Dead man's alarm
Simple java application suggested by Ben Maughan.
Posts a GUI countdown timer on the screen, when it reaches zero it sounds an alarm or something.
The intention is to use it in the observatory to guard against people having an accident and not being able to raise the alarm.
A makefile is included. On a Un*x system, just do
make build
to create the jar file (deadman.jar).
Then you can run it with
java -jar deadman.jar
There are various configuration options, which you can set in
various ways. Some of the options are (re)configurable from
within the application. You can set the defaults from the command line
or a configuration file, using name=value assignments.
To see the options, run:
java -jar deadman.jar -h
To set, e.g., the default reset time to 180 seconds, you can run
java -jar deadman.jar reset=180
or you can include the line
reset=180
in a file deadman.props. To write a skeleton config file, run
java -jar deadman.jar -writeconfig
If you want to use a different config file, you can specify that on the command line:
java -jar deadman.jar config=myconfigfile.props