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, 2007

Guided tour = this is gonna be big.

June 27th, 2007

When Apple decides to produce an extensive set of audiovisual introductory teaching materials, you can be sure they think they’re on to something that will:

  1. change everything, but
  2. take a little explaining.

To wit:

1984:
Macintosh Guided Tour.
2007:
iPhone Guided Tour.

On a related note: Does the presenter in the iPhone tour remind anyone else of the pixellated dude from the later Mac tour, “Macintosh Basics”?

Fig. 1. The Macintosh Basics guy.

Fig. 1. The iPhone Guided Tour guy.

The later incarnation trades the dorky white polo and rainbow Apple logotype pullover for a plain black T, but keeps the no-nonsense coiffure. Also, um, his framerate is better this time around.

Discuss.

DWL-G120 + ndiswrapper + Ubuntu

June 27th, 2007

Inside: steps to getting a D-Link DWL-G120 B1 USB wireless card working on Ubuntu 7.04 (linux 2.6.20-15-generic). Have been using it heavily for about a half-hour and it seems to work. Sharing the wealth.

Read the rest of this entry »

getproxies() in python2.3/mac

June 7th, 2007

Irritating:

$ python2.3 -c 'import urllib; print urllib.getproxies()'
{}
$ python2.4 -c 'import urllib; print urllib.getproxies()'
{'http': 'http://localhost:8501'}

Is it documented somewhere that getproxies() just plain doesn’t work in OS X with the Apple-supplied 2.3 build?

Don’t like the weather? Tough.

June 6th, 2007

(Weather forecast for the next few days, courtesy
the Weather Underground.)

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