The Flow of Consciousness

In a completely unscientific Twitter and Facebook poll last night, I asked the question:

PGH or PIT? How to YOU abbreviate Pittsburgh?

Boring Pittsburgh helped out on Facebook, too. @pghtweetup assisted, as well.

The count is in:

60 PGH
4 PIT
2 YNZ
1 YINZ

Many were quick to point out that PIT is Pittsburgh International Airport’s code, and that PIT generally refers to the airport when used in context.

Others reminded that professional sports broadcasts generally use PIT. This data shows that perhaps those outlets should be using PGH!

Thanks to all who participated! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

Let’s say you’re on an event page on Facebook and you want to select all of your friends. Click on “Invite People to Come” and you’ll see the friend selection dialog pop up. Once it’s up, copy and paste this little Javascript gem into the URL bar of your browser:

This will select everyone. Be warned, though, that if you computer is slow or you have a lot of friends, it could take a while. It took about a second on my MacBook Pro with a 2.53 GHz Core2Duo.

I really admire Facebook’s Friend Suggestions feature. It has on rare occasion shown someone to whom I’d really like to connect. Most of the time, though, it shows people who I don’t know at all and have maybe one mutual friend. So, it’s largely useless to me.

However, being the often mindless user, when I see a suggestion that may be relevant to my interests, I do visit the full friend suggestion page and see if there are any others. Rarely am I presented with anyone to whom I find a dreadful desire to connect. I still feel obligated to click that damned little [X] as if to say, “I don’t know this person.” Unfortunately, I have to repeat this approximately 25 times in order to full expunge this list of people.

So, I decided to write a little script which takes care of clicking that button for me. Navigate to the Find Friends page on Facebook and execute this script in your Firebug console. Or, prefix it with javascript: and execute it in the URL bar.

d = document.getElementsByClassName("fg_action_hide"); for (var i in d){ d[i].onclick() }

The first part gets an array (a list) of all of the clickable elements with that class, the class used to denote the [X]. The next part loops over them and executes each’s onclick() function just like as if you’d clicked it yourself.

Please note that I tested this ONLY on Firefox and Chromium, but it should work on any modern browser (read: anything but IE).

Tonight, I attended a rally for Dr. Ron Paul, the only true fiscal conservative—and libertarian— running for president. It was held at University of Pittsburgh’s Bellefield Hall.

Dr. Paul urged supporters to continue to fight to restore our liberties and protect the constitution. It was incredible to actually hear him in person and shake his hand afterward. He has the aura of benevolent power around him; a certain kind of celebrity which rockstars and models could only dream of.

When I told him that I hope to join him in Congress in 2010 or 2012, he said, “Hehe, alright. I hope to see you.” With that, I’m even more wanting to get into politics.

He may not win the Republican nomination, but he’s done much more than simply run for the presidency. He’s shifting the thinking of a whole new generation of Americans and given Americans who have been around for a while a new hope with an examination of how old ideas can be made new. I look at what I’ve learned in the past six or seven months as a stalwart Paul supporter—if kids were taught what I now know in schools, we’d not be in this mess we’re in and we’d have a Congress that follows the constitution and the rule of law.

Check out my Facebook gallery of pictures from the rally.

I will post videos as soon as Revver or YouTube finishes with them and I get a chance to post them. I’ll also post a picture of myself with the Congressman when it arrives from the lovely lass who took it.

Biggest win of the evening: Ron Paul signed my voter registration card

I’ve spent a few hours throughout the past few days attempting to get a working Java browser plugin to work on Rahab, which is my primary desktop running Ubuntu Gutsy amd64. It’s well-known that only the icedtea package provides a plugin that is at least java5-compliant. However, there’s a significant bug in it. There’s another version of Java that provides a java-1.4.2 plugin, but I need the newer one in order to upload my pictures to Facebook.

I’ve tried lots of things. I tried installing icedtea from the repos. It doesn’t work at all. I tried recompiling it from the repo source—some applets will load, but the one I really need (Facebook) will not. I tried installing a newer build from a developer’s stash, and it works better than my build (as it’s based on newer code from icedtea), but it still doesn’t load the Facebook photo applet.

I tried downloading Sun’s java-7 beta JDK package, but there’s not a plugin in it, either.

So, for now, I’m SOL. It looks like I’ll be using another computer running Ubuntu i386 or the Windows partition on Rahab to upload my photos.

Dear Lazyweb: any suggestions on how I can get ~400 pictures onto Facebook without uploading unmodified originals five at a time?

I’ve created a Facebook group for people who switched party affiliations to vote for Ron Paul.

Many states have closed primaries, and we, the members of this group, have switched our political affiliation in order to support Ron Paul. We retain our same beliefs, but feel that this clerical change is necessary in order to support the best candidate running for office.

If you want to do the same, check out my post from a few weeks ago on HOWTO Become a Republican in order to vote for Ron Paul in the PA Primaries.

If you’re one of those people who thinks that switching parties for this reason is bad, bugger off. The system is flawed, but, fortunately, it just takes a little bit of paperwork to be able to Do The Right Thing™.

I’ve been looking for a reason to mess around with the Facebook Developer API, and I’ve written a small application used to display an OpenPGP-compliant key id and fingerprint on a Facebook profile.

Check out my OpenPGP Key Facebook application.