pf

A simple pixelflut client for linux.

But... Why?

Originally, I hacked together a pretty simple python script to get some pixels painted on a pixelflut screen. Then someone told me about sendfile (2) and its python bindings. So I figured I might get away with just libpng and a bunch of linux syscalls (plus plain old threads later on, maybe). Having worked with cmake in the past, I also wanted to try meson and get my hands dirty with some programming on a lower level than I'm used to.

What does it do?

Read a PNG file, convert it to pixelflut commands and send those to a target host/port forever. If no host is specified, the program prints the pixelflut commands and terminates. Usage is pretty straight forward (see pf -h):

Usage: pf [options] <image>

Options:
-H <host>           Target host name
-b <buffer size>    Size of command buffer in byte (default: 1 MiB)
-h                  Show this help and exit
-p <port>           Target port number (default: 1234)
-v                  Verbose
-w <worker count>   Number of worker threads (default: 1)
-x <offset>         X offset for image coordinates (default: 0)
-y <offset>         Y offset for image coordinates (default: 0)

How do I build this again?

# Set up meson build directory
meson setup builddir && cd builddir

# Compile executable
meson compile

# Run unit tests
meson test

Is this any good?

Probably not, but I have fun hacking on it.