dglenn and I and several of our friends (I'm not aware of
any of 'em having an LJ) decided to make a Star Wars movie: Star Wars 4½: A Time Of Reckoning.
Sadly, the only print I know of is lost. In any case, one of the things we did was build a command center/bridge
in my back porch. We wanted several computery screen type things to liven up the set, so dglenn
and I hauled in as many computers and monitors as we could round up, and wrote programs to display
interesting things. One of his was a great pixel-by-pixel stipple-shaded crescent moon on (IIRC) a TRS-80.
However, it wasn't very dynamic, so I banged out a "spaceship ID" program on an Atari 800. It simply
generated several random points, connected most of them with lines, and spit out random ID tags at the
bottom. Dumb, but kinda fun to watch.
Fast forward to today. As a Cocoa programming exercise, I recreated the spaceship ID program as a MacOS X screen saver! To install, just ungzip and untar it (doubleclick will do it), and move the SpaceShipID.saver file into your Library/Screen Savers directory or /System/Library/Screen Savers if you want it available to all the users on your machine. It shows up in the screen savers menu as SpaceShipID.
For those of you who distrust precompiled software or are curious, the
source is available as well.
