The blog of Matthew A. Smith and Michael Chappell, on topics from A to Z

Yes, it’s now one day into my spring break. What am I doing? Why, staying in Macon and spending all my money on the BMW!! It’s time for the 100,000 mile overhaul, so I will be busy in the garage (once my parts arrive). If you’re in Macon, be sure to call!

Shortly after midnight on Saturday (2/16/2008) morning, my grandmother passed away. I will soon write a longer piece on this, but for now I’m just posting her obituary.

Martha Blalock Hawkins Jolley

MACON - After a 2 year battle with Parkinson’s disease, Martha Blalock Hawkins Jolley, 76. of Macon, passed away at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Sally and Terry Theus. Visitation services will be held Monday, February 18, at 2:30 p.m. (EST) in the chapel of Hart’s Mortuary in Macon, GA with a Memorial Service immediately following at 4:00 p.m. (EST). A graveside service will be held Tuesday, February 19, 1:30 p.m. (CST) at Hillcrest Cemetery in Boaz, AL.

Mrs. Jolley was a member of the Baptist faith, she taught Sunday School and hosted a weekly Radio Bible Hour for Second Baptist Church in Warner Robins during the 1960’s and 70’s. She was a member of Women’s Aglow and hosted a Bible study at the Villas in Macon for several years. Born to Omer L. Blalock and Sally Mae Johnson, she was predeceased by her husband, Robert Hawkins, 5 sisters and one brother.

She is survived by her husband, Rev. Donald Jolley, son Jim (Tammy) Hawkins of Macon, GA, daughters and sons-in-law, Sandra (Judd) Smith of Macon, GA, Sally (Terry) Theus of Macon, GA, 9 grandsons and 2 granddaughters, sisters, Betty Otinger of Boaz, AL, Johnie Lynch of Huntsville, AL, Chessie Mason of Guntersville, AL, numerous nieces and nephews.

Hart’s Mortuary and Crematory in charge of arrangements.

The pictures and video that will be displayed at the visitation are the same ones that I worked with on the “family photo project.”

Over the next few days I’ll be (finally) working on the gallery to get it in shipshape (if you haven’t noticed the complete mess that it has been since summer). You may notice the gallery link is missing. When it reappears, hopefully things will look much nicer!! Stay tuned…

In other news, my brother bought something interesting…

A few days back, I mentioned that I wanted to query my Facebook social graph in order to pull out a list of my friends’ websites. Why? To put the in my blog roll. Anyway, I was doing a little light reading today and came across some interesting posts centering around a topic I’ve read of before (but somehow forgot to put two and two together): The Open-ness of our social graphs.

Apparently the desire to get some data out of Facebook and into other apps has been around for a while. In fact, Google has created an open graph API to address just such a problem, and there are several other people who have been trying to devise a solution.

Robert Scoble, a rather well known technologist (for lack of another term), recently had his facebook account shut down for attempting to collect and export his social graph to another service. In a later post on his site, an interesting point is made during an interview with Mark Zuckerberg:

They are still thinking about data portability and just how that will work to both protect users as well as to encourage new kinds of applications to be built. He explained to me that the kind of script that I was running is often used by spammers to send tons of messages to users and that’s something they are really working to protect their users against. On the other hand, he understood the kinds of apps that I wanted to have as a user. When Rosedale was sitting with us, I pointed out that I’d love to see when Facebook users are active on Second Life. That would require opening up the social graph to new kinds of data sharing that Facebook isn’t yet allowing. But he didn’t yet have answers as to just what Facebook will allow in the future.

Perhaps my Facebook Query dream will become a reality eventually. Of course there’s much more I want to do with Facebook… I think it would be awesome if the “social graph” could be pulled out and tied into other sites (imagine: you are logged into Facebook and you can visit my site, leaving a comment using your Facebook identity. Then it could show up in your feed that you left a comment here, just as if you left one on someone’s page… or all sorts of other cool stuff!)

