The procedure entry point_except_handler4_common could not be located in the dynamic link library msvcrt.dll

This error is caused by a 3rd party utility or applcation overwriting your msvcrt.dll with a different version.

For example if a windows vista version of this DLL was copied on to a windows XP computer you would probably get this error.

A solution to this problem can be found in Microsofts KB
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324762

it was ment to be a sleep timer…
I just about shit a brick when I saw this.

for(int i=0; i<PAUSE_LENGTH; i++)
{
i++;
}

require_once('wp-config.php');

// feed object to wp_insert_post
$post_ID = wp_insert_post($wm_mypost);
echo date( 'r' ) . "\n";
echo "post_ID:". $post_ID . "\n"; 

class CMinMaxAvg
{
private :
int	m_count;
int	m_total;
int	m_min;
int	m_max;
public:

CMinMaxAvg() {
m_count = 0 ;
m_total = 0 ;
m_min   = 0 ;
m_max   = 0 ;
}

void add( int iNum ) {
if( m_count == 0 ) {
SetMax( iNum, true ) ;
SetMin( iNum, true );
}        SetMax( iNum, false );
SetMin( iNum, false );
m_count ++;
m_total += iNum ;
}

void SetMax( int iNum, bool force=true ) {
if( m_max < iNum || force ) {
m_max = iNum ;
}
}

void SetMin( int iNum, bool force=true ) {
if( m_min > iNum || force) {
m_min = iNum ;
}
}

float GetAvg( ) {
return (float)m_total/(float)m_count ;
}

int GetMax() {
return m_max ;
}

int GetMin() {
return m_min ;
}
};

Intro

PHPBB3 has become one of the more popular bulletin board system (AKA, BBS, or forums) available. It is used for all types of websites, from corporate websites, online stores, online hobby groups, ect.  One of the main selling points for many people that use PHPBB is the strong community of developers developing mods and themes. PHPBB is an open source project released under (General Public License) that started in 2000 by James Atkinson (now a former team member) has come a long way in the last 8 years. As PHPBB grew and became more popular and as its install base reached over 100,000 sites, it started getting targeted by hackers and script kiddies. Forums would be filled with spam comments, links to porn/adult sites, and people trying to sell perscription medication it turned a lot of people away from PHPBB on to other forum systems. The newer versions of PHPBB2 and PHPBB3 made spam and robot prevention a major concern and the exploits that allow robots and script kiddies to make new posts have been reduced significantly.

Requirements (^)

• A webserver that supports PHP ( apache.org, lighttpd.net, ect )
• SQL database ( mysql.com, sqlite.org )
• PHP 4.3.3 or above

For this tutorial we will be use a apache.org on a UNIX based web server hosted on dreamhost.com using mysql.com for the database.

Directions

1) Download the latest stable version of PHPBB (We are using PHPBB3.0.1)
2) Extract the archive to your desktop, preserving the file tree. (C:\temp\PHPBB3)
3) Upload the contents of the archive to your web server. (/abluestar.com/temp/phpBB3/)
4) Browse to the installation page

5) Click the install tab at the top of the page. Then click the “Proceed to next step” button.

6) On this page your system will be checked for the basic requirements.

7) Enter your database settings

8 ) Set up the boards administrative user

9) Set Advanced settings. Most of these settings can be left as there defaults or changed later.

10) Create database tables. This page creates the nessary tables on your database for the forum system to store your settings.

11) Final stage, this is just a conformation page that everything has been installed correctly. You can now browse to the install directory.

12) Main page. At this stage you should delete the /install/ directory from the PHPBB3 folder.

13) At this point you can log in to your forums adminitation panle and configure your forums to suit your needs, but this beyond the scope of this tutorial.

This tutorial was written for COMP2920, Steven Smethurst, B.J. Wilson, Dennis Warren

The agreement is being structured much like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) except it will create rules and regulations regarding private copying and copyright laws.
Federal trade agreements do not require parliamentary approval.
The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.
The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.
The agreement proposes any content that may have been copied from a DVD or digital video recorder would be open for scrutiny by officials - even if the content was copied legally.

