waving android

I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.

The blog here at is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on .

Archive for January, 2005

Look out, Gwen

January 31st, 2005

Geopolitical map: Distractistan

Guiltless system design.

January 31st, 2005

Usually I put this kind of thing on del.icio.us, but this point by dan Bricklin is too good not to pull a long quote from:

Instead of making you feel bad for “only” doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%. People complain about systems that have lots of “freeloaders”. Systems that do well with lots of “freeloading” and make the best of periodic participation are good.

At IRIS we talked about this a bit. During the panel discussion at the end of the presentation day, we talked about freeloading vs. contributing, and where Joe Schmoe (or Joe User or Joe Schlemiel or Joe Q. Random, as he was variously referred to) falls on that axis. I argued that there’s a vein of willing contributors out there, and while it certainly doesn’t cover the entire user population for distributed software, there are enough (based on the Open Source movement, SETI@Home, etc.) of these “civil servants” to make the world go ’round. (As it is on Earth, so shall it be in software.)

[Link via Guilt Is Good (Many-to-Many).]

Ha.

January 31st, 2005

Delicious comix from last week that I’m just catching up on: Cat and Girl’s The Blue Comic; Jeffrey Rowland’s Enchanted Delight Breakfast Beer.

Update: So much more! Strong Sad: “Have you seen my Moleskine notebook???? And a vision of our children in Penny Arcade: The Next Generation.

Back to work.

January 28th, 2005

One ring to make them all uncomfortable

January 26th, 2005

“Basically, being friends with a married couple is like going for a hike in a
neurosis minefield
.” (It is entirely possible that I, fully deserving of any and all ridicule dished out, am referenced somewhere therein.)

“To appear??? …

January 26th, 2005

… the two most cherished words in academia.

FeedTree 'RSS fruit' icon My talk about FeedTree, “Sharing Web micronews with peer-to-peer event notification,” has been scheduled for the last slot on day one of IPTPS ’05. (I hope that doesn’t mean everyone will be exhausted and grumpy by that time in the afternoon.)

Overheard.

January 26th, 2005

[11:48] <Adam> Hey, someone’s gotta be the control group!

[11:48] <Adam> That made much more sense in another window.

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