A Technological Guru Blog

This year, I am taking CIS 300 at Kansas State University. At first, I expected this class to be boring as it was a class on “data structures.” How much more boring could it get? Oooh, studying the differences in implementations between LinkedList and ArrayLists. The first day our professor proved to us just how wrong we were. He showed us two snippets of code:

String results = "";
for(char c: String.toCharArray()) {
results += (char)(c+3);
}

and

StringBuilder results = new StringBuilder();
for(char c: String.toCharArray()) {
results.append((char)(c+3));
}

He then proceeded to convert the entire collection of works by Shakespeare. Method 1 was estimated to take over 21 days by the computer. Method 2 finished in seconds. That caught my attention.
There are several cool data structures and search techniques that I have found awesome throughout this semester.

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So I’ve been working on a project for a while with Google App Engine and it has gotten close to being finished, so I decided to buy a domain name and put the project on it. Sounds simple and a 5 minute ordeal right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

So I need to verify it, the main and recommended way is to use TXT record supported by most domain name registrars. Well mine wasn’t supported. Shouldn’t be a problem, all I need to do is upload an HTML file to a server behind the domain name to verify. That is quite dificult it turns out.

Next I fire up a VM, put a web server on it, put the verification file on it, and open it to the world and put it in the DNS settings for the domain name. Cox Communications doesn’t allow port 80; FAIL.

Try two, I’ll do a redirect from my domain name to a file on jtmcgee.net projects. FAIL, Google Apps doesn’t allow redirects when looking for the verification file.

3rd times the charm, right? I’ll CNAME my App Engine and put my project there. FAIL, the App Engine just redirects me to google.com.

4th time I try to CNAME my own website. This has a similar result, getting redirected back to epicserve.com, the owner of the servers website.

5th time, I contacted my friend Brent and asked him to work some config magic so that I could CNAME my project server without redirecting. Finally I can validate!

Yet I am still waiting for that CNAME change to propogate to the DNS servers around the world… 1and1 is famous for their slowness. It shows up right on my computer I am just waiting for it to show up right at Google.

Never thought something so simple would take so long.

If you have read my site for a while, or know what projects I am involved in, you know that for several summers I always do a little update on an Eclipse Plugin download logger. It started two years ago, then it just literally increased an integer in a text file for every download. You could only see how many times a thing had been downloaded. Last year I upgraded it to two separate versions. Initially I wrote a logger that logged to an XML file. It kept a date, IP, and what was downloaded. This was infinitely better however when used it production it had a flaw where there were multiple file handles editing the file at the same time and it wiped the file. So later that summer I changed about 1/3 of the code to instead of logging to XML, to log to a MySQL database. It included a great backend that would provide Geo-location based on the IP address,  other WHOIS stats on the IP, and various other information. It’s backend was a copy of my old CMS for this website so it even had a decent looking backend. It allowed you to download your log in a CSV format for whatever purposes you wanted. It was great, just not so polished and debugged.

This year I moved the project to GitHub and you can find it here. This years version features an install script that dramatically makes it simpler to setup. Once you clone the git repository just running the install.php will setup everything from the MySQL DB, to error reporting, to your Google Maps API (for the map on the geo-location). All that’s needed to install this correctly is giving the web server the ability to write/edit files.

If you have a plugin for eclipse that you release check it out. Worst case scenario is it breaks, and if that happens it will turn itself off, stop logging, and allow the downloads to continue as if it was never there. Check it out.

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]