• You often look up #apush, #aplang, #apphysics, #apcalc on Twitter just to see your fellow sufferers.
• You don’t think of it as “cheating”, you think of it as “cooperative learning.”
• You have multiple breakdowns throughout the year from school-related stress.
• On top of your full schedule, you’re involved in several extra-curricular activities and you have a job.
• Every extra-curricular activity you sign up for is framed with the words “It’ll look good for college.”
• You sign up for a class because it’s weighted, not because the subject interests you.
• You consider any non AP class to be a blow-off class.
• You never meet anyone new in your classes because its been the same group of kids since ninth grade.
• You and your closest friends are all in the top 10% of your class.
• The probablity of your homework getting done depends more on your mood than the fact that it needs to be done.
• You consider anything below a A to be a bad grade.
• You watch TV or do other random things until 10pm then complain the next day about doing homework at 2am.
• You find yourself complaining to everyone how much homework you have… when you should be off facebook doing it.
• You get mad when non-AP students whine about how much homework they have.
• Sometimes the highlight of your life is just crawling into bed and passing out.
• You use random, obscure information you learned in class in everyday conversation.
• You stare at your homework and repeat the words FML as you go through it.
• You know that school is a joke after the second week in May.
• You write BS-ays instead of essays.
• You have back problems because your backpack weighs more than 50lbs.
• You can’t help but find symbolism in every single thing you read/watch.
• Sparknotes is practically your homepage.
• You can’t have a conversation with your friends without mentioning homework at least once.
• You’re actually disappointed because you realize that you could’ve gotten a lot more AP classes into your high school transcript if they’d let you start as a freshman.
• You look at your AP results to cheer yourself up when depressed about your lack of a social life.
• You are annoyed after the ap test because it was SO much easier than all the practice tests and you didn’t need to have studied THAT much.

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.

The Facebook Graph

Why they call it the “Graph” I am not quite sure, however it is quite a handy tool. Just heading over to http://graph.facebook.com/me will provide you some basic information about yourself, provided that you are currently logged into Facebook on that browser. Furthermore looking up more information is easy, all you need to know about something is it’s Facebook ID. Everything on Facebook has an ID, from an event to a group, to a person. With people you can even use words like the ones that are for your profile. You can access some basic information on me by going to http://graph.facebook.com/jordan.deloach.
Want other information? It’s easy

• http://graph.facebook.com/me/picture links to that select person’s profile (replace Me with the FB ID of anything on Facebook)
• http://graph.facebook.com/me/home Your news feed
• http://graph.facebook.com/me/feed Your wall
• http://graph.facebook.com/me/movies Your movies.

Obviously there are many more than this, and it as simple as fetching these url’s in your application to get all this data. Check out the Graph API for more examples and the nitty-gritty syntax. You can get all sorts of data on any event, photo, anything really.

Where these two technologies meet

Now the reason that we discussed OAuth tokens was that so you had them in your application for when the time came when you needed some data. Not all data requires a token, in fact any data visible by outside (non-friend) users is visible. However when that no longer cuts it, an access token with proper permissions can get you all the data you need. When applying the access token it is as simple as putting it as a GET argument

https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=w5h2kl5jhkleh235hjkl23h5jkwhfklq3

Note: when using an access token you must use HTTPS or a secure connection.

Another note: Me refers to the user who authorized the access token, not the developer.

And another, major note: all data will be returned in JSON Object forrm, so all you need is a few libraries, or if they are included with your language you’re fine.
For Java I used the libraries are JSON.org, they worked just fine.

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

Stop scanning through all that output, find it quickly with grep

This one took me a long time to understand ( not sure why ) but whenever your searching for something in output, just add a “| grep zzzz” at the end to find zzzz. Here is a real life example:

sudo netstat -tupan | grep 8080

That command would look at what program is using port 8080, or another example:

ls -Ra ~ | grep file.txt

That would list all the files in your home directory, ( the R is for recursive so it goes through all the folders in there not just the base one and the a is for all files, even hidden. ) and it would print out anything it finds that has “file.txt” in it.

