http://openid.net/add-openid/add-getting-started/

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Here are just a few of the benefits that come from allowing your users to register and login to your site with an OpenID that they already have.
Increase registration and conversion rates

Lengthy registration forms pose a major barrier to sign up and conversion for web users. OpenID simplifies the registration process by allowing users to sign in with an existing OpenID account in a single click, accelerating the sign up process and making long registration forms a thing of the past. Because users equipped with an OpenID can sign in to websites using an existing account, they also do not need to spend time creating a website-specific username or password at your site. In addition, OpenID eliminates the need to direct a new user away from your site to verify an email address, thus removing a fundamental obstacle to conversion.
Access rich user profile data

Accepting OpenIDs gives access to a rich set of user data that would otherwise require the completion of lengthy registration forms to obtain. Many OpenID providers collect and share a wide range of demographic information, including name, date of birth, location, gender and an email address. This data allows you to optimize your marketing efforts and tailor your website to better target the needs of your core audience.
Reduce customer care and password recovery costs

With OpenID, visitors to your site use an existing portable identity to sign in to your site. Because these users authenticate against an existing identity provider, there is no need to store passwords and invest valuable time and resources into expensive account and password recovery. This frees you to focus on the core functions of your web application and achieve greater customer satisfaction by eliminating frustrations associated with forgotten passwords.
Link your site to the social web

OpenID is the building block for several other open standards that allow you to enrich the experience for your users and connect your site to the social web. Open source protocols such as Portable Contacts can be used with OpenID to offer your site access to a user’s address book and friends lists. Activity Streams can be implemented on top of OpenID to allow users who authenticate with an OpenID to publish information from your site to their social networks, thereby extending your reach and projecting your brand to the social web.

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Becky – Drive test


Becky – Dublin zoo


Becky demolition


Becky crane hire


Becky spare tyre


Becky orange order


Becky mariah


Becky wants to be a hairdresser


Becky wants to be a footballers wife

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The following article has been reproduced by kind permission of the author, Rick Newkirk. Rick is the founder and Head Coach of the St. Louis Comets AAU Girl’s Basketball Club.

Mental Attitude

What makes a good player great? Sound basics? Size? Strength? Shooting ability? Speed? I believe it is Attitude – the ability to except situations and make them work in their favour. Losers never seem to know why they lose. They blame the referees for bad calls, the gym conditions, the court surface, their teammates, etc. Winners on the other hand play above the problems. A wise man once said, “It is not what life hands us, but what we do about it”. I was once asked, what is the most important measurement on a basketball court? Without a doubt, it is the six inches between your ears. Winning and losing comes down to who can stay focused. Great players never let their opponent or outside conditions control their game. They are mentally tough, mentally conditioned. It is easy to get frustrated when pressure and mistakes happen. The more you dwell on it, the more mistakes you will make. I cannot count the times I have seen a player get the ball stolen and then commit a personal foul because they were out of control, or becoming outraged because someone was talking about their ancestors. If an opponent can pull you out of your game, who wins? Once you are mad, you are though! Referee calls, turnovers, Fouls, missed lay ups, are like the Civil War. Once they happen, they become HISTORY!

Sportsmanship

Show sportsmanship! It is easy to be a good winner, but it takes real class to hold your head up after a tough loss. Great players never take losing well. If you gave 110% during the game, and you were beaten, there is no shame in having lost. Give credit to the team who played better on that given day. Learn from it and let it go. The respect you will gain from opponents and fans on both sides are well worth it.

Conditioning

Stay in shape! A hero is no braver than the ordinary person is, but they are braver five minutes longer. Spend as much time caring for your body as you put into your game. Eat well; get the correct amount of rest, run three times a week, most of all stay away from drugs and alcohol. Working out on your own is not easy, but as Coach Lombardi said, fatigue makes cowards of us all. To lose a contest because you run out of gas in the fourth quarter is unforgivable. If you lose a contest, make sure it was because they were better players, not in better shape.

Until the fat lady sings

Never give up! Winners never quit. “The person who wins may have been counted out several times, but they did not hear the referee” (Jansen). Finding a way to win is the mark of a great team. I have watched as our team made up nine points in ten seconds. Nothing is impossible when you believe. “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle” (A. Lincoln). You will be surprised what can happen when you never give up.

Commitment and hard work

Work hard and be aggressive. Never be out hustled or out fought. The team who is persistent usually comes out on top. Show enthusiasm! Nothing is ever hard work, unless you would rather be doing something else. Make a commitment to excel you never stop improving. When things you did yesterday still look big to you today, you have not done much today. There is no substitute for practice. Do not counts the days…..make each day count! The only person that keeps you on the bench and from being a starter…..is you!

Teammates

Strong players criticize themselves, not their teammates. Everyone has room for improvement no matter what the level of play, and talking about someone else’s short comings never helps improve your game. Take an interest in your squad and friendships will grow along with the success of the team. Remember, there is no “I” in team. It takes five players working together to become successful.

