Over at the Tucows Developer Blog, I have yet another installment in my series of articles on developing Facebook Applications using their PHP 5 client library. In this article, I look at the FacebookRestClient class’ groups_getMembers method.
Remember those articles from a couple of weeks back — the ones about QSOL’s ads for their servers with the tagline “Don’t feel bad. Our servers won’t go down on you either”? Valleywag has picked up the story in an article titled A blowjob ad reappears in Linux Journal.
The article concludes with this observation:
Obviously QSol ran the ad to titillate and shock, and get talked about — and from that perspective, the company has succeeded. But then there’s the quality of the ad itself. Leave aside the broken promises, and the ad’s tiresome execution. Why would you want to buy servers from a company that clearly hasn’t had a new idea in seven years?
Having been made suspicious by the large number of “5-star” ratings his software got from download sites, Andy Brice of Successful Software decided to run a little experiment. He took a text file with these words:
This software does nothing.
It doesn’t even run.
I was created as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it got.
See the results of the experiment at:
He gave the file an .exe extension and gave it the asking-to-be-caught name “awardmestars”. He also included a PAD file — that’s “Portable Application Decsription”, a standard for describing software in the shareware industry — that clearly indicated that the software did nothing at all.
In spite of all the warnings he provided, plus the fact that it was a non-functional non-application, he still managed to rack up these 16 awards:
As regular readers of this blog know, I work for Tucows, whose original business was being a place that reviewed and hosted downloadable shareware.
Would we have given Andy Brice’s non-application an award? No. Why?
An award from Tucows is not given lightly. In fact, just to make it on to our site, a software title needs to maintain a minimum three cow rating, and it needs to generate downloads. Titles that do not maintain an appropriate level of popularity are removed from the library on our site.
We offer a truly “best of” collection of software. One of team members reviews every single piece of software that is submitted. In fact, over 70% of the submissions to Tucows are rejected because they fail to meet our stringent ratings criteria. In a nutshell, for Windows applications (we have different rating scales for Mac/Linux/Games, etc.), Tucows uses a 56-point rating scale with a large proportion of the rating based on usability (21 points), we allot up to 14 points for Help, Documentation and Support, 10 points for program enhancements, and 11 points for the opinion of the reviewer. The Tucows rating guide is so standardized, that a third-party site provides a “Tucows Rating Calculator” where software authors can analyze their title to get an idea of how it would rate on Tucows.
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Welcome to the Herd, Bill!
I’ve known Bill Sweetman since the mid-nineties, back when I worked at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, so I was very pleased to find out that Tucows — the company where I hold the title of Technical Evangelist — has hired him as General Manager of our domain name portfolio.
Bill writes:
I’m going to be leading the charge to further monetize that portfolio as well as develop new products and services related to the portfolio. Translation: I’m going to be performing Domain Name Karate as a full-time job!
When presented with the opportunity to turn my long-held passion for domain names into a full-time gig, I leaped at the chance. This was truly one of those ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunities’ and I knew I’d regret turning it down. Plus, I get to work again with Ken Schafer and a great team of people who are equally passionate about the domain name space.
It’s good to have you on the team, Bill. Welcome to the herd!
Over at the Tucows Developer Blog, I have another installment in my series of articles on developing Facebook Apps in PHP: Using the FacebookRestClient Class’ “Group” Methods, Part 1.
My friend Miss Fipi Lele sent me a scan from The Usborne Guide to Computer and Video Games, a children’s book published in 1982:
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
I was quite impressed with how many predictions the book got right. Here are some excerpts from the “Videogames in the future” section of the book, followed by examples of the predictions coming true.
Here’s what the Guide had to say about “TV games” in which you can take part in battles. Remember, this was published when the Atari 2600 (which was still called the Atari VCS — short for “Video Computer System”) and the Mattel Intellivision were established consoles and the Colecovision had just been released:
A TV game with a very large memory will be able to reconstruct detailed pictures of say, the Battle of Waterloo or a space battle, and the players will be able to control far more of the details in the picture than they can today.
Score one point for the Guide. Although the game History Channel: Civil War got poor ratings, it fulfills the prediction. Here’s a screenshot:
Here’s the Guide on sports games:
In TV sports games you will probably be able to control each of your team members individually. These games will also have electronically synthesized voices and the referee will tell you when you are offside or given a free kick.
Score another point for the Guide. Here’s FIFA Soccer 2008:
The Guide has this to say about multiplayer games:
At present, most computer games are for only one or two players. More powerful computers though, will be able to cope with instructions from a number of people playing at the same time, either as teams against each other, or against the computer.
Another point for the guide! Case in point: a video of gameplay from the Halo 3 multiplayer beta…
Video duration: 9 minutes, 48 seconds.
And finally, here’s what the Guide predicts for handheld games:
Hand-held electronic games will still have liquid-crystal displays, but they will probably be in full colour and will be as detailed and realistic as pictures for a TV programme today.
Yet another point for the Guide: here’s Burnout Dominator for the PSP…
Late-Breaking Update
Serves me right for not Googling first: the Level Up blog at Sun has a complete set of scans of the book. Check it out!
By now, you’ve probably heard that for a brief period, a server configuration error caused some Facebook users to see its PHP code rather than the familiar Facebook pages that the code was supposed to render.
How the Code Got Out There
Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests asked the question “Could a server misconfiguration send out the whole source code in its entirety when you put in the Facebook URL?”
It seems strange that such a simple thing could give away your source, but as anyone who’s set up PHP on a server a number of times will tell you, it can happen.
When you visit a static HTML page — that’s a plain old HTML page that wasn’t generated by some server-side script written in PHP or any number of programming languages — the web server simply hands over the contents of the page (the HTML) over to your browser. Your browser renders the HTML as a web page:
The opposite of a static page is a dynamic one, in which the content is generated on the fly — the server isn’t just handing over the contents of a file. Instead, it calls on some program to cull data from one or more sources and then use that data to assemble some HTML which is then sent to your computer:
What happens when the server is configured incorrectly in such a way that the code for a dynamic page never gets sent through the code interpreter? One common result is that the code gets sent directly to the user. Instead of seeing the result of running the code, the user ends up seeing the code itself. That’s what seems to have happened with Facebook.