Simo Virokannas

Writings and ramblings

Category: Informative

  • Symbolicate .crash logs – with whatever

    Ran into a situation where I had to get a Apple crash log symbolicated but the instructions say you’ll need to drop them to the device log viewer for that device. But in this case, I don’t have the device the log was from. Or it might not be connected at the moment. Or any…

  • Swift: as easy as 1, 2, 3…?

    Apple shook the developer community a few years ago with the release of Swift, a language that is “concise, expressive and lightning fast”. As a developer mainly working on Apple platforms, I decided to jump on it right away, trying to keep in mind there was going to be bumps in the road like there has been with any…

  • CARL merchandise now available!

    Go check out the fresh collection of CARL merchandise! There’s awesome stuff, like this cool Espresso cup!  

  • CARL 1.1 is out!

    Check out the new features at the product home page: CARL Also, on the App Store and KVR Audio

  • Indeterminate progress is not progress

    The progress paradigm Before, you could open your computer, do your stuff, close it and enjoy life. Remember when loading a program, like a word processor, took a minute or more? Today’s applications and websites typically employ a model where there’s a backend process that either runs locally on the same machine or on a server somewhere.…

  • Hungarian Notation

    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

    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

    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…