Simo Virokannas

Writings and ramblings

Author: Simo

  • Hungarian Notation

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    Years ago, I got a task to add features to the source code of an existing application. It originated in a company that was seemingly obsessed with win32-style programming and Hungarian notation. After a while, the m_lpsz, g_u32 and s_aul prefixes started to make sense, and almost immediately after that, they stopped making sense. Here’s what…

  • Poor man’s photo backup, part I

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    A photo library, around 100 000 photos, not really professional but nice-to-have photos. Some of them are blurry, unfocused, or just plain horrible photographs. No time to browse through everything and only keep the really good ones. Aging hard drives and you badly need a backup, but 300 GB is just too expensive to store in…

  • Create ringtones from YouTube

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    Most of the methods online for creating ringtones from YouTube seem to involve shady websites with ads and registering accounts, if they even happen to work. So here’s a simple workflow for choosing what you want and creating a ringtone in a matter of minutes. All of this assumes you have a Mac, if you…

  • Streaming basics

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    As a quick crash course on video and audio streaming, here’s some nice facts and articles. The tool of the trade is RTSP, like it or not. There are methods of streaming through HTTP, but to make something that supports multiple streams or any sort of negotiation, it’ll always come back to RTSP. RFC 2326 – Real…

  • Unity version of MonoDevelop on OSX won’t run

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    …that is, if you are not running your system as admin. MonoDevelop assumes that everyone who uses OSX use it as admin. The way to fix this is to give you rights to the folder it wants to install its Mono library stuff into: /Applications/Unity/MonoDevelop.app/Contents/Frameworks/Mono.framework Give your user write permissions to that folder (and anything…

  • Some more music

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    Here’s one old track remastered and another new piece: Cabo Blanco (2012 remaster): Cabo Blanco (2012 remaster) Detective Story: Detective Story

  • NSOpenGLView and NSToolbar issue

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    For a long time, I’d run to the same problem with projects that included a window containing a full-window NSOpenGLView and a toolbar. In the Interface Builder, the NSToolbar controls open behind the OpenGL view and are unusable. There is a simple, although kludgy, way around this: Set the NSOpenGLView hidden in the View settings…

  • Emoji nonsense

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    Short history of Emoji characters: Many smartphone manufacturers released Emoji first only for Japanese products as a keyboard layout. Later they became popular elsewhere as a nicer replacement for the traditional :-) or :) smileys. Now, for some reason, first people started pushing these apps for activating Emoji on iPhones, as the layout was hidden…