This is an early iteration of code which allows you cleanse your Facebook wall. This is necessary because of the new Facebook Timeline which allows your past history to be searched more efficiently. This information was always there it is just now easier to get at. I had attempted to write a nice script using the Facebook API which would delete posts automatically but that proved to be impossible since the API does not allow applications to delete posts from other applications, and since no application I would create would be the same as the Facebook web application deletion through this method was not going to be possible. As result, I have resorted to iMacros a web browser extension for Firefox (and other browsers) that records mouse movements. Due to the fact that deleting content can be a fairly dynamic task some further scripting was required than what could be achieved simply through recording mouse clicks. This was done by implementing some javascript.
The code below is no doubt un-finished, I am largely writing it for myself but I would like others to be able to benefit if they are attempting to do similar stuff. The code below should remove all comments made in 2011 and 2010. These are the only dates because I believe comments are a relatively new feature, and at the time of writing it is not yet 2012.
I have been working on similar scripts for a few days now, my motivator in posting now is to show my method of handling the dynamic nature of the dates on the activity log. When running macros with no extra scripting it would be the case that the macro would run out of comments to delete due to the fact that later dates were not being loaded automatically. The javascript that I have written handles that issue.
The 999999999 and the YOUR_FACEBOOK_HANDLE will need to be replaced with information which is unique to you and you need to have the Facebook Timeline to use this.
And again, this code is in its very early stages. Depending on time constraints it may get developed further, I do not know. At first I was just curious about how to do this, but then I decided to do it for myself after becoming upset over the fact that Facebook would not allow me to easily do this through their API. This is really the first time I have felt betrayed by Faceook’s privacy policy.
I recently wrote a paper for school that asked me to use a model from a textbook presumably as a guide. I never take these models as something that should be strictly adhered to, but something to inspire or guide me when I have no idea otherwise. It was in this light that I wrote the paper. I received an interesting response, I was told that I wrote a ‘good’ paper, but that it was necessary to refer to the model explained on page x. I ask myself, ‘why?’ If I wrote a ‘good’ paper, who cares? If I am in university to expand my mind, to learn to think for myself, should not my deviation from the model to come up with my own ‘good’ response be considered a virtue? Apparently not, instead it seems that I was penalized for doing so. In my opinion I was penalized for not following the rules, something I do not think should be strict criteria in a place like a university (especially in 4th year). Yes, rules are important, when you have a foreman, baking a cake, building a bridge, but those are not activities you are supposed to learn to think for yourself from. How am I going to market myself when I graduate if my responses are the same as everyone else? What will make me stand out? Have any of the great inventions or great success come from conventional thinking? If I have demonstrated a solid understanding and given a quality response who cares if I followed the model. In a skilled environment does a manager care how an employee achieves the goals of the organization? Maybe I am wrong, I am not an expert, I am just a student, but something feels wrong. The only thing left is to decide if in the future I should hide what makes me unique or if I should at the expense of grades do what I think will best advance my skills and abilities.
I encourage everyone to investigate the Canadian legislation pertaining to internet privacy that is being proposed by the Conservative Party. Open Media who is against the legislation says on their page StopSpying.ca:
The government is trying to ram through an anti-Internet set of electronic surveillance laws that will invade your privacy and cost you money. The plan is to force every phone and Internet provider to surrender our personal information to “authorities” without a warrant.
This bizarre legislation will create Internet surveillance that is:
Warrantless: A range of “authorities” will have the ability to invade the private lives of law-abiding Canadians and our families using wired Internet and mobile devices, without a warrant or any justification.
Invasive and Dangerous: The laws leave our personal and financial information less secure and more susceptible to cybercrime.
Costly: Internet services providers may be forced to install millions of dollars worth of spying technology and the cost will be passed down to YOU.
I think if these claims are true there should certainly be substantive evidence that these abilities are required by the government in order to obtain: peace, order, and good government.
Here are some screenshots I took from the City of Toronto 2010 Financial Report. They are mostly of graphics since I do not have the time to read a 132 page document at the moment. But I did want to have a skim since ‘things’ seem fishy to me. The report can be found at http://www.toronto.ca/finance/financial_reports.htm. Click the images to see them in full size.
I recently found out a good alternative to shredding old sensitive documents. I don’t own a shredder and burning them is a lot of hassle, for me and my situation the best alternative was was soak the paper in a blender container for a few minutes, then run the blender creating a pulp. Voila! Paper destroyed!
I consider this to be alpha quality at the moment because testing is limited non-existent except for the one case displayed in this video. But, I’m busy and don’t have time to perfect it. If used as intended this could be a useful script, it was for me.
Today I started my second last semester of my Undergraduate University career (hopefullY) and it was alright, but one strange thing did occur.
