I just finished my first Android app, Locale Music Plugin. I don’t expect to do much more mobile development, nor do I have any breakthrough ideas or conclusions, but it was a fun little side project, and I collected a few thoughts along the way.
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We hosted Thanksgiving at our house this year. It was great, surprisingly smooth. Here are a few moments we captured, some predictable and some more…interesting.
Partly in solidarity with Movember, and partly because I’m on sabbatical, I’ve been lazy and haven’t shaved for a few weeks. Sadly, I don’t have the genes or temperament for serious facial hair, so it all came off this morning.
Still, it was fun while it lasted, and it brought back fond memories of May Moustache Madness over six years ago. Maybe next year I’ll have a tougher constitution!
First sale doctrine – your legal right in the US to sell a book, movie, CD, or game that you own – has never really made sense to me. It implies that a piece of media is a durable good, which means its value doesn’t get used up over time and doesn’t depend on its owner. For most media, though, that just seems plain wrong.
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Recently, while researching a side project, I started looking at the Facebook APIs. I was surprised that I couldn’t find a decent library for mocking or faking FQL or the Graph API. Everyone just uses live Facebook to test, sometimes even in unit tests!
A few thousand lines of code later, I had a little utility to fill that void. mockfacebook is a standalone HTTP server that implements Facebook’s FQL and Graph API. It’s particularly useful for automated integration testing. It’s backed by a SQLite database, which you can seed from Facebook or populate manually or programmatically.
Feedback is welcome!
One of my favorite perks of working at Google is the food. Sure it’s free, but it’s also healthy, good, consistently interesting, and available 24/7. Whenever I consider going anywhere else, a little voice inside my head always asks, “but will you eat as well?”
I recently had the chance to find out. I’m a month into a sabbatical, and I’ve discovered that yes, happily, I still eat as well. I’ve gone from making around three dinners a week to making six breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and the food is still interesting, tasty, quick, and good for me. Google’s food may still be better, but mine is a lot closer than I expected.
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I just finished posting pictures from San Francisco’s first “pop-up” white dinner, Le Dîner à San Francisco, modeled after the classic Parisian Le Dîner en Blanc.
It was a lot of fun. They announced the location just a couple hours beforehand - Golden Gate Park’s Music Concourse – and hundreds of us all showed up with good food, white tablecloths, white chairs, white decorations, and most importantly, our best (all) white clothes.
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I’ve seen some interesting geek heroes in popular media recently. A lab biologist saves the day in Contagion by formulating a vaccine to stop the massive plague sweeping the planet. Moneyball glamorizes quants and statistics geeks, a special breed considered brainy and painfully dull even by other geeks.
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We’ve just announced Google Cloud SQL, a hosted relational database that does for MySQL what App Engine did for webapps. It handles the plumbing and infrastructure so you’re free to focus on your application. No more DBA needed!
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I love the tactile feel of a book in my hands. A shelf full of old friends in paperback and hardcover makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Even so, I broke down and got a Kindle recently, and DRM notwithstanding, I love it.
I keep my reading list fairly up to date, but I’ve read some particularly good stuff recently, so I thought I’d share.
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