Leadership

Never be afraid to take charge. When a teammate is down, pick them up with some encouragement and get them back on track. At practice be the first one on court and the last one to leave. Talk on the court, direct traffic, let people know when someone is open or when there is a flaw in the defence. What you see plain as day may be hard for someone else to see. Never take any opponent for granted, respect everyone’s ability. Be a player who says “can” not “cannot”. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Be a total player!

Final Thoughts

Play hard! But never take yourself so serious that you forget to smell the roses. Enjoy the game, many lessons about life are taught from your adventures on the hardwood. Take what it has to give you and apply it to what life throws your way. Remember, we cannot always control what goes on outside, but we can control what goes on inside. Be mentally tough, Never let what happens during a contest take you out of your game. Concentrate on what is important, experience, learn, be the best you can, and the best will come back to you. Champions are made, never born. Ability can get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

source: http://www.brianmac.co.uk/winedge.htm

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September 15th, 2007 by George Notaras

The last days I needed to download a bunch of medical videos which have been uploaded to RapidShare by many other people. Although RapidShare (and all the other 1-click file-hosting services) is very convenient, it has some strict rules for free accounts, for example a guest has to wait for 120 seconds per 1 MB of downloaded data and – to make it worse – no download managers are allowed. Since “waiting” is not a game I like and since I intended to use either wget or curl to download the files, I decided to sign up for a RapidShare Premium account and then figure out how to use the aforementioned tools. Fortunately, registered users are permitted to use download managers and, as you will read in the following article, the Linux command line downloaders work flawlessly with a Premier account.
Theory

Rapidshare uses cookie-based authentication. This means that every time you log into the service, a cookie containing information which identifies you as a registered user is stored in your browser’s cookie cache. Both wget and curl support saving and loading cookies, so before using them to download any files, you should save such a cookie. Having done this, then the only required action in order download from RapidShare is to load the cookie, so that wget or curl can use it to authenticate you on the RapidShare server. This is pretty much the same you would do with a graphical download manager. The difference now is that you do it on the command line.

Below you will find examples about how to perform these actions using both wget and curl.

IMPORTANT: Please note that in order to use these command-line utilities or any other download managers with RapidShare, you will have to check the Direct Downloads option in your account’s options page.
Save your RapidShare Premium Account Cookie

Saving your RapidShare cookie is a procedure that needs to be done once.

The login page is located at:

https://ssl.rapidshare.com/cgi-bin/premiumzone.cgi

The login form requires two fields: login and password. These are pretty self-explanatory.

In the following examples, the RapidShare username is shown as USERNAME and the password as PASSWORD.
Using wget

In order to save your cookie using wget, run the following:

wget \
–save-cookies ~/.cookies/rapidshare \
–post-data “login=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD” \
-O – \
https://ssl.rapidshare.com/cgi-bin/premiumzone.cgi \
> /dev/null

–save-cookies : Saves the cookie to a file called rapidshare under the ~/.cookies directory (let’s assume that you store your cookies there)
–post-data : is the POST payload of the request. In other words it contains the data you would enter in the login form.
-O – : downloads the HTML data to the standard output. Since the above command is run only in order to obtain the cookie, this option prints the HTML data to stdout (Standard Output) and then discards it by redirecting stdout to /dev/null. If you don’t do this, wget will save the HTML data in a file called premiumzone.cgi in the current directory. This is just the Rapidshare HTML page, which is absolutely not needed.
Using curl

In order to save your cookie using curl, run the following:

curl \
–cookie-jar ~/.cookies/rapidshare \
–data “login=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD” \
https://ssl.rapidshare.com/cgi-bin/premiumzone.cgi \
> /dev/null

–cookie-jar : Saves the cookie to a file called rapidshare under the ~/.cookies directory (it has been assumed previously that cookies are stored there)
–data : contains the data you would enter in the login form.
Curl prints the downloaded page data to stdout by default. This is discarded by sending it to /dev/null.
Download files using your RapidShare Premium Account Cookie

Having saved your cookie, downloading files from RapidShare is as easy as telling wget/curl to load the cookie everytime you use them to download a file.
Downloading with wget

In order to download a file with wget, run the following:

wget -c –load-cookies ~/.cookies/rapidshare

-c : this is used in order to resume downloading of the file if it already exists in the current directory and is incomplete.
–load-cookies : loads your cookie.
Downloading with curl

In the same manner, in order to download a file with curl, run the following:

curl -L -O –cookie ~/.cookies/rapidshare

-L : Follows all redirections until the final destination page is found. This switch is almost always required as curl won’t follow redirects by default (read about how to check the server http headers with curl).
-O : By using this switch you instruct curl to save the downloaded data to a file in the current directory. The filename of the remote file is used. This switch is also required or else curl will print the data to stdout, which is something you won’t probably like.
–cookie : loads your Rapidshare account’s cookie.
Setting up a Download Server

Although most users would be satisfied with the above, I wouldn’t be surprised if you would want to go a bit further and try to setup a little service for your downloading pleasure. Here is a very primitive implementation of such a service. All you will need is standard command line tools.

