3.3 KiB
+++ title = "Shit-code and Other Performance Arts" slug = "shit-code-and-performance-art" date = "2023-02-08" [taxonomies] tags = ["software", "art", "sundry", "proclamation", "chaos"] [extra] toc = false +++
A sundry collection of intellectual property, some less intellectual than other
Something I firmly believe is that it's possible to make jokes in any medium. Here at Nebcorp Heavy Industries & Sundries, despite occasional dabbling with the physical, we work primarily with software, and so this medium is one of our primary corporate humor channels. Below is just some of our work there, from least to most useless.
katabastird, a graphical countdown timer
katabastird is, in its own words, "a simple countdown timer that is configured and launched from the commandline." It looks like this when it's running:
It was created for a couple reasons:
- I wanted to make a GUI program to learn how to use a particular library called "egui";
- I had signed up to give a five-minute talk to demonstrate the latest release of a commandline argument parsing library called "clap", which I had titled, "Clap for Clap Four", and I needed a program to showcase it.
Obviously the best way to showcase a commandline-parsing library is to incorporate it into a graphical program. Other commandline-mission-critical features included changing the color of the background to get more and more red as less time remained
and using the font used by the alien in Predator
But by far its greatest feature is an undocumented option, -A, that will play an airhorn
salvo
when it's done. This option is visible in the program's help text, but it's not described.
This is, honestly, not a great program. Once it's launched, it only understands two keyboard inputs,
ESC and q, both of which simply cause it to exit. Using the mouse, you can pause, restart, and
reset. And that's it, that's all the interaction you get.
In spite of this, I find myself using it all the time. It's easy to launch with different times (the
commandline parsing understands things like -h for hours, -m for minutes, etc.), and its last
invocation is just an up-arrow in my terminal away. The airhorn cracks me up every time.
At some point, I plan on changing it to something that uses the GPU to run a fire simulation on the numbers, and have the flame intensity get higher as the time remaining gets lower. I'll save that for when I want to get slightly more serious about graphics and shaders, though.
randical, a commandline program for generating random values
- randical
- freedom-dates
- bad_print