Source:http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/science/story.html?id=ae997868-220b-4dae-bf4f-47f6fc96ce5e&p=1

Its being structured like a trade agreement so it won’t have to be put in front of Parliament.
What this means is that when you cross the board the boarder guards will have the right to inspect your electronic equipment for IP such as MP3s, DVDs, home movies.

If you data is encrypted (like most of mine) they have the right to ask for the password to your data. If you refuse then you will not be allowed in the country. Just imagine if you are trying to catch a flight, you have 30 mins to get there but they have to make a copy of all your data, inspect if for IP infringements ect.

Most of my music is rips of Legitimate CDs that I own, PODcasts, and Creative Commons music.
How is a boarder guard suppose to identify what I have rightly purchased and what I haven’t?

Fewer and Geist said, once Canada signs the new trade agreement it will be next to impossible to back out of it. In a situation similar to what happened in the Softwood Lumber trade dispute, Canadians could face hefty penalties if it does not comply with ACTA after the agreement has been completed.
Source: http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/science/story.html?id=ae997868-220b-4dae-bf4f-47f6fc96ce5e&p=2

So after the agreements has been put in to place, We could start to see hefty penalties for breaches in the trade agreement.
Like fair use. In Canada it is legal to make personal copies of music that you own for your own purposes

Except that private copying of music is legal in Canada [cb-cda.gc.ca].
the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer’s performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer’s performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.

But this is not true in the USA, so any music that you make legal copies of in Canada are illegal in USA.
Once Canada gets a few heavy fines for breaking the ACTA Parliament will be pushed in to making stronger laws to fight against IP thief and with that goes the need for a warrant to get access logs from our ISP, and other horrible things I don’t even want to think about.

I believe strongly against this, as I believe it only benefits USA companies like the RIAA and the MPAA.
Its also seemed to me that it  attempts to circumvent the democratic process by making it a trade agreement instead of a law that would have to be passed in parliament.

Please please contact your member of parliament and tell them what you think about this.
List of all parliament members

• Vancouver East
• Vancouver center
• White rock, south surrey:

More information

• Copyright deal could toughen rules governing info on iPods, computers
• Slashdot

1. Login to your wordpress blog
2. On the right hand side there is a pugin button, click it
3. Activate Akismet plugin (download here if its not all ready installed)
4. Get a Wordpress API key http://wordpress.com/api-keys/ (its free)
5. Set the Wordpress API key in the Akismet settings page.

99.98 % of spam will automatically be rejected. You should check the spam folder every once in a while to remove false positives.

I use an Scriptable Install System provided by NullSoft called NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System). Ita great system that just plain works. Its free, open source, and can be used for commercial products, Great plugin system, Dead simple for simple things, ect.

The manual has lots of examples and function documentation to help get you started.

Over the last few years of using this program I have created a library of useful little snippets of code. Free free to comment with your own.

Opening a directory

ExecShell “open” ‘”$INSTDIR”‘
BringToFront

Registering/unregistering personal ActiveX files

UnRegDLL “$SYSDIR\spin32.ocx”
RegDLL “$SYSDIR\spin32.ocx”

Checking if a process is running
This uses the FindProcDLL::FindProc plug-in (here also):

StrCpy $1 “mybin.exe”
FindProcDLL::FindProc “$1″
;0 = Process was not found
;1 = Process was found
;605 = Unable to search for process
;606 = Unable to identify system type
;607 = Unsupported OS
;632 = Process name is invalid
StrCmp $R0 0 0 error
File “mybin.exe” ; Can’t use a variable
Goto end
error:
MessageBox MB_OK|MB_ICONSTOP “The application $1 is currently running. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to display the list of running processes.”
Quit
end:

http://xkcd.com/305/

Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.

http://xkcd.com/330/

Rule Social-b. 99.1
If friends spend more then 60 minutes unable to decide what to do, they must default to sexual experimentation.

