generates.

The story_defaults.yml file has been renamed to slurper_config.yml but its purpose and contents haven't changed. When slurper was originally written as a ruby script it served a different purpose than it does now so we wanted to rename it more appropriately. It still sits in your working directory for each project just like it always has.

We made the jump to version 3 of the Pivotal Tracker api. This along with the refactoring we did seems to have fixed the occasional error a few people were seeing when slurping in very large numbers of stories at once. Wes and I had some fun putting slurper and Pivotal Tracker's api through some fairly high load testing to the tune of thousands of stories and it held up really well without any major hiccups.

One of the coolest features for this release is that we added output in the terminal of your stories being slurped in similar to running your Rspec or Cucumber test suites. It's nice to see everything going across the wire and if you have clients in with you it provides them feedback with positive visual feedback on all the work that was just done to write the stories. Included is proper error handling and notifications. If there is an issue with any of your stories slurper now lets you know which one it was with either the story name if has it or the story number if the issue is with the story's name.

Finally with the keymap updates for the new story types in slurper.vim are as follows:

CTRL-h generates a Chore

CTRL-j generates a Feature

CTRL-k generates a Release

CTRL-l generates a Bug

There is no backwards compatibility for the old story formats so if you have stories in progress that are not in Pivotal Tracker yet wait until you've slurped them in before you update to the latest versions. You will want 0.3.0 of both slurper and slurper.vim moving forward.

Links:

slurper http://github.com/hashrocket/slurper

slurper.vim http://github.com/alowe/vim-slurper and http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2890

Pivotal Tracker http://www.pivotaltracker.com

VIM Destroys All Other Rails Editors

2009-12-29T21:51:00.003-05:00

Updated on February 06, 2010 to account for updates in pathogen.vim 1.2

Updated on February 10, 2010 to account for set up difficulties some Linux users were experiencing

Now that I have your attention, I've come across quite a few blog and forum posts from people looking for "the best" text editor or IDE to use for Ruby on Rails development. I was fortunate enough to meet Tim Pope soon after I got interested in Rails and was subsequently introduced to the awesomeness that Vim is capable of. It took some ramp up time to get comfortable with modal editing but now I find myself frustrated when I don't have all the power that comes from Vim's modal mindset.

Flame War Disclaimer

What you use to edit code is any other tool and it comes down to personal preference. Personally I LOVE Vim. There are hundred different ways you could set up Vim. This is the setup that's worked best for me. Hope you enjoy it as well.

First things first

Install MacVim or Gvim (For Debian based distros install with apt-get). I do frequently use terminal Vim or Vi but I like having both available. If you're on Windows you probably want to spin up a Linux box or a VM. Ruby on Rails development on Windows is going to painful.

Let's Get Plugged In

Download pathogen.vim it makes managing Vim plugins a lot simpler. Create a ~/.vim/autoload/ directory and copy pathogen.vim into it.

$ mkdir ~/.vim
$ mkdir ~/.vim/autoload
$ cp ~/Downloads/pathogen.vim ~/.vim/autoload/

Next you need to create and edit your .vimrc file so that pathogen gets loaded in the correct order.

$ mvim ~/.vimrc

Content:

filetype off

call pathogen#runtime_append_all_bundles()

syntax on
filetype plugin indent on
set tabstop=2
set smarttab
set shiftwidth=2
set autoindent
set expandtab

The "filetype off" is necessary for some Linux distros. If you're on OS X you should be able to omit that though it won't hurt either way if you leave it in.

Create a .gvimrc to specify colorscheme

$ mvim ~/.gvimrc

Content:

colorscheme vividchalk

I've also become fond of the molokai colorscheme. But its all personal preference. You can also forgo the .gvimrc file and just specify your colorscheme in .vimrc but if you are using terminal vim loading some colorschemes doesn't work very well. Putting it in the .gvimrc will only load the custom colorscheme when you are in Gvim or MacVim.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2340

Create a ~/.vim/bundle directory and install plugins. I prefer to clone them from github.com when I can. Some plugins still need to be downloaded from vim.org, extracted and copied to your .vimbundles directory. Either way go vote up plugins you find useful on vim.org. If you don't have git installed check out git-scm.com

$ mkdir ~/.vim/bundle
$ cd ~/.vim/bundle

Install rails.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-rails.git

Install cucumber.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-cucumber.git

Install vividchalk.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-vividchalk.git

Install haml.vim (There are two. I use Tim Pope's.)

