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The jawsh.mccullaugh.com Christmas Countdown


Now that Christmas is getting near, I thought it would be great to post a Christmas countdown in celebration of the season.  Of course, since I'm just a little bit odd (okay, I'm weird and a geek), I thought it would be great to put a do it yourself Christmas countdown.  So, I sat down to lunch with one of my best friends who just happens to be someone who really loves math and we (okay, mostly she... okay, she did all of the work) came up with this equation to calculate how long it would take until Christmas.  Now, how this works is you put the current date (just the date, not month or year) into the i variable.  Then you set c=h=r=i=s=t=m=a=s.  The output you get is the amount of days until Christmas.

Here's the equation:

c + 4Πh - 7Πr - i + 25 - t + m + a + s = Number of days till christmas

I also made a computer program that does the same thing.  I'm not currently distributing a binary version (one that just runs) right now because there are probably many programs and websites out there that have something like this.  The point of this program is the code itself so I'm giving you the source code in C.  (That means you have to get a C compiler and compile it yourself).

Here it is: (and yes, I've tested it and it works)

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <time.h>

int getmonth(char thetime[]){
  char tempy[4];
  tempy[0] = thetime[4];
  tempy[1] = thetime[5];
  tempy[2] = thetime[6];
  tempy[3] = NULL;
  if (strcmp(tempy,"Dec") == 0) return 12;
  else return 0;
}

int getdate(char thetime[]){
  char temp[3];

  temp[0] = thetime[8]; //get the first number of the date
  temp[1] = thetime[9]; //get the second number of the date
  temp[2] = NULL; //end the string

  return atoi(temp);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
  char thetime[28];
  int month;
  int date;

  if (argc == 1) {
    //first we get the time
    time_t rawtime; //making somewhere to store the time
   
    time(&rawtime); //getting the current time
   
    strcpy(thetime,ctime(&rawtime)); //putting the full time in a string

    //now we're going to fetch the date from thetime to an int
   
    month = getmonth(thetime); //used to make sure it's december
    date = getdate(thetime); //used to calculate how many days till christmas
  }

  else{
    char datething[2];
    strcpy(datething,argv[1]);
    month = 12;
    date = atoi(datething);
  }

  //I stop commenting here so as not the ruin the fun
  if (month == 12) {
    if (date > 25) printf("It's after christmas.  Sorry you missed it.\n");
    else if (date == 25) printf("It's christmas!\n");
    else {
      float c,h,r,i,t,m,a,s;
      i = (float)date;

      c = i;
      h = c;
      r = h;
      i = r;
      s = i;
      t = s;
      m = t;
      a = m;
      s = a;

      float pi = 3.141592653589793; //I know it's not terribly accurate but it should work for what we need.

      float days_till_christmas;

      days_till_christmas = 3*pi*c+4*pi*h-7*pi*r-i+25-t+m+a-s;

      printf("Only %f days until christmas.\n", days_till_christmas);
    }
  }
  else printf("It's not December.  This program only works in december.  Sorry.\n");
 
  return 0;
}

Here it is in a .c file: christmas.c

Update:

The program used to segfault at the end but I fixed it so that it won't.  Another update to this page may be coming soon (hopefully sometime tomorrow).
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