Simo Virokannas

Writings and ramblings

Category: Informative

  • Wonderful null character

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    Simo
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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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    Simo
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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…

  • UBV Beach Volley 2011

    UBV Beach Volley 2011

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    I’m happy to announce the first version of UBV 2011 is now available for buying in the Mac App Store. Link to Mac App Store Here’s a short trailer:

  • Javascript, Base64, PHP, UTF-8

    Javascript, Base64, PHP, UTF-8

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    Simo
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    I’m working on a small application that communicates through JavaScript to a PHP script, and usually the data contains text in UTF-8 format to make everything as compatible as possible. The text in UTF-8 format doesn’t go too well into an AJAX call GET URL. So it has to be further encoded with an encoding…

  • Xcode 4.0.2 and 4.1 distributed building

    Xcode 4.0.2 and 4.1 distributed building

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    For some reason, the distributed building system in Xcode 4.x seems to be broken. You can search for distcc servers in your network, define them, turn on distributed building, but still it does everything on localhost. If you take a closer look at the build log, it says: setenv DISTCC_HOSTS localhost ..so can’t expect much…

  • OSX Wine Keyboard layout

    OSX Wine Keyboard layout

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    Simo
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    This one applies at least to the OSX version of WINE. One good frontend is PlayOnMac, which, despite the name, also runs other software than just games. It is similar to WineBottler in many ways. Now on a Mac, usually your locale is an UTF-8 one. This doesn’t go well with Windows software. So here’s…

  • Dashcode, part I

    Dashcode, part I

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    Simo
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    As a regular Xcode user, I used to wonder a lot about Dashcode that comes bundled with it. At a first glance, it seemed like a workshop for osx dashboard widgets – which it is, but recently I learned it is a whole lot more. Sometimes there’s a need to build some small websites for…