I guess this is a rare issue – and considering that we’re approaching Windows 8 will make it even rarer. However, this is so absurd that I’m dedicating a blog entry.
The symptoms are quite simple: I was trying to activate a (legally bought) copy of Windows XP Professional with SP3. But whenever I tried to access the activation window in order to activate within the first 30 days, nothing really happened.
First of all, let me point out that the title (and content of this article) does not read out “GMX is evil”. I like GMX, but imho they made a mistake in enabling @gmx.net as a possible domain part in their free email service.
GMX (short for Global Message eXchange) was founded as a German company and is now owned by United Internet. The most popular service back in the days (and maybe still today) was their freemail service.
Nobody sane who cares about keeping emails uses IMAP!
Apart from a few other things (stay tuned) in the IT world, IMAP is a very prominent example of evil.
Many people today claim that nobody uses POP anymore and most email providers nowadays offer access via IMAP. But they couldn’t be further from the truth.
Once you’ve used IMAP and lost (more or less important) emails, you start hating it and might move back to POP.
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!)
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.
Last year I released a script written in PHP which was able to extract text messages from the iPhone (more specifically: from the SQLite storage container) into a simple TXT file, which was documented in this blog post. The software required a PHP interpreter, which had to be cared for by the user (check the blog post for details), but was published under CC BY 3.0 so the user could make any alteration he desired or deemed necessary.
Some time later I wrote an online version of the extractor (release blog post), which offered extended functionality and above all no longer needed the user to run the interpreter him- or herself.
However, due to the lack of time I couldn’t keep the standalone version up to date with the online version and so they diverged.
A while ago I encountered this error in Firebug during my work with AJAX techniques but never really documented it – so here we go.
The scenario is simple: a number of asynchronous requests are done via JavaScript and many of them Firebug will list as Aborted. I attached screenshots below.
What seemed mysterious was that these requests were done at completely different locations in the code, which didn’t have any relation to one another. Furthermore I didn’t render the fact problematic that some of the requests were shuffled amongst each other – that’s what AJAX was for …
For the past few years I’ve been using a Virgin Mobile cell phone every time I spent time in the United States. Because this was happening only once a year (meaning the rest of the year I’d be outside of the US and any US signal) I would use a plan that was good for a month and then just stop topping up until I would get back into the country. Of course this meant that I would lose the phone number and get a new one every time I got back; but since this was a holiday phone (in different places of the country with different contacts) that was totally fine. Besides, I know people who change their phone numbers (and email addresses) almost every month – and yes, I am being a bit dramatic here btw.
This year’s trip to Miami shouldn’t be any different: (re-)activate phone (=get a new number), top-up, fire away (=get to know ppl and write lots of texts).
However, this time it turned out to be sort of a chore, which I’ll be trying to document here.
About half a year ago I published a PHP script that could extract text messages from an iPhone SQLite container. It was followed by an online version (blog post) a few weeks later, which was a website offering to use the original PHP script for text message extraction without having to install and/or run a webserver.
One of the objectives of this blog – when I started it – was to archive solutions to problems which took me a while to find. If at the time a Google search with the most common question to the problem didn’t show a page with a solution within the first results, I created a blog post in order for it to be easier accessible for myself – along with sharing that solution with the open web. Furthermore, it’s a technique to remember things easier: write them down once and you won’t forget.