Darned clock watchers!

[Fairlight]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 10:44:44PM -0500, Fairlight, the prominent pundit,
witicized:
> It really makes a LOT more sense to write a small program like the old BSD
> 'sysinfo' that would just overlay the time in a small inverse box in the
> bottom corner of the screen, in like the last 4 characters where fP never

[...]

Actually...one would have to look at the old sysinfo code and find out how
they got around one little thing.  I now have a curses-based program that
displays the time every 1/10 of a second at the bottom right of the screen.
The only problem is that it gets suspended for tty output if it's
backgrounded.  To work, it has to be the foreground process--which it
wouldn't be if you wanted to -do- anything with the terminal session.

Now, I -know- for a fact that sysinfo didn't have this issue.  I know this
for certain because I personally used it for over three years, so I'm 100%
positive that it didn't have concurrency issues.

Alas, I 1) don't have the source at the moment, and 2) even if I did, don't
have time to figure out the workaround at this point.  Which is a pity, as
I actually have the rest of the meat of it done in perl.  :)

But I'd love to know how sysinfo did its magic at this point, since it
technically shouldn't be possible from an article I just read on the tty
device subsystem (which was actually an interesting read).

Anyway, this solution doesn't appear to be -easily- viable at this point.
Suggestion withdrawn.

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