Simo Virokannas

Writings and ramblings

Author: Simo

  • 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…

  • Xcode, NSOpenGLView, internal crash

    Xcode, NSOpenGLView, internal crash

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    I’ve been encountering a frequent problem with Xcode interface builder with NSOpenGLViews – whenever you add one, connect it to a class, and touch something, interface builder starts crashing like mad. First, you try to save everything hitting continue, then you realize saving, restarting, loading, deleting the control, creating it again, nothing helps. You just…

  • Orchestral tracks from the past

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    It’s already a long time since I removed the online jukebox from these pages, so here’s some of the old orchestral music from those times (along with some new).

  • Dashcode, part II

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    After using Dashcode for almost a year now, this is the bottom line: “Don’t make any big projects with it.” – A random Dashcode user After a while, when the project gets bigger, you’ll have some 20+ Javascript files, thousands of lines of code, several data sources (which are great, btw), it gets really slow.…

  • Wonderful null character

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    I recently programmed a lengthy piece of online software with PHP and JavaScript, utilizing server-side PHP/MySQL queries. But there was a problem that just popped out of nowhere – all but one data entry worked perfectly. This one row, when observed from the SQL server side (with a great tool called Sequel Pro), looked perfectly…

  • MacRuby and (too) persistent objects

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    If you’re starting with MacRuby and Xcode, you might stumble upon the same problem I did: If you deploy the project even once, those precompiled ruby object files (.rbo) stick to the deployment directory and you have to clean it up each time before testing any new code. Here’s a simple script you can put…

  • Amplify multiple mp3s from command line

    Amplify multiple mp3s from command line

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    This is quite easy to do, actually, just another case of bad (or missing) documentation. First, get an ffmpeg binary. This can be done by either compiling it by yourself or googling for a ready compiled binary. If you’re on a Mac, you probably have it already, as many of the video converters from Mac…