• 5 lbs oxtail, cut in 2 inch thick rounds
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup cajun seasoning
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 cup port wine
• 1 large Spanish onion, diced
• 1 large carrot
• 3 stalks celery, diced
• 3 italian frying bell pepper, cut into large pieces
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 (10 ounce) can whole tomato
• 1/2 can chipotle chile in adobo
• 1 cup sherry wine
• 3 bay leaf
• 1 bunch thyme, chopped
• salt
• pepper

Directions

1. Coat oxtail pieces with the flour and Cajun seasoning, and sear them in 3 tablespoons oil and remove from the pan.
2. Then degrease the pan and deglaze with port and reserve for later use.
3. In a separate pot caramelize the onions, carrot, celery and peppers, then deglaze with the red wine.
4. Add the oxtails to the vegetables.
5. Continue by adding in the tomatoes, chipotle, sherry, bay leaves and thyme and simmer for approximately 3 hours.
6. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Source: http://www.recipezaar.com/27422

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Source: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Supremely awesome!

You’ve been buying your own booze at the local bar like a sucker ever since you turned 21. But with a stiff shot of science, you can hustle the tipsy into picking up your tab. Try this pub magic to score yourself some free rounds. — William Snyder

Wired has a nice wiki page about some different Bar tricks that you can do to win yourself a free drink or two.  DO Bar Tricks

There is also a great YouTube Video, 1000 different ways to open a beer bottle.

This handy little function strips all the non  alphanumeric character from the string.

function strip_non_alnum($str) {
$str = preg_replace(’~^(\s*)(.*?)(\s*)$~m’, “\\2″, $str);
$str = ereg_replace(”[^[:alnum:] ]”,”",$str);
return $str ;
}

systeminfo | find /i “boot time”

This will show the time when you last rebooted the computer.
If you want to know when you stalled windows on your PC

systeminfo | find /i “install date”

This method will fail on files greater then 4GB, and its slower then other methods but it quick and easy as long as you are not dealing with files greater then 4gb.

FILE * h_file = NULL ;
if( h_file = fopen( h_file, "rb" )  != NULL ) {
	fseek(h_file, 0, SEEK_END);
	long file_size = ftell(h_file);
	fclose( h_file );
}

Internet explore hurts the internet.

A while ago I had this idea, to create a javascript that you install on your website that created a DHTML pop up if you browse the site with internet explorer. The pop up would tell you about the advantages of using other browsers, the disadvantages of using IE, and links to download locations. At the bottom there would be a check box that disables the pop up for a single session. next time they come back the would get the same pop up until they change browsers.

But it looks like someone else beat me too it. http://403day.org/

I would love to install this script on all the websites that I have Dev accesses to but that wouldn’t be nice. So instead I have installed it on my two biggest websites. Funvill.com and Abluestar.com. Funvill.com still pulls in about 20k a month in unique visitors even thou I shut it down about a year ago and Abluestar.com last month got 675k unique visitors thanks to stumbleupon. Between Abluestar.com and Funvill.com 88% of visitors are using Firefox and 11% internet explore. So basically I am throwing away 76k unique visitors in hopes that some of them will upgrade to a new browser.

I HATE INTERNET EXPLORE

Below I have included some hate quotes about internet explore that I enjoyed.

This is why web developers need to stop working around shitty rendering engines en masse. Every single time we - as developers - utilize hacks to make things work in IE where they’re fine in WebKit, Gecko, et. al., we further allow IE to be as bad as it is. Do you honestly think IE would be the POS it is today if the world’s web sites didn’t work in it? Every single time we work around it we provide Microsoft reason not to change anything. Literally. Microsoft’s biggest concern has always been backwards compatibility, and it is that reason that so many of the issues we have now we also had then. It would be one thing if IE7 had shown considerable improvement in this regard, but that simply isn’t the case. IE7 kept some bugs, and swapped out some well-known ones for others, which we now have to hack around, again.
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

MS doesn’t want those fixed. Seriously, they make money by ensuring that other browsers can’t compete because the Web is broken to conform to IE’s modifications of the standards. In this way they lock people into their platform. If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free?
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

IE will never have the same functionality, at least in terms of standards compliance, as other browsers as long as MS is allowed to bundle it without also bundling competitors. The Web will remain broken so long as MS is allowed to abuse their monopoly and numerous other markets will be broken as well, with innovation intentionally slowed for their profit. It is long past time the government enforced the fucking laws against MS, despite all the campaign contributions they made to both parties
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

