blog.haraldkraft.de » Life and People

Computer gibberish in movie

Harald Kraft — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:52:20 +0000

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:

We see some technician punching gibberish into a spreadsheet already filled with a lot more gibberish, haha.
And it gets even better if you consider what the guy typing is actually doing. See the following spoiler to find out:

Spoiler Inside
He is defusing a huge bomb with his hooked up laptop.

Well – so much for today and a real funny idea for a computer screen.
And as a side note: Carrie-Anne Moss also plays the main actress in The Unthinkable .

The Big Bang Theory – Intro (frame by frame)

Harald Kraft — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:09:01 +0000

After a few weeks (actually, a few months) of procrastination and research, I finally finished my “project” to split up the intro of the TV-series The Big Bang Theory frame by frame and find out what each snapshot meant.
I organized all 109 snapshots in a list with a short label of what the snapshot shows. Maybe community and fans will help to complete the work and compose nice descriptions.

You can find the list on a separate website here: http://www.haraldkraft.de/thebigbangtheory/

Enjoy

UPDATE (09/29/09): As I am in Toronto atm without proper internet access, I will update all your comments and emails within the next two weeks.
UPDATE2 (09/29/09): To avoid further comments on the same issues, I updated the page (spending the last 2 hours in an Apple store ).

Use customized shortcut keyboard setup in Opera browser

Harald Kraft — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:00:03 +0000

Throughout these past weeks, I’ve installed Opera on a few new systems (with various operating systems btw) and had to make (just) a few adjustments. One of them included setting my own keyboard setup. Even though making my custom shortcut settings was easily done each time (via Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> “Keyboard setup” Duplicate + Edit, see Tamil’s blog for a nice description), embarrassingly I had forgotton how to actually “enable” the modified keyboard setup.

In my opinion, it took me too long to find the solution online, that’s why I am posting this blog entry (apart from self-interest as a reminder ).

So, after you have possibly created and edited the customized keyboard setup to your needs – drumroll – while in the Edit-Dialog of your keyboard setup (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> select your “Keyboard setup” and click Edit) you need to click on the Default button in order to (as I called it) “enable” the keyboard setup.
That’s all there is to it – simple if you know it, but a bitch if you don’t and try all sort of tricks .

Btw, for those of you who’re interested: The only change I made in the keyboard setting (and that really matters to me) is that I like Ctrl+D to perform “Paste + go” as it used to do in older Opera versions. For me it was one of the most useful shortcuts ever and in my opinion was way more efficient than the “new” default setting (after Opera adapted Ctrl+D to be “Bookmark directly”, that I never use anyway, from Firefox).

Twitter PHP script

Harald Kraft — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:19:25 +0000

I wrote this PHP script in order to include the latest tweets from my Twitter on my website. It retrieves the RSS feed, parses it and pastes a number of tweets (along with timestamp and link) to HTML.

[[ OLD:
Before I can / want to release it under some free software license, I would appreciate it if some of you PHP nerds could review the code. I am mainly concerned about security issues rather than formatting and coding style. Since I am no pro in PHP coding, I will probably have done some things quite clumsily.

So please point out security problems as well as other major issues. (For example, if anybody knows how to stop parsing after max items were dealt which, please let me know ).
]]

[UPDATE 07/08/2009]
(HTTP) Links are now made clickable.
[/UPDATE]

[UPDATE 15/12/2009]
The script was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License today.
Download the PHP code at http://blog.haraldkraft.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/parsetwitter.php_.txt and feel free to reuse and tweak my script (along with mentioning my name as suggested in the license information in the code).
[/UPDATE]

Email me at blog {at} haraldkraft(.)de (or comment)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.