A Technological Guru Blog

During my recent Facebook app development using Java, I had to have some minor integration with Facebook, and I am here to share what I have learned and the cool parts about Facebook’s “Graph.”

Introduction to Working with Facebook

When writting my application, it happened to be a canvas app, or it was accessed via apps.facebook.com with a iframe to my acctual app. When I would get a new user I would immediatley get a new cookie that was named fbs_APPID within this cookie, most importantly, there was a access token. Now to know any information about a user, one must have one thing, an OAuth access token.

Getting an OAuth access token

Most times you will have a token in the cookies, however on some random times that I never figured out the pattern to, you just don’t have that information there. And as for most apps, you need to know some information about a user, and possibly even post or something of the like with the users permission. However, for protection, Facebook just doesn’t allow any application developer access to their entire database. So to allow only certain access to certain applications, applications are given OAuth tokens, these tokens are user specificic and generally session specific. With these tokens, you could use the later discussed Facebook Graph to get just about any needed data.
The process of getting an OAuth token if it is not in the “fbs_” cookie can be quite strenuous. First you need to redirect the user to the Graph server with certain application-specific parameters. Next, one of the parameters happened to be a call back url, now that url is called and Facebook gives you a code. Using this code and your application secret you can finally get a new OAuth access token. Basically what all these redirects does is allow Facebook to check that this user is acctually logged in and that this user is allowing the application access to this information.

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I have had this idea for several years, I had always thought the way of sharing schedules on Facebook was inefficient. At my high school I would have to go through 1200 notes, just to see who was in my class.

My application, only available for MHS students, allows you to add your schedule (teachers and classes), see who’s in your class, comment and Facebook Like both your teachers and your hours.

It was written on the Google App engine, using an OO (object oriented) database with JSP’s and Core-servlets. I  will be writing a post about this stuff later.

For some who want to complain about how “bad” it is, I remind you this was about 8 days of work. However here is some of my attached code for it. Note: this is only SOME, not all.

socialschedulesSource [zip]

Reduce all that typing, use the * and ~ command.

As most of you know * is a wildcard, the cool thing is it can be applied virtually anywhere in the Linux Shell. It’s great for being lazy when you don’t want to complete a whole file name.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/*

That command would edit the sites-enabled file, it is named ( at least on my server ) something strange like “000-default” and instead of remembering that, just put part of it. And a even more known thing is to use a ~ for your home directory, cool thing is you don’t even need to keep it in /home for it to find it.

cd ~/Pictures/May*9

That command would change directory into Pictures in your home directory and go to the folder that starts with May and ends with 9, such as May 2009

Don’t wait for a command to finish, just list them all at once with &&

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

The command right there is a great command that simplifies Ubuntu updates to just one line, instead of updating ( finding out what needs to be upgraded ) and acctually upgrading the packages. These commands can really be piled on, like yesterday I used the following:

wget http://localhost:8080/ && cat index.html && rm index.html

I would download a file, print it out, and delete it. All in one command. && is great.

sudo mkdir /media/Data && sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /media/Data

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I just finished upgrades on the site to 3.0. I have not seen much changes, but it’s always good to be up to date. Just thought I would in form everyone of that.

What is in this bill?

“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi ( D – California )

Now that we have “passed the bill” we can finally “what is in it.” What’s in it? Good question, we have secret deals for Nebraska and other states, we have $500 billion in cuts to Medicare, $52 billion in Social Security cuts, and taking over the loan industry.

Now those first ones are easy to believe, but that last one “taking over the loan industry?” Yes, sadly it is true. According to a March 22 article of USA Today “The government will shut down private lenders, sell expensive loans to 19 million college students and use the profits to finance ObamaCare.”

This bill is loaded with unfair, important-industry-cutting, profiting crap. After just knowing what is in this wretched bill, it should be enough to show you this bill is not right.

Yes, there are some good effects, but it is how we get there. Just like we can quickly solve the middle east problem with a nuke, it’s an unacceptable way of getting there.

How do the American people feel about this bill?

60% disapprove of this bill! And 57% are disgusted at the Democrats way of getting this past, the secret deals, the close door meetings, etc. Since Obama has been pushing this, Obama has hit his lowest rating ever.  These three statistics clearly show most Americans don’t want this, yet Democrats are using crude and rude tactics to get this in. A final, resounding statistic is 11% currently agree with  congress right now. If that doesn’t make something ring in your head, well… nothing will.

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