If browsers actually required that we provide valid code each and every time, things would be a lot better. How many browser security holes can be traced to a parser that would not have been affected had it simply seen invalid input and rejected it? How much simpler and faster would browsers be if they didn’t spend so much time trying to figure out what the person who wrote the code intended? How much more accessible would the content on those pages be to alternative browsers, like screenreaders?
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

We’ve been running for way too long on the mindset that anybody can build web pages. Web browsers were built with this mentality. If I’m integrating with an enterprise XML API, and I feed it bad data, it gives me the proverbial finger. Why should web pages be any different? If you want to put stuff online, learn how to do it properly. The web is a cesspool for precisely this reason, and you can’t blame the standards themselves. The XHTML and CSS specs are by no means perfect, but writing well-formed XHTML and CSS is not difficult. Requiring developers to ensure that every start tag has an end tag, proper nested order, alt tags, and the like, would go a long way toward keeping the architecture of the Internet sustainable. Granted, it might put sites like Myspace out of business, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s not a bad thing.
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

“In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE’s 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU’s Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market.”
Source: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/14/192240

This is the algorithm that I used to determine if a given year is a leap year or not. I’m not sure where I got it from but it comes in handy when creating calendar applications.

if (year % 4 == 0) && ((year % 100 != 0) or (year % 400 == 0))
then leap
else no_leap

I’m sure there are more interesting things about leap years that I don’t know.
I suggest that you check out wikipedia.org page on Leap_year

It often used in schools and big office networks because it allows you to enter in your own black list of sites to block such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. (Note: If your school or work blocks MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube, you might be able to regain access by changing your DNS address to different public DNS server or use a public proxy) It also provides trending stats on what web pages are visited most, how often, how how long each visit was. (Great for network techs)

A side effect of letting you black list domains is that it lets you disable most ad network, by disabling the DNS look up of there domain. (great for people that hate ads)

The service is great, lots of features, flexibility, its free and easy to use. I will probably install on my parents computer BUT!

How does OpenDNS make money?
OpenDNS makes money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo we can fix. OpenDNS will provide additional services on top of its enhanced DNS service, and some of them may cost money. Speedy, reliable DNS will always be free.

When you type in a bad domain instead of returning “domain not found” error message it forwards you to a search page with ads on it, this is how they pay for this service. A lot of my applications that I write rely on this “domain not found” error message. I been getting an increase in the amount of support calls from people that are use this service and because it disables the 404 error and my free utilities. I now have to update some my utilities to support DNS servers that don’t support “domain not found” error message.

Great service but it has one fatal flaw, it tried to make money.

The OpenDNS Name Servers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

Flags: 0×8183 (Standard query response, No such name)

In the second file the OpenDNS log in frame #3 in the DNS section it reads

Flags: 0×8180 (Standard query response, No error)
Answers
xxxxxxxxxxnothere.com: type A, class IN, addr 208.67.217.130

The open DNS server redirected the response from a dead address, my utilities can not longer find out if a domain is valid or not and no longer work. I’m in the process of creating a work around and it shouldn’t be too hard.

I should also mention that I am by no means an expert at DNS stuff. Most of knowledge comes from hacking together what I needed when I needed it.

 Instructions 

1. Right click on the AVG icon in your system tray (bottom right next to the clock)
2. Select “Launch AVG Free Control Center”
3. On the Security status page, you should see a list of items with green check boxes next to them.
4. Right click on “Resident shield” and select “Properties”
5. Un check “Turn on AVG Free resident Shield protectio”
6. Click OK

Remember to re-enable the virus scanner when you are done doing what ever you are doing.

Ingredients

• 16 fluid ounces soup broth (chicken stock)
• 4-5 kaffir lime leaves, shredded
• 4 or 5 2 inch pieces fresh lemongrass, bruised to release flavor
• 1 inch cube (or a bit more) galangal sliced thinly.
• 4 tablespoons fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons lime juice
• 4 oz chicken breast cut into smallish bite sized pieces
• 5 fluid ounces coconut milk
• small red Thai chile peppers, slightly crushed (to taste)
• coriander (cilantro) leaves to garnish.

