blog.haraldkraft.de

A few weeks ago I created a small PHP script that could extract text messages from an iPhone SQLite storage file. It required the user to have a PHP interpreter ready in order to run the script, which might be an obstacle keeping him or her from using the script.

Because I’m currently having more fun to do some programming in PHP than to rewrite the original script in Java (most people will have a JVM and/or JRE installed), I created a new webpage that uses the original script.

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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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UPDATE (10/06/2011): I started an online version of the script, see new blog post.

For a while I’ve been checking out various programs for extracting and converting text messages from the iPhone SMS storage SQLite database. For some reason they seem to be either for purchase or not doing their job well.
When I found out that all they are doing is pretty much just some simple SQL query and putting the result into various output formats, I decided to quickly write this myself, while keeping it simple and open.

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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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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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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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When you’re using an “external” tool for handling ZIP archive file (and the likes), it can be really annoying when you double-click on such a file in Windows Explorer (or other file browsers) and Windows treats the file as a compressed folder and doesn’t start the external application even though file associations are correctly set.

Some tuning tools like XP-Antispy are able to disable the functionality of compressed folders, however it didn’t work for me on Vista the last time I tried.
After a while of research I found the solution how to edit the registry, so that double-clicking associated files will truly be opened with the external application:

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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 ).

After using WebCalendar for quite I while, I finally got to the bottom of the problem, why it wasn’t working as a remote calendar in Mozilla Sunbird or in the Thunderbird extension Lightning.

Following the official description how to subscribe to a remote calendar did add the calendar successfully, but showed a yellow warning sign with the caption

The calendar foobar is momentarily not available

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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.

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