Important Options on Important Commands

• ls -l lists files with there permissions
• sudo -i become root
• cp -r, mv -r, ls -R, etc. Recursivley do something ( look through all the folders, not just the starting folder )
• any command with -h -h or –help is normally the help output and is almost always there.
• almost any command with -v verbose tells you everything it is doing, great for debugging

Great Commands

• cat read a file without entering it, eg cat file.txt would output the contents of file.txt
• touch create a file without entering it, eg touch file.txt creates file.txt
• “echo ‘text here’ >> file.txt” adds ‘text here’ add the bottom of file.txt, can also use with commands like lshw >> lshw.txt
• lshw -html >> lshw.html lists your hardware with lots of details in a neat html file.
• sudo start/stop/restart servicename like sudo stop mysqld stops mysql

Other Random Things:

• “.” is the present directory, just the period, like cp /etc/apache2/ ./ would copy everything in the apache2 folder to the present directory
• “..” or “../” is the upper directory, apache2′s would be /etc and /bin’s would be / ( great for cd ../ )
• The “d” at the end of things like sshd or mysqld normally stands for daemon
• cron schedules things to run at certain times
• Use public/private keys

“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.

Some evidence of new government power

According to a “Ways and Means” report of the U.S. House, IRS agents now have the right to:

• IRS agents verify if you have “acceptable” health care coverage;
  
• IRS has the authority to fine you up to $2,250 or 2 percent of your income (whichever is greater) for failure to prove that you have purchased “minimum essential coverage;”
  
• IRS can confiscate your tax refund;
  
• IRS audits are likely to increase;
  
• IRS will need up to $10 billion to administer the new health care program this decade;
  
• IRS may need to hire as many as 16,500 additional auditors, agents and other employees to investigate and collect billions in new taxes from Americans; and
  
• Nearly half of all these new individual mandate taxes will be paid by Americans earning less than 300 percent of poverty ($66,150 for a family of four.)

See all those “quotes” are places where its up to the specific IRS agent, how they feel about you, that day, etc. I don’t know about you, but this scares me a little.

What can we/you/I do?

Support the “no”-ers. Those people, Republicans or Democrats, who weren’t affraid of anything, those were able to vote against everyone else. They need support both now and in the upcoming midterms. Another thing we can do is in the midterms, elect those who promise to repeal it.

Right now Senator Jim DeMint has promised a health care repeal bill by the end of the week. The repealing process has started, now it just needs support! Even if it is not successful right away in November when the GOP gains power, the repealing will be in an ever great forward motion. And even if that fails, many think that is what many will care about in the 2012 election, “will you repeal healthcare?”

In Conclusion

I hope this article has been a bipartisan explanation of what is, what is wrong, and what is to come. And I am quite tired, so I shall end this article right now.

Sources:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6084818-503544.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6084856-503544.html

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

http://republicans.waysandmeans.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=176997

So this is my “make shift gigabit switch and phone switch” as the real 8 gigabit switch and connector pieces are en route. It is connecting my room line and the line to the router as everyone else is yet to get on the bandwagon.

Example person:

• 25 gb. of music
• 25 gb. of power points, word docs, etc.
• 100 gb. of programs and settings
• 50 gb. of movies
• 15 gb. of pictures

Thats more than generous on each part but that only comes out to 215 gb! In my room I have 990 gb and that is more than I could ever use. On my main desktop I only use 200 gb and that includes my game/dvd ripping project and backups!

Holy cow people I don’t see how you need that much space!

Update: 4 left!

Update: 3 left!

Extremely Ugly, and Hard to Follow Code

So as it would not work, I have setout to rewrite it into an exceptable format. I am writting this into a MVC type framework. This website code is extremely mess, even the directory structure. The images and the PHP and the configuration are all in the root directory. So far I have reconstructed a small part of the base, but it is really hard as all this code is useless as you cannot follow it.

Cleaner code, that I am trying to rework.