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-haml.git

Install endwise.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-endwise.git

Install surround.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-surround.git

Install unimpaired.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-unimpaired.git

Install abolish.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish.git

Install repeat.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-repeat.git

Install NERD_tree.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git

Install NERD_commenter.vim

$ git clone git://github.com/scrooloose/nerdcommenter.git

Restart Vim and you now have a super powerful Rails editor at your fingertips. Check out each of the plugins for documentation of features.

Technorati Tags: vim, ruby, rails

Story Card Faster Than The Speed Of Pivotal Tracker

2009-12-26T17:31:00.001-05:00

Pivotal Tracker Does Some Things Really Well.....

It provides a very streamlined and convenient tool for managing story cards with clients. This is especially true when your client is not on site with you on an ongoing basis. It does a solid job of fostering collaborative ownership of project scope and allows clients to see their impact on the project in a very tangible fashion. These things are all great once there are stories in Pivotal Tracker. Sometimes getting stories into Pivotal Tracker can be a frustrating experience.

Pivotal Tracker Can Be Frustrating.....

When I found myself on the receiving end of a brain dump by a client or in a room with flaky wireless I frequently got burned by the limitation of how fast Pivotal Tracker's UI would let me create new stories or by lost stories when then internet fizzled out.

The Solution.....

One of my fellow Rocketeers, Wes Gibbs had the idea for and wrote a ruby script called slurper that allowed us to compose stories in a plain text file and then slurp them into Pivotal Tracker through the api. After a few iterations of improvements with contributions by myself, Tim Pope and Stephen Caudill it has been released as a gem.

Install the slurper gem

$ gem install slurper

Create a story_defaults.yml file in your working directory and add your configuration information.

project_id: 1234
token: 123abc123abc123abc
requested_by: Jane Stakeholder

Create a stories.slurper file in your working directory and open in vim. Compose your stories in the slurper story format.

Save your file and slurp the stories into Pivotal Tracker.

$ slurp stories.slurper

It Gets Better.....

slurper is great. It's much faster than working through the Pivotal UI. It adds the additional bonuses of not having to worry about losing stories to flaky internet and being able to archive your story files in a dropbox folder or Basecamp for historical purposes.

Eventually I found having to compose the stories in the slurper format still wasn't fast enough. To solve this I wrote the slurper.vim plugin. The plugin generates story templates for you via key maps. Fill in the details for each story, wash, rinse and repeat.

There is a detailed readme available for both projects on their respective github pages with installation, configuration and usage information. They currently follow the Hashrocket Way format for writing stories.

slurper github.com/hashrocket/slurper

slurper.vim github.com/alowe/vim-slurper

Technorati Tags: agile, pivotal tracker, story carding, vim

RubyJax December Presentation

2009-12-05T17:29:00.001-05:00

Come Check Out My Presentation at RubyJax December: Sinatra, Heroku, and You, and You

I will be presenting a demo on building a Sinatra app and deploying via Git to Heroku. I will cover a basic introduction to Sinatra, a flexible and light weight Ruby web framework. I will also cover leveraging the pony gem for mail via Gmail and Big Tiger will talk about authentication with Sinatra apps. Sinatra provides an amazingly lightweight, simple solution for quickly deploying low complexity sites or services. Location is the Hashrocket offices and we will follow up the presentation with a hackfest to pair program on sinatra apps with everyone that makes it out.

Please RSVP on the meetup.com page. Look forward to seeing you there.