Note the number of red peppers is a personal choice. It can be as few as half a chilli per diner, to as many as 8-10 per diner, but the dish should retain a balance of flavors and not be overwhelmend by the chili peppers. We suggest about 8-12 chili peppers for this recipe.

Method

Heat the stock, add the lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal, fish sauce, and lime juice. Stir thoroughly, bring to a boil, and add the chicken and coconut milk, then the chile peppers. Bring back to the boil, lower the heat to keep it simmering and cook for about 2 minutes (until the chicken is cooked through). Enjoy!

Not really intended to be eaten as a separate course, we like it served ladled over a bowl of steamed Thai jasmine rice. This quantity serves 4 with other food, but is probably only enough for two if eaten separately.

If you would like to have a decent-tasting tom kha without spending the time to prepare above, we also suggest you try our convenient Tom Ka Paste (click to see description).

• http://www.mininova.org/
• http://www.youtorrent.com/
• http://thepiratebay.org/
• http://isohunt.com/

My favorite bit torrent client is http://www.utorrent.com/

http://www.abluestar.com/dev/sdk/vcsetup.exe

Two of the biggest players in this field are Twitter.com and Tumblr.com. I don’t have any friends on any of these services so I decided to try them both out and see what they are like.

Who is more popular
One for the first things I do when evaluating two different online communities is look at the usage statistics. I usually will go with the bigger company, more stable, more secure, etc. According to compete.com twitter.com seems to have a pretty good lead on tumblr.com.
+1 point for twitter.com

Domains
I like having my own sub domain, personal preference that comes from the old geocities days. tumblr.com provides a sub domain while twitter.com doesn’t.
https://twitter.com/funvill
http://funvill.tumblr.com/
+1 point for tumblr.com

Who owns your data
I am very paranoid about losing my data or a free service that becomes pay and holds my data ransom. These are things that wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Lucky both of these sites allow for offsite backups and YOU OWN your own data. They also let you use your own domain just incase your mini blog ever becomes super popular and you want to switch services.
+3 points for twitter.com
+3 points for tumblr.com

Post categories
tumblr.com lets you identify posts under media types such as text, photos, links, chat, audio, video, etc. twitter.com doesn’t let you set a category.
+1 point for tumblr.com

How do I create a new post
Both allow you to post via IM, Email, Phone, Client, API, etc
+5 points each twitter.com, tumblr.com

Themes look and feel
Twitter.com only gives you the very basic theme options, good enough for most people. Tumblr.com other hand gives you full control while keeping it simple enough for the basic user to use.
+2 points for tumblr.com (I really like there theme viewer/editor)

Conclusion
Go with whatever service has more of your friends on it. There both pretty much the same. If you are the first or a trendsetter I would suggest tumblr.com. I personally will not be switching off of Wordpress myself. Wordpress is just too powerful and I can host it on my own servers (+10,000 points) my own paranoia wont let me use any of these services for too long.

9 points for twitter.com
12 points for tumblr.com

Ask your self how you found the last item you purchased from the internet.
Did you search with Google? What search terms did you use? Did you stumble upon it from someone else’s website? Did you read a review about it and searched Google for it? Put yourself in the mind of your customers, how do you expect them to find you?

The first thing you should do with all new domains is manually add them to the search engines like Google or Yahoo.
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
You can pay some money to be included in there index quickly but I never have found it to be worth the money that charge.

The next thing I would consider is setting up a google/yahoo adwords campaign. Depending on your product or service, you could run a successful adwords campaign on as little as $10 a month. It all depends on what keywords you want to use. Selecting the right keywords is an art in its self, there are plenty of book out there that are just dedicated to helping you select good keywords. Ask yourself this question what search words would your customers use to find you?
http://adwords.google.com/
http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Next is to manually get the word out there. This step can be one of the hardest and most time consuming steps. What you need to do is get people talking about your product, get people to link to your website from theirs, get people to promote your service/product for you because they believe in your product.
- Write a review of your product and add it to a consumer reports website
- Ask a blogger or review site to do a review of your product/service
- Find people Forums/blogs/that are talking about your competitors and suggest your own.
- Create links back to yourself anyway you can.
- Be creative,

Search engine optimization (SEO) and advertisement are huge subjects. I only slimed the service in this article.