It being the first day and thus my first appearance in some of my classes I wanted to make a good impression, I showed up 50 minutes early, I was the first to arrive. Doing so gave me ultimate selection in terms of where to sit. Do I sit in the back so that I can mingle? Do I sit in the middle and try to hide from the professor? Or do I pick the front so that I can be engaged with the class? I decided to sit in the front row, because like all semesters I go in thinking that this is going to be the ‘best semester ever.’ Something that fades fast, not that I do poorly, far from it, but as pressure increases while deadlines loom the exact same positive attitude held at the beginning can falter a little bit. Not only did I decide to sit in the front, I decided to position myself nicely (near the podium towards the right) so that I could optimize my interaction with the professor. I wanted to get the most out of the class as I could since I am genuinely interested in the content and excited for what is to come.
Being early also afforded me some time to twiddle around on my laptop. I found myself on the course website which must have been posted at some point during my sleep and I started looking through the material. In the syllabus I found a comment regarding technology in the classroom, it advised me that if I was going to be using my laptop during class (no mention of cellphones) that I was required to sit in the back row so that I do not distract other students.
I agree that other students have the exact same right to have a positive learning environment as I and that they have the right not to be distracted but I am not sure that discriminating against young open minded people for moving with the times is the correct path to take when attempting to ensure that every student has a quality experience. I decided to pretend that I did not read what I had read and hoped that it was just some boilerplate material that the professor did not actually care about.
Class begun and the profssor said that they did not want to start the semester off by boring us all and that they would end with discussion about the syllabus instead of starting with it like usual. Knowing that I might be upsetting this professor by having my laptop open I was very conscious about being on my best behaviour, more so than usual (which typically is a high bar for me to meet). I had a simple text editor open with no distractions, I tilted my screen all the way forward when not typing to indicate that I was not looking at the screen. I participated several times in the class, if I was not the number one participant I was close to it, I think by the end of class the professor even knew my name.
It was a great class, I enjoyed it a lot, and I think it has been a sign of good things to come. And although what happened next does not change that it leaves me questioning peoples’ attitudes towards technology. As promised the syllabus was brought up at the end, and the rule about technology usage was indeed reaffirmed to my dismay.
Asking students to use technology appropriately is nothing new, and something I fully support. Watching people play video games in the next row infront of me is very distracting. At times students have even been asked to shutdown their computers or even in some cases asked to leave the room which is absolutely fair game in my opinion. But this is something that needs to be handled on the case by case basis. Why are we punishing diligent students because others abuse the privilege? People pass notes on paper yet paper and pens are allowed to be at the front. People even flat out talk and often nothing is done about it. This is not an issue about technology, the technology is fine. Laptops in the classroom can be a useful tool if used appropriately. In fact, me being in a technology related academic program I am forced to lease a laptop from the school. The issue is with how people may or may not use the technology. I worry that these attitudes will result in a self-fulfilling prophecy because it is possible that only to students who want to goof off will take the option to continue using their laptop in the back giving the impression that all people who want to use a laptop do so unproductively.
I do not think I could have possibly been a better student during the entire class, I payed careful attention and contributed valuable insights to the class discussion. However, regardless of that fact I was still being told that because of my note taking tool I was to only exist in the back row, in the exact same place that I decided against sitting at the beginning of class because this semester was going to be the ‘best ever.’ I tried my best to show that using technology is not a bad thing, that it can be used responsibly but none of that mattered. I was still told to sit in the back, and implicitly told that this semester will not, and cannot be my ‘best semester ever.’
On my laptop I emulate a scroll wheel with the centre click and the trackpoint. To set this up I install the the gpointing-device-settings package, select “use wheel emulation” and in my case the button number was 2.
I was fiddling with MPD and MPDroid today and had some issues. My MPD could stream from my laptop to my phone/MPDroid fine using the lame encoder (which started being pre-packaged in Ubuntu 11.04) but I was not able to do so from my home server. The difference? ubuntu-restricted-extras. I loaded ubuntu-restricted-extras onto my server and fixed the issue. Unfortunately I have killed an ant with a nuke because I got a whole bunch of non-needed packages in the process, but, oh well. School is starting soon, and it got the job done. I have yet to be able to stream to Chromium however.