Slides are available on Slideshare in in Keynote and PDF format. Sorry to any Powerpoint folks out there but I'm tired of trying to clean up slides to look right when exported to .ppt.

White List An Email Address in Gmail

2009-10-31T13:47:00.001-04:00

Recently I set up an email address with my alma mater, University of North Florida in order to receive updates from them. When setting up an email address with them they prefer to redirect to an existing address for alumni. There had been reports of issues of mail forwarded to Gmail accounts not making it. I figured easy fix, just white list the address they are forwarding from. It took me a bit of muddling through to find the way google would like you to do this via filters.

First, click the "Create a filter" link

Second, provide the email address you would like to white list and click the "Next Step" button.

The last step is to check the "Never send it to Spam" check box and click the "Create Filter" button.

You'll see the confirmation message and your new white list filter displayed and you should be displayed below. Any mail sent to you from that address should come in without issue.

Technorati Tags: gmail, white list

Git Cards: How I'm Learning Continued

2009-09-03T00:02:00.001-04:00

Newest set of study cards are out. Get some Git foo in Keynote and Powerpoint formats. Pick your flavor. This is not a complete list by any means just the core list I'm find myself using most often. Once again input on refinements and additions are greatly appreciated.

For in depth studying or quick references there are a lot of good resources on the github.

Technorati Tags: Git, Git Cards

Hashrocket and Tweeblocker News Spot

2009-08-20T22:14:00.001-04:00

I'm really excited about the success of Tweetblocker and for being fortunate enough to be part of the team at Hashrocket. So far we've received great write-ups from Mashable and Read Write Web. Tonight Tweetblocker earned us a spot on our local news station Action News Jax. (You can see the video on their website just to the right of the story.)

We're most excited about the response the application has gotten from the twitter community. We've been getting a lot of ideas and feedback. If you have feedback or ideas on Tweetblocker please checkout our User Voice Page and message us on Twitter.

We also appreciate the support and understanding we've seen as the app has grown extremely fast and we had to scramble to stay ahead of the growth. In the past couple weeks since release we have grown from fewer than 200 users to just over 6,000 and are still seeing a strong daily uptick in that number.

We had a great phone call with some of the powers that be at Twitter. They have some new features coming out around their api and the data they make available which will give us more to work with as we improve Tweetblocker's ability to decipher the spammers from the legitimate Twitter users so stay tuned and keep fighting the good fight!

Technorati Tags: hashrocket, tweetblocker

Regex Cards: How I'm Learning Continued

2009-08-18T12:02:00.002-04:00

Continuing on with keeping my technical vocabulary sharp I've posted my Regex 101 study cards. Available in Keynote and Powerpoint formats so pick your flavor. As always input on refinements and additions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks and credit to Stephen Caudill for some great instruction on more complex Regex's and for introducing me to Rubular.

Cheat Sheets to check out

2009-08-04T09:42:00.001-04:00

A quick list of cheatsheets that other folks have been kind enough to put together and thought I'd share:

Git - Credit Zack Rusin
Probably one of the most useful cheat sheets for me.

Rails.vim - Credit Morohashi Kyosuke
This one is a bit incomplete/out of date, but since the site is in Japanese I wasn't able to check for an update.

Vim - Credit viemu.com

Ruby on Rails - addedbytes.com has quite a few useful cheat sheets.

Technorati Tags: ruby on rails, vim, git, cheat sheets

Vim Cards: How I'm Learning

2009-07-26T23:33:00.001-04:00

I tend to learn things by committing as many key items to memory as possible. The thought being that if I have a strong vocabulary down pat then my brain is free to focus on problem solving and context while I'm engaged in what I'm learning.

Over the last few months I've been learning Vim for use as my primary code editor. Initially there is a steep learning curve involved. I found that as I've developed associations between actions and their corresponding Vim commands the modes portion has come more and more naturally to me. The major obstacle for me was reading through a few Vim books and then being fortunate enough to pair program with the folks at Hashrocket to figure out the most useful commands for me.