This primitive server consists of the following:

1. A named pipe, called “dlbasket“. You will feed the server with URLs through this pipe. Another approach would be to use a listening TCP socket with NetCat.
2. A script, which, among others, contains the main server loop. This loop reads one URL at a time from dlbasket and starts a wget/curl process in order to download the file. If dlbasket is empty, the server should just stay there waiting.

So, in short, the service would be the following:

cat <> dlbasket | ( while … done )

All credit for the “cat <> dlbasket |” magic goes to Zart, who kindly helped me out at the #fedora IRC channel.

So, let’s create that service. The following assume that a user named “downloader” exists in the system and the home directory is /var/lib/downloader/. Of course you can set this up as you like, but make sure you adjust the following commands and the script’s configuration options accordingly.

First, create the named pipe:

mkfifo -m 0700 /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

If it does not exist, create a bin directory in the user’s home:

mkdir -p /var/lib/downloader/bin

Also, create a directory where the downloaded files will be saved:

mkdir -p /var/lib/downloader/downloads

The following is a quick and dirty script I wrote which actually implements the service. Save it as rsgetd.sh inside the user’s bin directory:

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# rsgetd.sh – Download Service

# Version 0.2

# Copyright (C) 2007 George Notaras (http://www.g-loaded.eu/)
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
# published by the Free Software Foundation.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.

# Special thanks to ‘Zart’ from the #fedora channel on FreeNode

# CONFIG START
HOMEDIR=”/var/lib/downloader”
DLBASKET=”$HOMEDIR/dlbasket”
DLDIR=”$HOMEDIR/downloads/”
LOGFILE=”$HOMEDIR/.downloads_log”
CACHEFILE=”$HOMEDIR/.downloads_cache”
LIMIT=”25k”
WGETBIN=”/usr/bin/wget”
# Rapidshare Login Cookie
RSCOOKIE=”$HOMEDIR/cookies/.rapidshare”
# CONFIG END

DATETIME=”`date ‘+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S’`”

cat <> $DLBASKET | (
while read url ; do
# First, check the cache if the file has been already downloaded
if [ -f "$CACHEFILE" -a -n $(grep -i $(basename $url) "$CACHEFILE") ] ; then
echo “$DATETIME File exists in cache. Already downloaded – Skipping: $url” >> $LOGFILE
else
echo “$DATETIME Starting with rate $LIMIT/s: $url” >> $LOGFILE
if [ $(expr match "$url" '[rapidshare.com]‘) = 1 ] ; then
# If it is a Rapidshare.com link, load the RS cookie
echo “RAPIDSHARE LINK”
$WGETBIN -c –limit-rate=$LIMIT –directory-prefix=$DLDIR –load-cookies $RSCOOKIE $url
else
$WGETBIN -c –limit-rate=$LIMIT –directory-prefix=$DLDIR $url
fi
echo “$DATETIME Finished: $url” >> $LOGFILE
echo $url >> $CACHEFILE
fi
done )

exit 0

As you might have already noticed, two extra files are created inside the home directory: .downloads_cache and .downloads_log. The first contains a list of all the urls that have been downloaded. Each new download is checked against this list, so that the particular URL is not processed if the file has already been downloaded. The latter file is a usual logfile stating the start and end times of each download. Feel free to adjust the script to your needs.

Here is some info about how you should start the service:

-1- You can simply start the script as a background process and then feed URLs to it. For example:

rsgetd.sh &
echo “” > /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

-2- Use screen in order to run the script in the background but still be able to see its output by connecting to a screen session. Although this is not a screen howto, here is an example:

Create a new screen session and attach to it:

screen -S rs_downloads

While being in the session, run rsgetd.sh

rsgetd.sh

From another terminal feed the download basket (dlbasket) with urls:

echo “” > /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket
cat url_list.txt > /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

Watch the files in the screen window as they are being downloaded.

Detach from the screen session by hitting the following:

Ctrl-a d

Re-attach to the session by running:

screen -r

Note that you do not need to be attached to the screen session in order to add URLs.
Feeding the basket with URLs remotely

Assuming that a SSH server is running on the machine that runs rsgetd.sh, you can feed URLs to it by running the following from a remote machine:

ssh downloader@server.example.org cat \> /var/lib/downloader/dlbasket

Note that the > needs to be escaped so that it is considered as part of the command that will be executed on the remote server.

Now, feel free to add as many URLs as you like. After you hit the [Enter] key the url will be added to the download queue. When you are finished, just press Ctrl-D to end the URL submission.
Conclusion

This article provides all the information you need in order to use wget or curl to download files from your RapidShare Premium account. Also, information on how to set up a service that will assist you in order to commence downloads on your home server from a remote location has been covered.

The same information applies in all cases that wget and curl need to be used with websites that use cookie-based authentication.

source: http://www.g-loaded.eu/2007/09/15/use-wget-or-curl-to-download-from-rapidshare-premium/

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