Darned clock watchers!

[Joe Chasan]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 10:44:44PM -0500, Fairlight wrote:
> With neither thought nor caution, Joe Chasan blurted:
> > > However, you should be able to do this with inkey and a tight loop.
> > 
> > thats pretty much what i thought i'd end up having to do if i couldn't
> > figure this out a different way - but the inkey/loop/field-build works 
> > best when there is only one field on the screen (which _do_ i have in 
> > some cases) and also, more importantly, makes it very difficult to 
> > back-space, arrow back and forward, edit, etc.
> 
> 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
> displays anything.  You have it run as a background task starting at login,
> and it has -nothing- to do with fP at all, and thus is not subject to its
> constraints.
> 
> The old sysinfo used to use the 25th line of displays (but was
> configurable) and presented more than the time.  But the principle is
> the same in general.  You just have it "sleep" for a tenth of a second
> between updates.  For that granularity, you'd need to use select() on most
> platforms, as sleep() is only granular to seconds.  SCO has a nap() that
> uses microseconds, but it's not standard.

its funny but when i first looked at this i thought to myself - too bad 
this isnt' the old wyse terminals as a wrote a program to do this on the 
25th line of those babies way back when.  maybe progress isn't always a good
thing!
 
--
-Joe Chasan-                           Magnatech Business Systems, Inc.
joe - at - magnatechonline -dot- com   Hicksville, NY - USA
http://www.MagnatechOnline.com         Tel.(516) 931-4444/Fax.(516) 931-1264