Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir via Core-talk" <[email protected]> · Fri, 15 Nov 2019 11:03:42 -0600

On 11/15, Ralph Lange via Core-talk wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Nov 2019 at 06:05, Ralph Lange <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > My favourite: One line printed per module linked into the IOC, so that you
> > have a small table of "versions used" in the log - even when you're looking
> > at old logs where issuing a "version" command should have been done months
> > ago.
> >
> 
> Well ... there's actually two things that are probably to be handled
> separately:
> 
> 1. An ASCII splash screen
> That's technically pretty useless, but a traditional and valuable marketing
> tool. Remember the VxWorks logo that was scrolling through when an IOC
> booted? You do, even after more than a decade - that's why it's valuable.
> We could have a splash, based on an ASCII version of the new logo. Maybe
> mention the main contributing labs (like the CS-Studio splash)? 10 lines
> max.?
> And - like in VxWorks - users should be able to opt out by setting an
> environment variable.

-1.  Please, no.  If you really want it, make it opt-in so that I don't
have to do extra work to get rid of it.  I don't think it adds any
marketing value.  Anyone who will see the banner on an IOC boot console
or log would already know what EPICS is and have no problem remembering
or finding it.

> @Timo: Do you think Dirk also does ASCII design?

Not that I support the ASCII splash screen idea, but FYI, FIGlet [1] can
generate ASCII art from text, and there are programs [2][3][4][5] that
can generate ASCII art from images.

Lewis

[1]: http://www.figlet.org/
[2]: https://csl.name/jp2a/
[3]: http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/
[4]: http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aview/
[5]: https://github.com/alexvking/png2ascii

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System