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Xcode, NSOpenGLView, internal crash

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

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

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

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

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Africa “Flyover Cliché” track
Africa

Light

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Adventure Legend

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Chest of Tales

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More “electronic” stuff:

Access Denied

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Sneak

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Dashcode, part II

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

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

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

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.

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 in your non-deployment target, just click Add Build Phase (+) / Add Run Script and copy/paste the following code:

cd $CONFIGURATION_BUILD_DIR/$CONTENTS_FOLDER_PATH/Resources
for a in `find . -name "*.rbo"`; do rm -f $a; done

This isn’t pretty, but does the trick.

Amplify multiple mp3s from command line

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

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 App Store come with the ffmpeg binary hidden inside their directories. Just open a terminal, type:

cd /Applications
find . -name "ffmpeg"

…and you’re set. Copy the found binary to /usr/bin or wherever you want it.

If you’re on Windows, google for ffmpeg.exe, copy it anywhere and it’ll work, unless it doesn’t, which is pretty much a 50/50 possibility.

On Linux, using any repository system you use, install the package ffmpeg, only to realize it doesn’t support mp3, because mp3 is apparently not an industry standard.

Not depending on if it’s a good standard or not, you’ve got 1072 mp3 files you’ve recorder for some reason, and they’re all too silent. By a factor of 10.

Go to the directory with the files, and type (example):

cd SilentMP3s
mkdir LouderFiles
for a in *.mp3; do ffmpeg -i $a -vol 2560 LouderFiles/$a; done

Now you’ll see a lot of text flowing through your terminal for a while, and when it’s done, you’ll find all of the files, 10 times louder in a subfolder named LouderFiles.

The ffmpeg -vol parameter amplifies the sound. The default value is 256 (no amplification), and you can adjust the number accordingly. Here it’s 2560, as it’s 10 times louder. Note that these are not decibel values or anything that sophisticated, but just an integer value. 512 equals to twice the volume, 768 three times, 1024 four times, etc.

The best way to find the correct amplification might be to look at the actual waveform in an audio editor, e.g. Audacity, and then try the amplification on one file. You’ll quickly see what is the appropriate value for the -vol parameter.

HALion Symphonic Orchestra on OSX Lion

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

This page at Steinberg’s website claims that Halion Symphonic Orchestra won’t work on OSX Lion. It says “Plug-in not detected by host. No update planned but runs as VST Sound Instrument Set based on HALion Sonic on Lion.”

Not true.

I just finished installing Cubase Studio 5 on Lion, with HSO working just fine, both as a VST plugin and through ReWire.

As the script for copying the samples from the DVDs is made for PPC and needs Rosetta, it probably won’t run. But if you already have the samples loaded on a Mac, you can just copy the samples to their place from the other Mac after installing the plugin (latest from the Steinberg website – not the one that comes on the discs).

The path to look for is /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/ReWire/HALion Symphonic Orchestra. For the 16-bit edition, there should be approx. 11 GB of data, for the 24-bit version probably some 50% more.

This is not recent news, as it also worked on Lion Developer Preview and Cubase Studio 5.5.0, which was also not supposed to work on Lion…

UBV Beach Volley 2011

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

I’m happy to announce the first version of UBV 2011 is ready and waiting for approval in the Mac App Store. Here’s a short trailer:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

4 new tracks

This post is from Undocumented stuff. For commenting, click on the title.

Here’s some new music:

Vector

Strongly influenced by Tron: Legacy soundtrack.

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HD1

Tried to capture the classic feeling of Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire.

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Bronze

Tries to be like the stuff they play in saunas at Impuls+.

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Puzzle

Older track, found it lying around unfinished.

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