I Geek, Therefore I am

I'm sure most people remember the game Lemmings, right. Well, the other day while trying to login to a web site, the server said it could not log me in, but offered some suggestions on other things that I could do with my time. One such suggestion was to play Lemmings. It's pretty much exactly as I remember it on my roommate's Mac back in college.

I went to see the Tim Burton remake of Sweeny Todd this weekend. On some level, I knew it was a remake; however, I did not know that it was a musical. This was rather unexpected, to say the least. My first clue was when I saw Stephen Sondheim's name in the opening credits. It was actually an entertaining movie and story line (even if a bit twisted). The singing was better than one might expect from a group of (I assume) non-singers, although some of the lyrics were a bit unintelligible between the accents (both real and faked) and the multiple parts singing over one another. The look and feel of the movie was similar to Sleepy Hollow or some of the mansion scenes of Edward Scissorhands: dark and desaturated with mostly gray tones. This made the punctuation of color, mainly blood, much more pronounced. And speaking of blood, this had a lot of the really fake looking blood. I think Tim Burton really enjoys the sight gag of cutting someone and having their blood spray across the room, drenching everything in its path. The blood effects reminded me of either old samurai movies or what one might see in anime. This seemed to turn the attention away from the blood as gore and lend a bit of a fairy tale feel to the movie.

I got tired of the binary clock dock app that I've been using: one column per digit displaying the hour:minute:second. Fortunately, it being open source and me being a programmer, I can look inside and modify it. It's a fairly simple C program using some X11 libraries. It uses localtime() from time.h and prints it to a string. It then parses that string to determine what the display should look like. The original code examined each char in the string and then used a case to compare the char to the digits 1-9 to set the "bits" to display (lame).

My new version gets the month (+1) and mday from the tm struct in addition to the time. It then examines the string two bytes at a time and does atoi() to get the actual numeric value, then checks the bits in the (now one) byte to store for display. I added one more row of "lights" and "rotated" the display 90 degrees to the right.

Can you tell what time it is in this .gif?