On syncing with Google Contacts
So, I started with a new company a few weeks ago, and one of the things I missed from my previous company was having the entire corporate directory synced onto my phone. Its really handy as an on caller to be able to give people a call when something goes wrong, without having to dig around and find their details. Back in the good old days at Google the way you got this sort of data onto your phone was to run a script written by one of the guys on the gmail team. The script grabbed the LDAP directory, and pushed it into Google contacts, which you could then sync with your phone. Now I wanted something very similar -- especially as the contacts sync stuff with Android is pretty reasonable. However, I'd never coded with the Google public APIs before, and that turned out to be the hardest part of the problem. First off I wrote a little script which dumped the corporate directory into a text file. I mostly did this because I wanted other people to be able to run the script in as light weight a manner as possible -- for example, if we wanted…