Staticfree Blog

I put together a quick hack for the upcoming geek holiday: a binary countdown clock. It requires Perl, Time::ParseDate, and a VT100-compliant terminal. Run it with no arguments for this holiday.

The holiday is another high-order bit being flipped in the Unix time. Unix time, for those not in-the-know, is the number of seconds since midnight of Jan. 1, 1970. You might think, "wow, that must be a lot of seconds". It is. At precisely 08:37:04 tomorrow (January 10^th), it will reach 2³⁰ (or 1,073,741,824) seconds - hence the holiday.

So, happy almost-2³⁰-seconds-since-the-Unix-epoch!

Update: I put together a Javascript version of the countdown clock. Enjoy :-)