Network Aware Screensavers?

borgquite asks: "Does anyone know of any network aware screensavers? I am running a school network and would love to be able to have a screensaver where the other computers communicate with each other in some way - for example, if you could have a marquee where the message gets passed from screen to screen. The best I can find is n 0 time, but is there anything else a bit more exciting?"

Comments

Killjoys

[Atzanteol]

Wow, so far most of the posts have been "why would you do this? It's not necessary."

Gawd, have things gotten sooo bad that coding useless but nifty apps is a lost art? Doesn't anybody tinker anymore?

I'm *soooo* sick of seeing post after post of "but why would I need this?" If you're asking this question, click the frigging back button already. You don't. Fuck off. Let the rest of us who would like a nifty-but-useless little app be merry.

I'm so worked up now I may write something like this just to piss off the 'practical' /. crowd...

DIY

[Permission Denied]

As usual, my response is to search google for a half hour. If google doesn't turn up anything, do it yourself.

I did this a few years ago. I wrote a screensaver that bounced a logo around. The whole reason for the screen saver was that it sent a UDP packet to a central logging server noting the time that the screen saver came on and went off. This allowed us to log each machine's idle time, and I had various awk scripts that made nice little reports (win32 screen saver, but server stuff is kept on Unix of course).

This was a really trivial program - one C file, took me maybe an hour or two to write. It would be extremely easy to extend it so that it sent a UDP packet to the "next" machine (where each machine has an ordered list of machines, saved in the registry), and waited for a reply. If no reply, send the packet to the machine after that, and so on. Once you get a reply, turn off the marquee; if no reply, wrap marquee around. The screen saver also listens for UDP packets when it's running. If it receives a packet when it doesn't have a marquee, it sends a reply, and scrolls in the marquee from the left. The only tough part is some sort of synchronization mechanism to ensure the marquee doesn't skip around; this synchronization would happen when the machine starts up the screen saver (this part is cloudy, the rest of the design is clear in my head).

I can't find my old code - this is a while ago, like five or six disk crashes - and the code was so trivial, I didn't put it in CVS (I only back up my CVS repositories, everything else I lose whenever a disk fails).

I might write this after dinner, since it sounds kind of cool. If I do, I'll base64 encode it and put it in my journal, so check my journal tomorrow morning (can't post directly to slashdot because of lameness filter, but it seems lameness filter doesn't apply to journal entries). I try to write my win32 stuff using gcc (cygwin environment for development, avoid cygwin libraries in final product) - if cygwin is missing the screensaver headers or something, I might use the MS .NET SDK (which is free and comes with fully-functional C and C++ compilers, nmake, and everything you really need to write win32 programs, just no lame IDE). If that won't work, I'll use VS 6.0.

I challenge anyone else on slashdot to write a better version, from scratch, by tommorow (2002-12-13). Should get interesting if anyone takes me up on this. I have to go to work tomorrow (which limits the time I can put into it), but you college kids should have plenty of free time since you should be on winter break by now.

Sonar on X

[EvilMal]

The Sonar screensaver for X allows you to set it up to ping other systems on the network. I believe you can make it ping the whole network. The other systems are shows as blips on a radar. The higher the ping, the further away they are, I believe.

Re:Environment,

[Kaeru the Frog]

Here! Here!

My house is right next to the local whale based power plant and every time they throw another whale in the fire it creates a really awful smell. I suggest we get rid of all of the power plants that burn whales and use only ones that burn dolphins and baby seals. They are much easier on the air.

Primordial Life

[pythorlh]

Primordial Life is a great network aware screensaver. It creates little creatures that evolve as the screensaver runs. Using the network, creatures that reach the edge of the screen can be sent to other computers, for a much larger virtual world.

"Would, you, like, to, play, a, game?"

[E1v!$]

It would be neat to setup a game server, and have a small game launch as the screen saver running a bot. The idle computers could compete against each other.

(people could write bot plugins...)

Blinkeneye

[FunkyRat]

This reminds me of the old computer folklore story. I've heard two versions of it, one occurring at MIT, and one occurring at Georgia Tech. If anybody out there knows the true origin of this story I'd appreciate knowing.

The story associated with MIT goes that an unknown prankster programmed the mainframe to pick a random unused terminal in one of the computer labs, display a large eye on the screen, look left and right, wink and then disappear only to reappear on yet another unused terminal in the room. Apparently this caused quite a panic among the janitors at the time who thought the computer was watching them.

The story associated with Georgia Tech goes that late one night (or early one morning depending on how you look at it), a sleepy eyed operator was running the nightly backups. As he watched the status lines scroll by, a large (CBS logo style) eye appears on screen, winks and then disappears leaving only the status messages scrolling.

DALiWorld

[Hank Reardon]

How about DALiWorld

It's a giant, multiple machine aquarium. You'll not only get fish swimming across machines in your network, but across the Internet. Here's a blurb from their site:

At DALi we are not just building software that will allow you to have a localized world and ecology, we are building systems that will engender truly ubiquitous artificial life. We are not targeting any particular platform. Instead, we are targeting all of them. Our universe will be everywhere - bits of DALi scattered across millions of computing devices the world-over. In personal computers, portable devices, automobiles, airplanes, even your television. Our aim is to be the first company to realize the living global digital Gaia: a virtual ocean distributed across machines that span the entire non-virtual world; a community of millions of users all taking part in building this virtual ocean, creating the ecology and the life forms that inhabit it; the life forms seamlessly swimming from one machine to the next... And we want you to be our co-creator.

The only drawback for me is that it's written in Java, so getting it to run on the FreeBSD servers in the data center didn't work.

Have fun!