Mar 092013
 

When you’re at the CeBIT, you’ll always find a few surprises. “Surprise” being something or someone unexpected.
Apart from seeing all sorts of new technical and technological innovations, I unexpectedly met a friend I knew from Munich. He is big in the Drupal community and was doing PR at the CeBIT this year.
We met on the exhibition grounds when it was already past day-time and people were meeting up for after-work get-togethers and parties, I decided to pay him a visit during opening hours on the next day. What I found was something so cool that I need to blog about it.

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Mar 132012
 

It took me a while until I would finally face the issue about iMessages (and their date). The latest released version of the SMS extractor was able to deal with iOS 5 containers and would already also extract iMessages – however with a wrong date.

In order to fix this, I had to treat iMessages as a special case. Thing is, in order to still be able and deal with container files prior to iOS 5 (and the program stay universal), the fact whether iMessages can appear needs to be determined before the actual message retrieval is done. So far I’ve been too lazy to approach this issue, that’s why it took a while. (And yes, I hate legacy support, but I hate it even more when users are left out who don’t or can’t update for some reason!)

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Feb 152012
 

I know, I’m kind of late, but when I found out about Google’s “Do a Barrel Roll” just recently, I had to try this out myself and wanna blog about it.
(On a side note: seriously, how nerdy is it if you want to type “myself” but instead type “mysql”? Having to write this sentence was already a chore)

If you clicked the above link and if your browser is sort of up-to-date, you will have witnessed the Google website to spin about and stop again when at its original position. It did a barrel roll.

Now the interesting part is the actual techniques behind it as the whole thing is done via CSS. It makes use of two new things in CSS3: keyframes and animations.

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Aug 302011
 

Well, to put this down as “gibberish” would be unfair, because it’s quite reasonable information right there. It’s rather what would be called “continuity goofs” over at the IMDb. Furthermore my remarks in the introduction of the first part of the blog series still apply, that with current HD quality movies, it’s easy to pull up a still and check the information sold to us by the movie makers.

I have to admit, the people responsible for The Bourne Ultimatum have done a pretty good job, both with the movie in general and as far as IT authenticity is concerned. (As a small side-note: sorry, idealists, but I have not read the book)
However, there are a few things (to be followed), where they did sloppy work – remember when Nicky says “it’s being blocked by the firewall”?

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Jun 302011
 

A few days ago, Google launched their version of social networking in the shape of Google+.
Like most Google projects, this seems to be in a semi-closed beta phase allowing members to invite new people. My guess is they randomly selected Google accounts that were automatically joined into the program for trying it out. Ever since then a huge wave of asking for and giving out invites has occurred.

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Jun 082011
 

The blog series of computer gibberish in movies began with this post, where you can also find the introduction to the general topic.

Following part 1, where they just punched in random keys and numbers, we can see a higher level of “gibberish” in The Girl who played with Fire, because they bothered to put “real” text:

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Jul 062010
 

After a long history of incidents/accidents, I’ve been using my iPhone 3GS (new bootrom) with regular iOS4 for a couple of days. However, I had to do without any mobile internet – even though my contract was fine and it had been working just fine with 3.1.2.

I’ve pretty much tried every instruction that’s out there which has anything to do with enabling mobile internet. Removing SIM-card, resetting APN (even though my provider doesn’t even need any APN settings), completely resetting network settings – along with disabling+enabling mobile data connections and/+ 3G for a thousand times. The “E” or the “3G” was showing up fine (depending which one I enabled), nevertheless, no connection could be made from any app.

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Jun 222010
 

We all know those scenes from movies, where we see a computer screen while the NOC-list is being copied or when someone logs into a mainframe in order to disable the power of half a city (via SSH btw). Some are done well or very well (as the mentioned SSH one) others poorly researched or even plain lazy.
While watching such scenes, we usually immediately recognize whether it’s authentic or just crap. Nowadays modern high resolution+definiton movie formats make it even possible to pause the movie and verify all the text that we see on computer screens in such scenes.

Recently, when I watched the (quite brutal) movie “Unthinkable” I saw a real killer:

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Jan 202010
 

Recently I came across the situation where I created a webpage on which I wanted to include some raw XML data in a <textarea> so the user could see that XML data including all tags and stuff. What made the setup special was, that in this scenario I didn’t just put a predefined XML formatted data inside the textarea, but the XML data was supposed to be inserted into the webpage (into the textarea) on the client-side via Javascript.
(In order to give you a little bit more information about the whole picture: the source XML data – to be inserted on the fly – might change and should be able to be updated without reloading the whole page)

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