Facebook: Infinite Session Keys

Facebook infinite session keys provide a great way for developers to write external applications and allow them to interface with your Facebook applications.

This is particularly useful when you need to write a batch / cron job that requires access to the Facebook API.

I found the online documentation to be pretty cryptic, so I thought I would document the steps involved to set this up:

1. Generate a one time code by accessing the following URL in a browser: http://www.facebook.com/code_gen.php?v=1.0&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY
   
   
2. Use the generated code instead of the auth_token that is normally passed to the auth.getSession.
   
   
3. The session returned from this call is known as your "Infinite Session Key" and can be used to setup in any external program. e.g.
   
   PHP:
   
   $facebook = new Facebook($api_key, $secret);
   $facebook->set_user($myuid, $infkey);
   
   Java:
   
   FacebookRestClient facebookRestClient = new FacebookRestClient(apiKey, secretKey);
   facebookRestClient.auth_getSession(oneTimeCode); // get infinite session using the one time code
   
   
4. That's it! Your external program should now be able to access the Facebook API just as if it was running inside Facebook.
   
   

More Australian Broadband Woes

Well just when I thought I was one step closer to obtaining my goal of "higher" speed broadband, I discover that Australia does not have the backbone capacity to handle the demand.

Read Story

Seems that unless the Australian government is prepared to invest a similar amount in broadband infrastructure we could very well end up with network gridlock.

Will Australia Get Its Fibre?

Back in March of this year the Australian Labor Party said it would invest AU$4.7 billion in a new national fibre broadband network if it won the federal election.

It's now been two days since the ALP was voted into government and a lot of Australians (including myself) are eagerly waiting to see if this promise is kept. The plan was to roll-out fibre to the node(FTTN) which should provide broadband speeds of a minimum of 12Mbps to 98 percent of Australian population which is 4 times what I get today out of my ADSL2 connection.

Deciding to Blog

After years of finding excuses not the blog, I have finally decided that it is probably a good thing. At a minimum it should allow me to brain dump my thoughts, and purge the cache from time to time.

So if you are into VoIP, Facebook and most things technical then be sure to drop in from time to time.