In hopes that it might help others trying to adopt Vim I've posted my slides I study with on slideshare.net. This is my first shot at slideshare. Feedback is appreciated. I've posted it in Keynote and Powerpoint formats so pick your flavor. I also look forward to hearing back on any commands I'm missing that you think would be good additions to the deck.

I purposefully left out any rails.vim or other plugin specific commands on this one. Will probably post a slide deck with those seperately in the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: Vim

Intern Life

2009-07-10T21:37:00.001-04:00

After a great vacation I kicked off my first two days as an intern at Hashrocket. So far it has been even more of a refreshing and insightful experience than expected. It has been a great feeling to finish up the day feeling brain drained and stoked all at once. I couldn't ask for a better crew to work alongside and learn from. The two big take aways from this week:

1) Stoked to be again be a part of Hashrocket's Apps for America entry. Excited about being able to go through the app lifecycle from start to finish "The Hashrocket Way."

2) Follow your passions and whenever possible surround yourself with people that are passionate about what they do.

I'll be blogging more about my journey with the Hashrocket crew in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Gone Mac... Again. Not Looking Back.

2009-07-01T21:06:00.001-04:00

I was a Mac user for quite a while and ended up back on Windows shortly after they switched to the intel chips due to work. After a while on Windows I eventually got sick of how crappy the experience was and converted my machines over to Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS. Dual booted for a while until I got a solid grasp on Linux and Wine. Then I ran MS Office on Wine. Why? B/c Open Office is a pretty crappy experience for anything other than basic office functionality. The fact that you still have to reach over to the right arrow key or hit enter in Calc to use the auto complete is just one feature that speaks to poor usability. Anyway as much as I loved the configuration of my Linux machine it was just spent too much time working on my desktop. Same for Windows. Not to mention none of the Spotlight, Quicksilver, or Gnome-DO Windows equivalents were even close to their Linux or OS X counterparts for me. Finally, Ruby on Rails and Git on Windows is the equivalent of sadomasicism. So Monday I ran down to the Apple store and got myself a shiny new Macbook Pro. 37 minutes later I had it completely updated, files migrated, software installed, and humming along like.... well, a Macbook Pro.

The moral of the story? Don't sit around wishing for a super polished Linux OS. OS X fills that need.

Not to say that if someone comes out with an awesome Linux distro that rivals OS X that I wouldn't check it out. Just don't see it happening anytime soon.

Here's to not thinking about my OS and focusing on my actual work.

Value Your Time

2009-05-28T12:48:00.001-04:00

As many of you know I worked as an IT recruiter in a past life. Yes many of us have a shady past. A lot of us also have skills in addition to how we might primarily earn our income. I frequently get requests to help someone find XYZ type of person. As I am the type of person with a strong desire to please/help out my impulse is to just immediately say, "Sure I can help with that." This however is not the best thing either person for a few reasons.

This will distract me from how I primarily earn income.
This is will give them an inaccurate perception of the cost of this extra service I am providing them.
It sets a precedence that I don't value the skills I am exercising on their behalf which means they won't feel bad asking me to do this over and over again for free.

How do I handle this? Two ways:

First there are definitely times where it makes sense to provide a little something extra to a client or a business partner where you have a symbiotic business relationship. Just make sure that when you do there is some sort of valuable reciprocation if only to solidify your presence as a service provider of your primary occupation.

Second charge for your time/skills. This will weed out the folks that really need/value your help from those that don't. It is extremely easy form your own company as a payment/liability limitation mechanism (For Florida folks the Florida Department of State Division of Corporations) and you can easily manage invoices and funds through great tools like Less Accounting and Freshbooks.

So will I help you find your next employee? Sure, happy to help through Adam Lowe, LLC as long as it is a direct placement and you're willing to pay a nominal fee.

Honorable Mention for localpolitics.in

2009-04-25T22:23:00.002-04:00

If you haven't checked it out yet have a look at localpolitics.in. I was fortunate to be a part of Hashrocket's entry for the Sunlight Labs Apps for America contest. Localpolitics managed to grab an honorable mention out of 40 apps that were submitted. If you want information on what your representatives for your zip code are up to then this is a great resource. Added bonus it will let you check out Youtube video of them and show you who the top recipients of government funds are for any zip that you enter.

