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Two photos

This post is from peeba.gfxile.net. For commenting, click on the title.

Just a quickie post with two photos from last weekend.

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 in it), using posix permissions or ACLs. Then it works.

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 of the control. Then, add a line to your window controller’s awakeFromNib method:
-(void)awakeFromNib {
[[self glview] setHidden:NO]; // glview is the NSOpenGLView control
}


Result: You can still control the view inside the window normally in Interface Builder, but NSToolbar opens on top, the OpenGLView still opens up normally, and everybody is happy.

Photos from Barcelona

This post is from peeba.gfxile.net. For commenting, click on the title.

Wow. I haven’t updated this blog in a looong time, mostly since I’ve been busy with Legend of Grimrock so I haven’t had that much energy for other creative endeavors. But there have been a few things I should have written here about like another ludum dare game I made called Snow Globe Kerfuffle which I made in Flash so you can play it right in your browser! I’m pretty happy how the game turned out, much more so than with the Dystopian Future Underground City. Another noteworthy mention is that I opened up a Souncloud page so if you want updates on my music, you should follow me there since as we all have witnessed, the blog updates can be kinda sparse. Anyways, onto the topic at hand: I went to Barcelona and took a bunch of photos with my awesome new Olympus OM-D E-M5:

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 in other markets than Japanese. Some even made a good deal of money out of it, offering activators for $0.99. Soon after, Apple started removing these apps from App Store and made the keyboard available in all countries.

Now, with OSX Lion and iOS 5, the available character set has been expanded quite a bit – hence a new avalanche of ‘activator’ apps, only this time they don’t activate anything. Basically, you have an app which copies the wanted character to pasteboard, from where you can paste it to your message. Of course the old rule applies, not the one selling is crazy, but the one who buys…

People, before paying for such a thing, please take a look at wikipedia. The Emoji page there contains all the characters you want, all you need to do is copy and paste them to a note or email them to yourself onto your iPhone.

You might want to paste them to your notes in Mail for synchronizing, just select “Paste and Match Style” from the Edit menu.

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 -can’t- add OpenGL views anymore.

This happens once per project, and for me it seemed there’s no other solution than to create a completely new XIB.

Today, I found a workaround:

1. Remove the NSOpenGLView that’s causing the crash
2. Restart Xcode, reload the project
3. (never touch NSOpenGLView in the interface builder again)
4. Add a “Custom NSView” and move it into place, set all the NSView settings for it as you would with the OpenGLView
5. Set the class for that custom view to NSOpenGLView or a class derived from that
6. For the view controller, add an IBOutlet NSOpenGLView *object or the derived class
7. Connect that outlet to the Custom NSView in interface builder
8. Add some proper initialization code for the view (straight from Cocoa API documentation) – this is what you don’t have to do when using the NSOpenGLView but now it’s necessary:

// in the controller class .m
- (void)awakeFromNib {
 // set the pixel format and depth buffer and other parameters as you wish
 NSOpenGLPixelFormatAttribute attrs[] = {
 NSOpenGLPFADoubleBuffer,
 NSOpenGLPFADepthSize, 32,
 0
 };
 NSOpenGLPixelFormat *pf = [[NSOpenGLPixelFormat alloc] initWithAttributes:attrs];

 // assuming your class has an IBOutlet NSOpenGLView *m_gl
 [m_gl initWithFrame:[m_gl frame] pixelFormat:pf];
}

… and you’re set. No crashing.

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):

Cabo Blanco
Cabo Blanco

Running
Running

Train Roof Rundown

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Africa “Flyover Cliché” track
Africa

Light

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Adventure Legend

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Chest of Tales

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

More “electronic” stuff:

Access Denied

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sneak

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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. First, basic things like moving controls to places starts to take time. Then saving the project becomes really painful, not even mentioning deploying the project. If you want to use undo, just forget about it – for some reason, each undo takes as much time as saving the project.

Then, debugger stops working. The Dashcode’s small embedded fake HTTP server can’t handle the simultaneous requests made by the main page to load all the scripts. You might circumvent this by making a script loader that somehow loads them gradually, one by one. I tried it but it didn’t work, instead started giving way more exotic error messages.

This is until the project grows even bigger and you reach the point where Dashcode crashes when autoloading your project.

Dashcode preferences

It didn’t happen on Snow Leopard, though, so I guess this is some random incompatibility problem with OSX Lion. Even choosing the setting “Do nothing when Dashcode starts” doesn’t disable the autoload completely. This is probably because closing the big project on Dashcode crashes it and it reloads the last project when starting again.

I found a workaround for that:

1. Open Dashcode
2. Quickly press CMD-W when the project loads up
3. Quickly press CMD-Q when the project is closed
4. Open Dashcode again
5. Open the project from the Recent projects menu

Handy and easy.

Another possible solution for this could be if someone figured out a way to include JavaScript files to the main page in a way that Dashcode wouldn’t understand them and wouldn’t load and parse the sources every time you open the project. I guess that is what crashes the editor.

Anyway, it’s a shame that it seems this program has been neglected by Apple for some time now. Hope they’ll get more active on it one day again.

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 fine, it came up in queries, appeared normal, everything ok.

But there’s a PHP script on the server side that makes the appropriate query and returns the data as XML for the JavaScript side to parse. And every time a query contained this one particular entry, it broke. The XML was returned normally, but it didn’t work. Empty set.

So, I decided to make the query manually, giving it as Base64-encoded SQL query to check what’s wrong.

It returned a nice set of XML – with one exception: the browser said there’s a 0×0 character on row 15. That would explain a lot, so I checked row 15. Just normal written text as UTF-8 string in the database. I copied the text and pasted it to Skype for the person who wrote it, with a note after the text.

Black hole, galactic representation of a NULL character. Photo by Alain Riazuelo.

The note disappeared. Found the null character.

After a quick search I learned that it is actually possible to write a NULL character from the keyboard. Didn’t know that. This brings up a whole bunch of new problems that everyone should keep in mind when writing software. Especially when dealing with HTTP servers, as they, sometimes when it’s possible, also send the size of the page in the headers, and the client side then downloads everything but doesn’t expect a NULL character, and sometimes, when no size is sent, client may stop at a NULL. Both times you’ll probably end up mishandling the data.