Zeiterfassung

A simple stop watch for measuring multiple discontinuous events simultaneously. It was made to gather information on the distribution of speech time in a classroom.

This is my first published self-made program in six years, and also the first I wrote in the C programming language, as well as the first that I haven’t written just for fun. I also made it under quite some time pressure, and thus it did not become an example of elaborated programming.

This is what it looks like

Initialising:

Enter the name of speaker 1: Teacher
Enter the name of speaker 2: Student a
Enter the name of speaker 3: Student b
Time mesuring will begin after you’ve entered the last name!
Enter the name of speaker 4: Any student

When the program is running:


 ===================================

Total time spoken: 18:48

(1) Teacher
   (78 utterances) - Time spoken: 12:39 (67 %)

(2) Student a
   (2 utterances) - Time spoken: 0:15 (1 %)

(3) Student b
   (1 utterances) - Time spoken: 0:12 (1 %)

(4) Any student
   (60 utterances) - Time spoken: 5:42 (30 %)

Total time: 32:26

Press ’q’ again to quit or any other key to continue.

Download the Program

I could easily have produced binaries for Solaris on SPARC and Linux on PPC as well, but I did not bother. Both combinations are rather unusual, and in addition to that I don’t think anyone would want to carry around a SPARCstation (although it would be a nice computer for the classroom, because those I know are very quiet).