Harald Kraft

WordPress shortcode for user role visibility

Jan 202014

As WordPress itself is very powerful concerning permission management, it’s sometimes a little bit difficult to perform very simple tasks. Recently I wanted to display different contents for different users (or more specifically: different user roles). However this isn’t possible to do out of the box.
There are a lot of plugins for managing user groups (or here) and even build big membership systems. But this seemed like a complete overkill for what I wanted to do. So I wrote a small shortcode that could do exactly that.

The usage is simple: an enclosing shortcode named [user_role] will take the attribute of role=”role“; the content between opening and closing shortcode brackets will only be shown to those users who have the appropriate role specified in the attribute.

When Android status bar icons are blue or gray/white

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Dec 102013

Anybody with an Android device (usually it doesn’t matter which OS and/or ROM you are running) has encountered the situation, when status bar icons (e.g. WIFI and/or GSM/UMTS) are either blue or gray/white. On a sidenote: whether it’s gray or white depends on the OS and the color settings, so from here on I will just write using the word “gray”.
Throughout the internet you can find various answers to the question why icons are either blue or gray. The short explanation is this:

BLUE: the device is “connected” to Google services
GRAY: the device is NOT connected to Google services

So what’s the long answer then, and what does it mean to be connected to Google services?

Sheldon’s T-Shirts on The Big Bang Theory series

Life and People No Responses »

Aug 282013

As you might remember, I started a website in 2009 about The Big Bang Theory intro with a listing of all the snapshots and what they are about (matching blog post). Ever since many people from TBBT fan community have contributed to the page and almost all the snapshots have been disclosed.

From time to time I check the referal logs, which URLs link to my page and how they do it. Most of the time the websites have a few images and a source link (to my page). Sometimes they hotlink my images (which I’m not so happy about) and sometimes they even take own credit for copying my stuff (which I’m angry about).

But let’s get back to the positive examples.
Continue reading »

CMS garden at CeBIT

General, Life and People No Responses »

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.

Cooler Master Blade Master 92 not suited for nonstop operation

Technical No Responses »

Dec 282012

This is probably the first post in my blog about a review/rating of a real product (apart from similar reviews like Virgin Mobile service and btrfs). Also, I would like to mention that Cooler Master fabricates excellent products and I have had good experience with them. However, my use of the Cooler Master Blade Master 92 CPU fan was not so successful.

The computer at hand contains an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (running at 4x 2.4 GHz), it was built in late 2007. I didn’t give it many breaks, so it was pretty much running constantly since then, with a few exceptions (moving places, i.e. a period of a few hours, or building in new harddrives or a power supply, i.e. a period of a few minutes). The built in CPU fan also was from Cooler Master, however I could not find the model name (model no. was A9025-18RB-3BN-F1) when it started to make problems half a year ago (means it was working perfectly fine for 4.5 years with a few short breaks).

Windows service (svchost.exe) is downloading constantly

Life and People, Technical 13 Responses »

Nov 072012

Now this issue is truly interesting. For starters, who will actually notice that some Windows service is producing permanent internet traffic? Secondly it was really kinda hard to find out what was causing the download.
I don’t know which Windows versions do have this scenario, but I’m guessing Windows XP and all later versions are “affected”. I’ve experienced it with Windows 7 x64 and Windows 7 x64 with SP1.

It hasn’t been the first time that I had noticed something was causing traffic for which I couldn’t come up with an explanation.
While I’m on holiday my main computer will keep running however pretty much idle – I can connect via VNC and check emails and instant messengers. I also get a daily report email from my router which includes the amount of incoming and outgoing bytes.
So this one time I noticed that the incoming data was round about 1GB – needless to say I was away not using the computer. This amount kept showing up for the following days on which I was still out of town.

Free iPhone text message extractor works with iOS 6

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Oct 042012

Actually, the updated version of the SMS extractor for iPhone was already rolled out on September 25th, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about this, so here goes.

Apple made a lot of changes to the SQLite container (especially field names and references) so I also had to apply a few changes to the extraction software. Unfortunately it is on a path of getting cluttered because there are many special cases. However atm I don’t have the time and motivation to turn this into a very clean program. For the time being it’s doing its job: extracting every single text message for free :).

Weird wireless network connection problem in Windows

Technical No Responses »

Sep 292012

Yes, I admit it, there are a myriad of reasons for any sort of problem with the wireless network connection. I have encountered many, for all of which I could give you more or less an explanation and which could be solved or were gone after a reboot. Which is also a Windows thing, a reboot usually solves everything – however, of course, you take away the possibility to debug and actually find the problem itself. Nevertheless, the problem at hand could not be solved by a reboot.

XML support for free iPhone SMS extractor

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Aug 152012

Even though this piece of software is doing a good job, it got a little rusty and features needed to be added. Also I had to do some small fixes.

The SMS extractor is now able to output the extracted text messages into an XML formatted file. The following example will show the format that is being used:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<messages>
	<message type="SMS">
		<address>0123 45678910</address>
		<time>09.05.2012 20:09:19</time>
		<text>This is an example text message.</text>
	</message>
	<message type="iMessage">
		<address>+49 123 45678910</address>
		<time>06.08.2012 18:54:17</time>
		<text>This is an example iMessage.</text>
	</message>
</messages>

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<text>This is an example text message.</text>

</message>

<text>This is an example iMessage.</text>

</message>

</messages>

Computer gibberish in movie – part 5 (The Nikita series)

Life and People, Technical 4 Responses »

Jul 302012

I have to say, I was really impressed while watching the Nikita series and what they did with the computer work. Yeah, they do have fancy software that looks all nice and stuff (even on a monochrome screen), but apart from that there’s hardly anything that can be criticized.
The only thing that the makers kept doing wrong continuously they did on purpose: they used bogus IP addresses. My guess is they did not want any real real world references in order to stay in this technical fantasy world.

Nevertheless there are a few things which I would like to share that stuck out throughout the series.

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