This is most probably my last post over here. All the posts have been copied to Szabster.net where I host my own WordPress, but I’ll leave everything here because I have some popular posts very very well ranked in Google.

So, update your bookmarks and subscribe to that one as well

I think that is extremely beneficial for every desktop application having an flexible yet powerful logging system.

This can “log” to a file, to a console (internal or not) or both. Anyway, the most important thing are the different log levels, and filters.

Let’s say that we have Text, Info, Warning, Error … each represents an level. Then we can setup a filter to “show” only the Warnings, or the Errors supressing all the other messages. This is extremly useful if you have bunch messages showing up in your log file / console.

Now let’s see some code

#define SAFE_ARRAY_DELETE(x) if(x) {delete [] x; x=NULL;}

#define INRANGE(x,min,max) ( (x >= min) && (x < max) )

namespace Log
{
    const int Text        = 0;
    const int Info         = 1;
    const int Warning   = 2;
    const int Error       = 3;
       
    // used only by the filtering
    const int Any        = 4;

};

static int g_logFilter = Log::Any;

void setConsoleLogFilter( const int logFilter )
{
    if( INRANGE(logFilter,0,5) )
    {
        g_logFilter = logFilter;
        return;
    }
    g_logFilter = Log::Any;
}
 
void consoleLog( const int logLevel, const char *msg, ... )
{
    va_list ap;

    // is filtering turned on?
    if( g_logFilter != Log::Any && g_logFilter != logLevel )
    {
        return;
    }

    char *text = new char[ 2048 ];
    assert( text );
 
    memset(text,0,sizeof(text));
 
    va_start(ap, msg);
        vsprintf(text, msg, ap);
    va_end(ap);
 
    switch( logLevel )
    {
        case Log::Info:
            printf( "INFO: %s\n", text );               
            break;

        case Log::Warning:
            printf( "WARNING: %s\n", text );               
            break;
       
        case Log::Error:
            printf( "ERROR: %s\n", text );               
            break;
           
        default:
            printf( "%s\n", text );               
            break;
    }

    SAFE_ARRAY_DELETE( text );
}

This is very very straightforward … it’s C++, but it can be adapted to C, by replacing the memory managment stuff … new with malloc, delete [] with free and moving out the constants into an enum

It works out great for me, and I use something very very similar to this on a day to day basis

Happy coding!

Original source here .

Hey, you! Why don’t you try Ubuntu?

Test post right from Google Docs :))

There are quite a few tutorials/howtos on how to install LAMP + WordPress locally on your Ubuntu box so I won’t go into any that, I just want to point out a few things I consider very important.

First of all my apache listen only on 127.0.0.1:80, so this way you can be sure that it is available only on the localhost. MySQL will already listen on localhost only by default so you won’t need to touch that.

Make sure that you install phpMyAdmin. Believe me it’s much better than struggling with the command line tool.

You can use the root MySQL user for your WordPress, no need to create another one … LoL you are on localhost.

Make sure that you make the “wp-content/upload” directory writable, so you can upload/modify stuff, all you could just make the whole /var/www/wordpress .

Installing WordPress locally has tons of benefits, because you can test out plugins, write new stuff, etc without messing with your *real life* installation, which is pretty cool.

Automatic build number incrementation always was a hot topic especially under Linux. My solution is fairly simple to implement, so let’s see some “code” right away:

#!/bin/bash

echo Fetching and updating build number ...

cat Core/Build.cpp | \
awk '{ printf("unsigned int g_internalbuildNumber = %d ;\n" \
,$5+1); }' > Core/_Build.cpp

rm Core/Build.cpp
mv Core/_Build.cpp Core/Build.cpp

This is a nice little bash script, but you already knew that, what it does? Well it reads in the previous build number and writes it back after incrementing it with 1.

The initial “Build.cpp” must contain the line:

unsigned int g_internalbuildNumber = 0 ;

… please notice the spacing because it is very very important, since awk parses the tokens based on the spaces.

Now make this script to be executed as the first thing inside your makefile, and make sure that the “Build.cpp” is compiled and linked with your executable, shared object or whatever.

To access the build number from within the code, you just have to do an “extern unsigned int g_internalbuildNumber;” and there you go, nothing fancy but still cool

Maybe it’s not the most elegant solution, but hey … it works for me and that’s all what matters

Nvidia PhysX formerly known as Ageia PhysX is an excellent physics engine which can benefit from hardware acceleration if you have an “PhysX” card in your machine, but it does well in “software” mode too.

On Windows the installation is pretty straightforward so I won’t go into that, but on Linux you have to do a little hand work after to get it work.

So first I grabbed the PhysX_2.8.1_SDK_CoreLinux_deb.tar.gz file from here .

After un-tarring the package, i got a “few” debian packages. Well now the “installation” order counts so the best is to give a command like inside the folder where you extracted the debs:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Once that is done, you will see that you are not able to run any of those samples included, because it cannot find the shared libraries (at least not under Ubuntu).

It installs the shared objects to /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/ so we need to do three symbolic links to /usr/lib in order to make this work.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libNxCharacter.so.1 /usr/lib/libNxCharacter.so.1

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libNxCooking.so.1 /usr/lib/libNxCooking.so.1

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libPhysXCore.so.1 /usr/lib/libPhysXCore.so.1

With this done we can check out the installed samples in /usr/sbin/PhysX_Samples_2.8.1_FC4/Bin/linux …

Well this is it … and Happy Coding

The excellent GPU Gems is now available for free in HTML format at the NVIDIA Developer Zone. This book is a must for every single n00b or pro who is into making 3D demos, games, etc.

This is still a valuable resource, and there are some really cool techniques presented in there.

Go and read it right now by clicking here .

Folks, happy reading!

(Maybe, I’m a bit late, but hey … nobody’s perfect … ha!)

My fiancee takes a trip to St. Petersburg tomorrow … Yay!

PS: Valerie will kill me for this