Beyond the awesome app that was turned out it was a great experience being able to be on the inside of a project with members of the Hashrocket team. They truly are a class act that builds quality software. It's not often that you encounter an awesome organisation that is willing and excited about having people come in and be taught the components their secret sauce first hand.

A big thanks to Hashrocket, Dennis from ThoughtNTheory and all the other folks that made this possible. Veez has a good post listing all the contributors.

Technorati Tags: hashrocket, apps for america, sunlight labs, ruby, rails, localpolitics.in

Free Brushes from BlendFu.com

2009-04-17T23:39:00.001-04:00

I was working on a couple of new slide deck templates and needed some new brushes for Gimp. I came across BlendFu.com and found some solid ones. What really impressed me was that its actually a cool site. I haven't been impressed with a lot of the sites out there for sharing brushes etc. I think the world has enough Laura Croft Tomb Raider wallpapers already. BlendFu was done really well and provides a great browser live preview tool where you can try out the brushes before you download them. It looks like every brush has both a Photoshop and a GIMP brush pack.

Technorati Tags:GIMP, Photoshop, Brushes

Time and Task Management with Tomatoist.com

2009-04-14T15:36:00.001-04:00

I'm grateful to be spending yet another day co-working with the Hashrocket crew at their offices. I always look forward to spending time with them as I always walk away with new knowledge and better ways of accomplishing the tasks before me. Today is no exception.

This morning I spent some time sitting in with Corey Grusden and Stephen Caudill on their pairing session. I noticed that in the background they had a small web app up that said "Pomodoro in progress" and had a countdown timer. The site is tomatoist.com. Corey and Stephen built the app as a tool to facilitate implementing the Pomodoro Technique of time management. After a little over half a day in the rythm with Pomodoro I'm getting a lot done and it is providing a good balance between work time and decompress time. For me I'm a person that performs well under pressure and this is allowing me to break up my work into manageable tasks with the positive pressure of a deadline without the downside of having to procrastinate until I'm up against a real deadline. Check it out and get on top of your tasks.

Technorati Tags: Hashrocket, Pomodoro Technique, Time Management, Hashrocket

Stepping Down From JAXDUG

2009-03-05T20:35:00.001-05:00

I was introduced to the Jacksonville Developer's User Group in 2006 and owe much of my career to the knowledge and relationships that were built through the group. After being active in the group for the last three years and acting as Vice President along with Bayer for the past couple months I have decided to step down. I have been excited to see a resurgence in attendance at the last few meetings but Bayer and I have not been able to come to a consensus on a vision for the group moving forward. Due to this and having a lot of things vying for my attention right now I will be taking some time to focus on other efforts. Bayer and I have been friends for a long time and continue to be. We simply have a difference of opinion and the last thing I want is for a disagreement between two friends to distract the group from developing further. My best wishes go with Bayer and the group and will continue to be present at meetings as I'm able.

-A. Lowe

Technorati Tags:JAXDUG

Gmail Notifier on Ubuntu 8.10 - Open Gmail in a new window

2009-02-26T09:51:00.002-05:00

Since I moved over to Gmail quite a while back I've gotten away from using a desktop email client and really have enjoyed Gmail notifier. The one hitch is that when I set it up the initial configuration on my Ubuntu 8.10 install wasn't working when I clicked "Go to inbox".

My first solution was to simply replace the default entry for "Browser path:" on the configuration screen with "firefox". This works but opens into a tab on an exhisting firefox instance which may be minimized and hard to determine which window was the target if you have a lot of firefox windows open.

My preferred solution was to replace the "Browser path:" entry with "firefox -new-window".

This way Gmail will be opened in a new browser window.

Technorati Tags: Gmail, Gmail Notifier, Ubuntu, Linux