I’m running on some old hardware so perhaps that is the issue (P4) but I have had issues booting virtualbox machines. The machine would load grub, but after that I would just receive a blinking cursor. To fix this I had to modify some of the virtual CPU options
VBoxManage modifyvm "vmName" --acpi on --ioapic on --pae on
I’m going to start keeping some notes on things that I do when installing Ubuntu, and since I did an Ubuntu 11.04 install last night here is a large bulk of what I did. It is rough around the edges, and more of a personal note than anything at the moment. But I like making my even my scratch notes available if people are interested. This will probably become outdated later on this after when I realize I missed something
#!/bin/bash
# install script
# written for ubuntu 11.04
# Last Update August 28, 2011 1:45pm
# enable my package proxy, this line would not be for everyone
apt-get install squid-deb-proxy
# enable the partner repositories
nano /etc/apt/sources.list
# some nice themes
add-apt-repository ppa:bisigi/ppa
# chromium
add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa
# latest firefox
add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
# for latest shotwell
add-apt-repository ppa:yorba/ppa
# for latest pidgin
add-apt-repository ppa:pidgin-developers/ppa
# for latest gimp
add-apt-repository ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn
# for latest awn dock
add-apt-repository ppa:awn-testing/ppa
# for latest thunderbird
add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable
# update
apt-get update
# remove default ubuntu stuff I don't like
# gwibber because it is slow
# empathy because it is buggy
# evolution because I'm going to install thunderbird
apt-get remove gwibber empathy evolution
# install all out stuff
apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager ubuntu-restricted-extras \
chromium-browser bisigi-themes vlc mplayer gnome-mplayer pidgin \
gimp avant-window-navigator sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre \
build-essential thunderbird filezilla
# upgrade stuff needing upgrade
apt-get upgrade
This is a bit of a different post, but it is in the direction of the types of content I want to add to this blog. A friend sent me this YouTube clip this morning and I’m very thankful for it. It is one of the best news clips I have seen. The main point is regarding the power that money has in terms of electing people into office. I’m not sure how it would be accomplished but there needs to be a way to level the playing field for getting elected.
A large point of free society, free markets is to make sure that the best rise to the top but when this rise to the top can be influenced by money and personal interest what is best cannot necessarily rise to the top.
Just some links for a friend that I thought would be useful for others too, they are in no order at all
http://www.howtoforge.com/ tutorials
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html bash scripting guide
http://www.unixmen.com/ blog
http://www.thisweekinlinux.com/ video blogger
http://www.webupd8.org/ often similar to omgubuntu
http://www.howtogeek.com/ good tech site
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ ubuntu news/tutorials
http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php some command line book
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse random commands
http://ubuntumanual.org/ was in my bookmarks
http://www.linuxtopia.org/ donno if this is good
http://tldp.org/ was in my bookmarks
http://www.linuxinsider.com/ news
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ you just found this
http://maketecheasier.com/ news how tos
http://www.linuxalt.com/ was in my bookmarks
http://planet.ubuntu.com/ ubuntu blog
http://www.fsdaily.com/ used to read this one a lot!
http://gnome-look.org/ for themeing
http://ubuntuguide.org/ great guide
http://www.h-online.com/ don't know why I don't read this more
http://ubuntu-news.org/ ubuntu news
http://www.arstechnica.com tech news
http://www.engadget.com/ tech news
http://gizmodo.com/ tech news
http://www.makeuseof.com/ tech news
http://www.phoronix.com/ detailed linux reporting
http://www.techdrivein.com/ tech/linux news
http://techcrunch.com/ tech news
http://www.techdirt.com/ tech news
http://twit.tv/ several awesome podcasts
http://www.linuxjournal.com/ linux magazine
http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ ubuntu news
http://ubuntuforums.org/ ubuntu help
http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/ Linux Action Show/Techsnap Awesome videocast
Over a year ago I took these photos of the bikelane on Simcoe. These photos actually led to an article in the Toronto Star (however I did not receive credit). It was also picked up on Duncan’s City Ride over at Biking Toronto. Today I happened to be in the area and figured to make sure I have a safe passage under the rail lines I’d take the Simcoe bike lane! Buuuut….
On the West side North of the underpass I found:
South West side:
South East side:
Then since I had my camera out I found this between Lakeshore and Queens Quay:
Buuuut, that wasn’t enough, I encountered two more before I got to the safety of the Martin Goodman Trail:
I don’t have much to say, I noticed the water coming out from both sides of the underpass, I guess there may have been something legitimately wrong, but I seem to have bad luck with this underpass or it is neglected. I used to take a lot of pictures of cars in bikelanes, I gave up because it was extending my commute time by too much.
Where does Bell Mobility get off thinking that it should be dictating what email applications I should be running (K-9 Mail). This is extremely disappointing.
I’m currently attempting to read a DRM protected eBook for school. I found the font to be too small, but, sucks to be me because the publisher has not enabled the zoom function on the book, and they wonder why people pirate. With a regular PDF you would be able to do things as simple as zooming in on the page. Not to mention the fact that I have to load up an entire virtual machine just to read the book since the DRM is not compatible with Linux but only OSX and Windows.
Having a science background, now in a commerce program, I am routinely making comparisons between the two. I find it interesting that science people have the tendency to dismiss many areas of study as being fruitless. One such area might be Human Resources. This is an odd thing to do because what science project will succeed if the people can’t work together? Or don’t want to work at all? None. But perhaps maybe Human Resources is still useless because ideally people would do as they are told and function well together. Well, ideally steel would have zero mass and be infinitely strong.
