Obtain the information about a bitcoin address I have a bitcoin address. How do I get it's balance and the amount of BTC (preferably in Satoshi) it's ever sent and received? I don't want to use any third-party bitcoin services, I want to do it as directly as possible. How can I do that?
If you dont want to use ANY 3rd party service, you will need to parse the entire blobkchain and put it inside a database so you can query whatever information you want.

To do that you have two options: 


code your own parser for blocks/transactions, and here i suggest you using the rcpapi (its all json, nothing crazy) instead of doing it the hard way like this 
use some software which can do it (something like blockexporer or Abe)


Another piece of advice: before you start downloading the blockchain, you need to set this in your bitcoin.conf

# look up historical transactions
txindex=1


Which allows you to get detailed information about "old" transactions, but this will make grow the blockchain size in your disk significantly