Ladies and gentlemen, today I would like to direct your attention to the new link in the right side bar entitled “Programs and Scripts.” This page will contain handy bits of code developed by myself (or any of my esteemed colleagues) and presented here for your programming gratification!

The inaugural bit of code available here is called “wmiRegistryTools.js” and provides JavaScript methods (only for use in WSH) to interact with the WMI interface. The library is probably only of interest to people involved in network administration because it simplifies scripted registry edits. The cool part is that you can perform these edits on remote computers…

Anyway, keep an eye on the programming pages. I’ll be adding scraps and bits of useful code (or not so useful code) over time, and just maybe you’ll find something that will help you out or make life easier.

Because it’s philosophically correct (and I’m always endorsing open source), all my code is release under the GPL so you are free to use, reuse, and modify it. Of course if you find anything there helpful, I’d love to know (you know, to stoke my ego and such)!

Just to throw out a little plug for Adam and myself, we’re “spinnin’ on the ones and twos” this Friday at the Rookery for downtown Macon’s monthly “First Friday” event. We’ll be playing a smooth blend of rock, rap, old(ish) stuff, and whatever else pleases our auditory palette.

It should go down like a smooth vodka on the rocks (some may argue that it’s “Mr. B’s” on the rocks, but whatever).

We’ll be experimenting with our “sound” (when are we not?) and hopefully trying out some new visual stuff. If everything works out as planned, we’ll have some audio posted up here later on for your listening pleasure. We plan on starting the evening off with some chill stuff, playing around a bit and just having a good time. As the night progresses, we’ll probably move more toward rap and bigger beats to keep the party moving (or so we hope).

Anyway, we’d love it if you came out and chilled with us. We’ll be out there from 10pm-2am and the cover is $3, but if you arrive before 11:30 armed with this flyer (just print it) you will get in for free.

But I can’t. Let me explain.

Facebook offers a developer API that allows programmers to use the data stored by Facebook. One of the neat features is called “Facebook Query Language,” and allows you to execute queries on the data provided by Facebook, as if it were a giant database (oh, wait, it is). Earlier this afternoon I was wishing I could gather a list of all my friends and their website URLs (if any). Since many of my friends are on Facebook, I figured that Facebook would be a great place to start. But who wants to click through 600+ Facebook profiles copying down website addresses??? Not I … but that does sound like a great task for your average computer program, right?

Since the normal Facebook interface does not allow you to perform “report” style searches on your friend list, I jumped over to the developer docs. Sure enough, the query language can retrieve all sorts of cool information through the API - but not a friend’s website! In fact, no contact information is available through the API (I’m assuming this is for security purposes). Unfortunately this means that my nifty idea is moot… no automatically updating phone book, list of friend urls, etc is possible.

I’m sad.

This has been a busy but great week. I’ll be back with more detail on some of these events, but I gave a presentation last night (which went really well, and the video and other information will be online soon), helped a friend assemble a new computer today, I’ve been in the gym three days this week (and tomorrow will be the fourth - getting back into shape), I’ve done a little homework (love only taking 12 hours of class), and I’ve been working a few hours a day to boot!

Speaking of work, I’ve been developing some Windows scripts to help with system administration. They may be simple but I think that they are super-cool! I’ve been learning to work with WMI through JScript (not because I love WSH or JScript or anything, but it’s built into all the machines I manage and JScript looks more like the languages I’m familiar with than VBScript… read this for some other reasons) and it allows me to do some really cool things. The coolest part is that these functions can be executed against either a local machine or a remote machine… which means I could write some scripts that scan the network and create reports of certain configuration settings on all the machines that are found. I’ll be writing more on this later, and probably create a site section dedicated to these code snippets I’ve been creating (they are reusable and can be inserted into many scripts).

Ps, Thank You Kenneth

On a side note, thanks Kenneth for all your comments! If you don’t know, I love receiving comments on my posts (and I reply to them) because it reminds me that people actually read this stuff! It’s fun to have a little dialog on the website from time to time… so if you’re feeling game, don’t hesitate to drop a line - even if it’s just to say hi!