// Enables and disables an MFC control by name
void CCILikeChease::EnableControl( int iControl, bool enable )
{
// Enable Control
     CWnd* wnd_control = (CWnd*)( GetDlgItem( iControl ) );
     if( wnd_control != NULL ) {
          wnd_control->EnableWindow( enable ) ;
     }
}
void CNetworkDlg::HideControl( int iControl, bool show )
{
     // Hide the Control
     CWnd* wnd_control = (CWnd*)( GetDlgItem( iControl ) );
     if( wnd_control != NULL ) {
          if( show ) {
               wnd_control->ShowWindow( SW_SHOW ) ;
          } else {
               wnd_control->ShowWindow( SW_HIDE ) ;
          }
     }
}
void CNetworkDlg::MoveControl( int iControl, int top, int left, int sizex, int sizey )
{
     // Move the control
     CWnd* wnd_control = (CWnd*)( GetDlgItem( iControl ) );
     if( wnd_control != NULL ) {
          LPRECT lpRect = new RECT ;
          wnd_control->GetClientRect( lpRect ) ;
          lpRect->top = top;
          lpRect->left = left;
          if( sizex > 0 || sizey > 0 ) {
               lpRect->right = sizex + left ;
               lpRect->bottom = sizey + top;
          }
          wnd_control->MoveWindow( lpRect ) ;
          delete lpRect ;
     }
}


In this article we are going to use the Facebook API to access you and your friends information.
We are then going to display the information a different manner then Facebook.

Requirements

• A Facebook account with the developers application added
• A Facebook application
• A PHP enabled web server with access to the internet.

The Facebook API is well documented.
If you want more information on any of the topics that I touch in this article is suggest that you search the Facebook API.

The Facebook API uses a REST-based interface. This means that Facebook method calls are made over the internet by sending HTTP GET or POST requests to the Facebook REST server.

The Facebook API has about a hundred different methods, in this tourial we will be using;

• friends.get - Returns the identifiers of the current user’s Facebook friends
• friends.areFriends - Returns whether or not each pair of specified users is friends with each other
• users.getInfo - Returns a wide array of user-specific information for each user identifier passed, limited by the view of the current user

For a full list of all the different Facebook methods see the Facebook API documentation

Basic Application Architecture
First we need to understand how the Facebook API works.

1. A browse makes a request
   1. A user browse to the Application canvas page
      Example: http://apps.facebook.com/ninteentwenty/
   2. acebook looks at the call back URL associated with the application.
      Example: http://www.abluestar.com/dev/facebook/
2. Facebook sends a request for that call back page with the user’s ID as a parameter
3. Our webserver gets the request and builds a page for this user.
   1. In the process of building the response page, we can request additional information from Facebook REST server.
4. After the page has been built on our server its sent to Facebook
5. Facebook serves our response to the user.

Most of the time the user doesn’t know that a 3rd party (our server) was involved at all.
The page appears to come from Facebook its self and is embedded in to a page with an iframe.

Make a request using the Facebook API

When starting off a great place to start is the API Test Console. It a tool for building requests for the Facebook Rest server.

You can select the method, call back function (most of the time left blank) and respond type (XML, PHP array, JSON).

For example if we where to select the friends.get method and the a response type of XML.
It would query the Facebook server for a list of all the currents users friends and return the results in XML.

$friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_get();

We could then take two of these UID (aka user IDs) and test to see if they are friends with the friends.areFriends method.
In this case these two people are not friends with each other.

$friends_areFriends = $facebook->api_client->friends_areFriends( ‘508673161′, ‘504464182′ );

The UID is a great method for uniquely identify members but it would be nice to know who 508673161, and 504464182 are.
To do this we can use the method users.getInfo to get information about these users including there names.

$users_getInfo = $facebook->api_client->users_getInfo( ‘732945108′, “name” );

The test console is a great tool for testing out how methods work and how the response is formated.

