2012

I’m going to quickly walk you through how to build a server-side Facebook registration flow with Django. This is really basic and doesn’t rely on special libraries aside from httplib2 and urlib which are pretty standard. First you need to create an app. I set my App Domain to localhost and Site URL to http://localhost:8000 for development purposes. You’ll probably need to do the same if you’re using Django’s built in development server.

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While trying to figure this out I came across a great article by Matthijs Hollemans. I suggest following it if you’re interested in an in-depth tutorial. What follows is a more concise version of that article and instead of using PHP I’m using a variant of Jacky Tsoi’s Python script. This is pretty tedious and there are a lot of steps you have to get right in order for this to work properly so hang in there.

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It took me a few evenings to figure this out so I’m writing a quick explanation based on what I’ve found to work. My use-case is pretty simple, I want to POST some data to a form on a server from an iOS app I’m building. I’ll be using NSURLRequest to build the request object and NSURLConnection to make the actual connection to the server. The first thing we need to understand is how Multipart Form requests should be structured.

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I wanted to play around with MQTT this evening so I put together a little tutorial on how to get started using Ubuntu and Mosquitto. Installing Mosquitto Enter the following into your terminal. Remember to replace YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE with the version of ubuntu you’re using, I was using Maverick Meerkat at the time so I replaced it with just maverick. First add the following two lines to /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mosquitto-dev/mosquitto-ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main deb-src http://ppa.

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Today I posted a public photo of how nicely done a bank start-up’s packaging was and didn’t realize my card number was in plain view. Now, I’m a pretty rational individual so I did what everyone else would have done which is call the customer service number on the back of the card. Apparently they have Sundays off so I had to leave two anxious messages on their answering machine.

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One hundred and eighty six years ago both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passed away on this day, exactly fifty years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. It’s hard to ignore the coincidence of this timing. A couple summers back I bought an old book containing a eulogy given by Daniel Webster in August of 1826—I think this sums it up nicely: No two men now live, fellow-citizens, perhaps it may be doubted whether any two men have ever lived in one age, who, more than those we now commemorate, have impressed on mankind their own sentiments in regard to politics and government, infused their own opinions more deeply into the opinions of others, or given a more lasting direction to the current of human thought.

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I spent a while last weekend thinking about death and privacy—for no particular reason aside from taking notice of a couple books I own: The Adams Jefferson Letters Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs There are countless collections of correspondence floating around from a time when an envelope was considered a form of privacy. In many cases privacy died with the individual.

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