A cool chess clock
Playing chess with friends in the Pampa Humida, I couldn't find a proper way to teach my friends on how to play quickly enough so that the game wouldn't become boring as hell. So I found this web page with a simple chess clock on it. Written in javascript, it wasn't exactly reliable or fast, and required me to have network access (unless I saved the page to my machine, but anyways). Also, the web browser overhead was too much for my taste.
So I started looking around for software to fulfill my needs. The only clock I could find was Ghronos but it was Java-based and (so?) I couldn't get it to run natively on my machine (it would run in a browser, but then I would be back to square one).
So I opened up Emacs and started hacking at a pygtk program, because I like Python and I found that GTK looked decent enough I wanted to learn it. Within a few hours, I got a basic version working (0.1) that was just a countdown. A few hours more and I got fisher delays implemented (0.2). (That took around five hours according to the changelog.)
Then I went to debconf8 in Mar del Plata and tried real hard (okay, I didn't try at all) to keep myself from working on the software and follow the conference, and failed, so I polished the interface and implemented more features: a reset handler, control over the initial time (duh!), colors, etc. Now I think it's a pretty decent clock, still lacking some features, but it's been fun anyways.
Now I've got a 1.0 version which seems pretty mature to me anyways. It's been fun.
The chessclock can be downloaded through the Koumbit Redmine site or through git:
git clone git://git.koumbit.net/gameclock.git
The is also a package in Debian and Ubuntu.
Update: Gameclock died, see the obituary.
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