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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 June 23rd, 2005

The RSS Wars

June 23rd, 2005

So, wait. Microsoft’s big RSS announcement tomorrow is that they’re adding ordered lists? I must be missing something.

Microsoft confirmed that it is backing an effort to add support for ordered lists but would not go into detail ahead of Friday’s announcement.

Winer also hinted that RSS may be assuming a more central role at Microsoft, noting that there is a team devoted to the syndication standard.

Oh, now I get it. The announcement is about lists, but the big news is that Microsoft cares at all, and in a big way.

Is RSS the new HTML? Are we about to witness the beginning of the “RSS Wars?” (And not the silly, low-stakes syndication format wars, RDF vs RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0 vs Atom. I’m talking about all-the-marbles stuff like we saw in 1999.)

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Gray matters

June 23rd, 2005

So I was out to dinner with a small group last night, and we just kept bringing the funny. Half a dozen times I thought to myself, “This is a hilarious journal comic waiting to happen! Must remember.”

Today: nothing. Stupid brain.

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An end to configuration files

June 23rd, 2005

I hate configuration files, don’t you? Wouldn’t it be simpler if the user’s preferences were just hard-coded into the script? 

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys, re

PASSWORD = 'bar'

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    PASSWORD = sys.argv[1]
    
    script = open(__file__, 'r').readlines()
    for i in xrange(len(script)):
        l = script[i]
        if re.match(r'^PASSWORD =', l):
            script[i] = 'PASSWORD = %s\n' % `PASSWORD`
            break
    
    open(__file__, 'w').write(''.join(script))

print "PASSWORD = %s" % `PASSWORD`
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