Recently, my wife (who knows I'm addicted to anything with blinking LEDs on it) suggested that I might hook a monitor to my headless Linux box and have it display just blinking lights in the screen. Once I tore myself away from staring at the modem and ethernet hub, I took a crash course in Curses and threw together the following script.

Of course, now I want to add more monitors to the box just to have more things blinking at me ;)

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use Curses;
my $win = new Curses;
my ($x, $y, $color,$bold,$char);
initscr;
start_color;

# Initialize the 6 color pairs I'll use
init_pair 1, COLOR_GREEN,   COLOR_BLACK;
init_pair 2, COLOR_RED,     COLOR_BLACK;
init_pair 3, COLOR_YELLOW,  COLOR_BLACK;
init_pair 4, COLOR_BLUE,    COLOR_BLACK;
init_pair 5, COLOR_MAGENTA, COLOR_BLACK;
init_pair 6, COLOR_CYAN,    COLOR_BLACK;
init_pair 7, COLOR_BLACK,   COLOR_WHITE;
halfdelay(1);  #wait for 1/10 secs for keystroke
noecho;        #don't echo keystrokes

# Loop to continuously blink the lights
while (1) {
    $x = int(rand(79));
    $y = int(rand(23));
    $color = int(rand(8));  # use one of my 7 color pairs
    $bold = int(rand(2));
    # Use a space as my character
    $char = 32|COLOR_PAIR($color)|A_REVERSE;
    if ( $bold > 0 ) { $char = $char|A_BOLD; }
    $win->addch($y,$x,$char);
    $win->refresh;
    # exit loop when a key is pressed
    last unless ($win->getch() eq -1);
}
endwin;

[download]

In reply to blinkenlights by rattusillegitimus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.