13 Miscellaneous Software.

John Mackin, john@cs.su.oz.AU

A clock that will show you instantly what parts of the globe are exposed by sunlight and what parts aren't.

Released.

X-Windows.

sunclock is another of those desktop gadgets that most people think look nice but really don't have a lot of use for. I use sunclock to obtain an at-a-glance indication of the time anywhere in the world. In its iconic form it sits in a small Mercator projection. When maximised it produces the same image but obviously larger with slightly more detail. It also displays the date, local time and UTC. sunclock actually calculates mathematically what parts of globe are sunlit and which aren't, it seems quite accurate, so long as you assume the earth has no atmosphere.

I haven't seen any precompiled sunclock binaries for Linux about, so check your nearest archie server. sunclock compiled straight out of the box for me.

Public Domain and may be freely copied as long as the notices at the top of sunclock.c remain intact.

Terry Dawson, VK2KTJ

Kirk Lauritz Johnson, tuna@cag.lcs.mit.edu, modified by Dimitris Evmorfopoulos, devmorfo@cs.mtu.edu.

A rotating earth for X-windows root window. It has real life shading, and options for geostatic view, and non geostatic view. A prettier and more modern version of sunclock but requires a bit more processing power.

released, stable.

X-Windows.

xearth is much like sunclock except that it draws a view of the earth onto your root map in blue and green, as the earth would be viewed from space. You have a number of options in determining the behaviour of the view. You can either have it so that the same part of the earth is displayed, and the sun rotates, so you'll have varying light and shadow on the display, or you can have it shown as if you were travelling with the sun, so the whole of the globe is visible, and the earth rotates. You can specify the latitude/longtitude that will be the centre of the display. xearth is also capable of producing gif and ppm graphics output, so you can generate custom graphics of the globe. When run as your root map, you can adjust the interval of time between updates. On my 486sx25 you notice a small degradation in performance when it is recalculating, but it's not annoying.

A precompiled xearth binary is available from: sunsite.unc.edu, or the source can be obtained from just about any X11/contrib directory. Try export.lcs.mit.edu if you can't find it elsewhere.

Copyright (C) 1989, 1990, 1993 by Kirk Lauritz Johnson. The copyright notice included states that xearth is freely redistributable so long as the copyright notice is left intact, and be included in documentation.

Alan Cox, GW4PTS.