xphoon6x

Usage

Overview

Xphoon sets the X root window to a picture of the moon in its current phase, including the partial lighting of the dark side by reflected earthlight.

Options

-b

Defeats the earthlight feature, forcing the dark side to be black.

-t

Have xphoon keep running and update the picture every interval minutes. (Normally, xphoon just sets the root picture and exits.)

-i

Forks a background process and prints the process-id to stdout. Useful if you want to make menu commands to refresh or kill xphoon.

-s

Rotate the whole picture 180 degrees, resulting in a moon picture as viewed fom the Southern hemisphere.

-demo

Demonstrate xphoon by rapidly stepping through moon phases.

Notes

The original motivation for this program was that xsetroot was too slow. Loading a full-screen bitmap took about 15 seconds. We made a trivial program that had fullmoon.bitmap compiled in, and it ran in less than a second. (And incidentally, the executable was smaller than fullmoon.xbm.) Then later we came up with the phase hacking, the earthlight, and the auto-scaling.