Day: May 28, 2006

The price you pay for (crappy) pizzas in Perth depends primarily on whether or not you have coupons:

• Price without coupons = “We might as well get decent pizza elsewhere (at one of those gourmet places).”
• Price with coupons = “Well, at least it’s cheap…”

If you’re in the market for cheap pizza (ie. you’re a student or buying for an event), you probably only really want it if you have a coupon. Cheap pizza places here almost always accept competitor’s coupons, so you just need to obtain a coupon for one place.

A quick look around reveals that the Pizza Hut website offers coupons that you can download, print, and use. However, you need to register first. Luckily we have Bugmenot.com, the online website that lets users “find and share logins for websites that force you to register”.

Anyhow, this is the first account that comes up on Bugmenot:

Not quite as good as webmaster@pizzahut.com.au, but fairly amusing.

I’ve been using GLEW to handle my OpenGL extensions and I like using assert when developing test programs that require certain extensions.

The thing I like about assert is that it exits the program and prints out the error, file, and line number. That’s more of less what I would do using more lines of code (meaning more chance of stupid errors) or my own macro (why reinvent the wheel?). It also encourages the use of descriptive variable names (like “num_draw_buffers” instead of “n”) so that the error output is more meaningful.

Here’s a snippet from some recent code:

glewInit();

/* These extensions must be supported */
assert(glewGetExtension("GL_ARB_vertex_shader"));
assert(glewGetExtension("GL_ARB_fragment_shader"));
assert(glewGetExtension("GL_ARB_texture_rectangle"));
assert(glewGetExtension("GL_EXT_framebuffer_object"));
assert(glewGetExtension("GL_ARB_draw_buffers"));

/* There must be at least 2 draw buffers */
{
    GLint num_draw_buffers;

    glGetIntegerv(GL_MAX_DRAW_BUFFERS_ARB, &num_draw_buffers);

    assert(num_draw_buffers >= 2);
}

Finally, if you ever decide that you don’t need assertions (because your code is clearly perfect), #define NDEBUG disables them. Good stuff!