Reticulating Spines and Other Wastes of Time

I just posted a message to the monodevelop-list of the same title, but I figured since there's about 7 people on that mailing list, I'd better post to my blog to ensure maximum coverage (9 people!). The actual mailing list posting can be found here, but I'll summarize.

The splash screen loading messages in MonoDevelop are about as exciting as a 1040 tax form, so I created a patch to randomly display more interesting messages like:

• "Nerfing Pirates, Buffing Ninjas..."
• "Zesting Oranges...
• "Adjusting Radiation Levels..."
• "Locking Boxes..."
• "Burninating the Peasants..."

There's quite a few more, and it's thoroughly entertaining to watch. To get an idea of what it looks like, check out this screenshot on flickr.

The behavior is triggered by an environment variable "RETICULATE", so setting the environment variable will turn on a more exciting splash screen when you start MonoDevelop. Starting it from a build set of sources, you would call: tyler@onion:~/sources/mono-project/monodevelop> RETICULATE=1 make run

The patch: ProgressTracker.cs.diff

[tags: monodevelop, mono, burnination, reticulatingspines]

• Posted: 19/12/06 10:27AM
• Category: Programmr

Write reply