Now we want to put all three of these functions together to create a application that lists all your friends common friend.
PopFriends.txt demonstrates how to do this.

Requirements:

• Basic knowledge of php
• A webserver running php5 that is open to the internet.
• A facebook account (sign up)

Directions

1. Add the developers application to your facebook account.
   Goto: http://www.facebook.com/developers/ and add the developers application to your account.
   After you sugsefuly add the devlopers application you should see the devlopers icon on the left sidebar.
   
2. Create a new application
   Goto: http://www.facebook.com/developers/editapp.php?new
   1. Application Name: for our app, we put ‘Comp1920 Application’
   2. Check the Terms of service box.
   3. Click on the Optional Fields link - this will bring up more options.
   4. Support E-mail: your Facebook contact email may be filled in automatically, but you might not want to give out your personal email to everyone who adds your app! You do have to put a valid email address that you can check, however.
   5. Callback Url: for our app, we put ‘http://www.abluestar.com/dev/facebook/’ - you should put something DIFFERENT - in particular, you should put the url of the directory on your server where you will create your application.
   6. Canvas Page URL: http://apps.facebook.com/: for our app, we put ‘comp1920tutorialapp’ - you must put in a different name.
   7. Use Iframe: keep this setting.
   8. Application Type: leave this set to ‘Website’.
   9. Can your application be added to Facebook: set to ‘yes’ - this will bring up more options.
   10. TOS URL: you can leave this blank.
   11. Post-Add Url: for our app, we put ‘http://apps.facebook.com/comp1920tutorialapp/’ — you should put something DIFFERENT - in particular, you should put your full canvas page url.
   12. Default FBML: type in the text ‘hello’.
   13. Leave everything else under Installation Options blank.
   14. Side Nav Url: for our app, we put ‘http://apps.facebook.com/comp1920tutorialapp/’ — you should put something DIFFERENT - in particular, you should put your canvas page url here as well.
   15. Leave everything else under Integration Points blank.

   All the fields are described in detail on the Facebook documentations wiki.

   

   We have created out first Facebook application.
   People will be able to add this application to there accounts but it will not do anything just yet.

3. Download the Facebook php5 API
   GoTo: http://developers.facebook.com/resources.php
   Extract it to a folder on your local computer.
4. Create a basic Facebook Application with the Facebook php5 API
   1. Download and edit Step1.php with your faviorite php editor. (I suggest and use notepad++)// Include the Facebook php API
      // The API can be downloaded from facebook’s website. http://developers.facebook.com/resources.php
      require_once ‘facebook.php’;// These are settings that are given to you when you register your applcation.
      // ToDo: Change these setting to match the ones found on your
      // My Applcation page http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php
      $appapikey = ‘[your api_key]’;
      $appsecret = ‘[your secret]’;

      // Create an instance of the facebook class.
      $facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);

      // attempt to log in to facebook
      // We will attemp to log in as the current user,
      $user = $facebook->require_login();

      // The call back url for all internal links on this page.
      $appcallbackurl = ‘http://www.abluestar.com/dev/facebook/’;

      // catch the exception that gets thrown if the cookie has an invalid session_key in it
      try {
      if (!$facebook->api_client->users_isAppAdded()) {
      $facebook->redirect($facebook->get_add_url());
      }
      } catch (Exception $ex) {
      // this will clear cookies for your application and
      // redirect them to a login prompt
      $facebook->set_user(null, null);
      $facebook->redirect($appcallbackurl);
      die( “can not load facebook class” );
      }

      // Print the users number.
      echo “hello $user”;

5. Upload the Facebook API and step1.php to your webserver.
6. Add the application to your own Facebook account to test it.
   Goto your applications Canvas page: http://apps.facebook.com/comp1920tutorialapp/
   Add your application to your Facebook account.
   
7. Browse to your applications page
   Goto your applications Canvas page: http://apps.facebook.com/comp1920tutorialapp/
   

You have made your first working Facebook Application.
In the next article we will be adding some functionality to the application to make it useful and describing how it all works.

Finely!