Simo Virokannas

Writings and ramblings

Category: Informative

  • CARL merchandise now available!

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

  • CARL 1.1 is out!

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

  • Indeterminate progress is not progress

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    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

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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…

  • 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…