[geeks] Alarms, or why I hate computers

[jodys at helluin.org]

So, I haven't needed my alarm for awhile, and it's power socket is now
being used by the monitor. Well I need to wake up at a certain time
tommorow. So, stupidly enough, I decided that I should use my workstation
(an Indy running Irix 6.5.16m) to wake me up instead. I decided to do
this about 1:00AM, it's now 1:45AM and I need to be up at 9:00AM.

This follows

isengard ~ > apropos alarm
alarm (2)               - set a process alarm clock
alarm (3F)              - execute a subroutine after a specified time
PXFALARM (3F)           - Schedule alarm signal
ualarm (3C)             - generate a SIGALRM signal in ``useconds'' microseconds
isengard ~ >

No joy. Score Unix 1 - Jody 0. Maybe SGI make some nifty OpenGL alarm clock, 
with 3D rotating numbers or something, but I don't want to spend the time 
sifting through /usr to find it. (or searching through the reams of Irix 
docus (which are overall good, I might add)). Let's see what the open source 
world has to offer.

I search www.freshmeat.net for alarm. Bunch of promising looking software.
I decide that I should try for a simple, single purpose program, thinking
that the more complicated day planners and such are more likely to crash
or screw up (definitely an anti-feature in an alarm clock). To make a 
long boring story short, I tried 4 separate single purpose alarm clock
programs. Score Unix 5 - Jody 0. Not a single one seemed to serve it's 
purpose. It either didn't compile or didn't have the features. (Features!
I say, it's an alarm clock!, why do you need 
    -slope float_val            set angle of the digits
but no option to set the duration of the alarm?)

Finally, I broke down and decided to try using at(1). Which I don't think
I've ever had a use for. So I pull up the man page and try the examples.
Which for some reason didn't work when I tried them, but mysteriously 
start working now (confound you evil machine!). So finally I get a test 
(echo "Help me!" into the at queue. 3... 2... 1...  Nothing. Oh at 
doesn't log stdout or stderr of the proccess it runs, it figures you 
would take care of it. So I say screw it, I don't wan't to figure out 
how I should go about redirecting echo's stderr and stdout to a file 
so I can see if at is working, and just try to see if I can make this 
10 year old, once state of the art workstation make a noise on cue. 
I slap "playaiff ~/somerandomsound.aiff" in the at que for 30 seconds
hence.

Testing... 3... 2... 1... ...  ... ... wait a bit, maybe at has a 
lag... NOTHING!

Unix 6 - Jody 0 

So I'm giving up, monitor becomes unplugged, alarm clock goes in.

Part of me is saying "You know Jody, you're just not as good at Unix
as you used to be, you're slipping", the other part is saying 
"It's a friggin alarm clock! A schizophrenic EE dropout can design
one while drunk! Hell, I can probably design one with 4 beers in 
me! This isn't orbital engineering! It shouldn't be this HARD!" 

BTW I just spent 30mins composing this rant, when I should of
been sleeping... I hate computers.

Jody