=pod

=for advent_year 2008

=for advent_day 12

=for advent_title Twelve Intrepid Ibex pulling a load of open source

=for advent_author Bill Ricker

Recently, I gave a talk for the A<http://boston.pm.org|local PerlMongers> on
"A Magic Number Mystery Tour of Use.perl.org journals with pack and unpack"
(A<magic_pack_tour.pdf|pdf>). In summary, time() and time_t take all longint
values, so some time is I<011111111111> or I<1234567890> or I<Bill>
o'clock. Earlier on Thursday was (net byte order) I<IAGO> o'clock.

During Santa's flight, there are several interesting times:

=begin pre

$ perl A<time_t2A.pl> --sort | grep -E 'Dec 2[456]'
<center>&hellip;</center>
IRON  Wed Dec 24 15:03:42 2008 GMT . Wed Dec 24 10:03:42 2008 ET
ISIS  Thu Dec 25 08:50:27 2008 GMT . Thu Dec 25 03:50:27 2008 ET
ISLE  Thu Dec 25 09:03:01 2008 GMT . Thu Dec 25 04:03:01 2008 ET
ISMS  Thu Dec 25 09:07:31 2008 GMT . Thu Dec 25 04:07:31 2008 ET
ITCH  Fri Dec 26 02:36:56 2008 GMT . Thu Dec 25 21:36:56 2008 ET
ITEM  Fri Dec 26 02:45:33 2008 GMT . Thu Dec 25 21:45:33 2008 ET
<center>&hellip;</center>

=end pre

While I could use
A<https://web.archive.org/web/20110916173113/http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/a7c5/|The ThinkGeek Epoch Clock> 
to track this, it won't arrive by 6am today&hellip; And while it supports Roman
numeralsN<roman>, which I don't need, it cannot display the time_t in the
octal, hex, or ascii that I want; only hh:mm:ss is convertible.

We can churn out a quick prototype with a couple of CORE features:
<tt>un-</tt>C<pack>, C<Term::Cap>, and C<Time::HiRes>.

=begin pre

 0.     1229079896
 1.    11120442530
 2.       49424558
 3.         'IBEX'
 4. Fri Dec 12 06:04:56 2008
 5. Fri Dec 12 11:04:56 2008

=end pre

But that's pretty dull in comparison to ThinkGeeks' lovely black monolith.

<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110916173113/http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/a7c5"><image src="https://web.archive.org/web/20110916173113/http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/additional/large/a7c5_thinkgeek_clock_front.jpg"></a> 

M<Tk> to the rescue! Or not. I would like to try a M<Tk> gui on Perl, but
playing with Perl and PerlAdvent on my laptop has been a challenge this week,
since a kernel security patch disconfigured my wifi, so I was not optimistic. 
I eventually bit the bullet and upgraded to
A<http://www.ubuntu.com/|Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex>, forgetting that this would
break my P<2007-17|PerlAdvent tools> and P<2006-5|Ack>, since they were built
against F</bin/perl> (5.8.x).  Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex sensibly moved up to the
year old Perl P<2007-19|5.10>, and now nothing works except core modules. 

Eventually, a quick C<cpan Tk> lets me load this portable GUI library,
and its tests begin popping-up a plethora of windows, a pleasant
sign my luck is changing. Even better, the module comes with a C<timer> demo,
which I was able to quickly wed to the CLI clock script&hellip;

<img src="Screenshot-Clock-tk.png" style="float:right">

Not too bad!

Did you notice what time it is today? Coincidence? Or is it&hellip;

M<Tk> eye candy version:

=sourcedcode mod12tk.pl

The CLI prototype:

=sourcedcode mod12.pl

=begin footnote roman

Perl can do A<http://search.cpan.org/search?query=roman&mode=module|Roman Numerals> too.

=end footnote