Nyan Cat Telnet Server

As with nearly everything I make, this is open source (NCSA license) and available on github (klange). You can also follow me on Twitter (@kevinlange). Watch Nyan Cat on a VT220

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My Résumé

This is an animated, color, ANSI-text telnet server that renders a loop of the classic Nyan Cat animation. (Mirrors)

Open up a supported terminal^ and run:

telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu

Or you can click here on some browsers.

Nyan Cat Buy this CD!

Don't see poptart cat? Check the terminal support notices and caveats below.

[Nyan Cat]
Screenshot from gnome-terminal

In addition to telnet, netcat may also work. Check which version of netcat you're using and note that you can't tell netcat what terminal to report so you will always get "ansi" mode (non-xterm-256-color, uses "10X" for bright backgrounds).

BSD   nc -v miku.acm.uiuc.edu 23

GNU   nc -T miku.acm.uiuc.edu 23

Supported Terminals

Should work on all of the following (assuming at least an 80x24 terminal):

xterm
Gnome Terminal
Konsole
PuTTY
Linux framebuffers (software, run as is; hardware terminals use TERM=fallback telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu)
iSSH
ConnectBot
urxvt
rxvt
Terminal.app on 10.7 (10.6 and before, run TERM=ansi telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu)
cygwin
Windows Terminal: Run as telnet -t vtnt miku.acm.uiuc.edu
VT220 with TERM=vt220 telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu
Shell in a Box (web terminal) with TERM=linux telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu

Troubleshooting

If you get bad output

If you are using a modern terminal which reports itself as xterm or similar and you don't see Nyan Cat, try:

TERM=ansi telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu

If everything else fails and you know your terminal supports at least standard ANSI escapes (color), try:

TERM=fallback telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu

If that gets the colors right, but you don't support unicode, try one of the following:

TERM=linux telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu # For background-only, prints spaces
TERM=vtnt telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu  # Foreground, uses extended ASCII block characters

If you are on Windows and using the native terminal, try this:

telnet -t vtnt miku.acm.uiuc.edu

If the server isn't responding

Shoot me an email: langek (A) acm (D) org
Or let me known on Twitter: @kevinlange

The server is set up to run with inetd and should be fairly stable by now, but if something does happen, let me know and I'll try to bring everything back online.

Notes

The server is written in C and runs with inetd. It does not make use of ncurses or other terminal libraries, but rather writes raw ANSI escape sequences after being given a terminal type, which telnet passes as part of its handshake. It was originally written for my personal operating system.

The server running the service is part of the UIUC ACM cluster.

If your connection is lost during a successful run, it's probably because I restarted the server.

References

Nyan Cat was originally made by prguitarman.

Astute readers have noticed that this server's hostname is miku and that the original source of the Nyan Cat song was done with the Hatsune Miku (初音ミク) Vocaloid vocal set. During the summer of 2010, this hostname pointed to my personal server (it's a cluster VM now), which was in fact named after the Vocaloid.

Development

As stated previously, code is up on Github at klange/nyancat. I am accepting changes if they are worthwhile and improve the overall experience.

The application behind the telnet server was originall written for my toy OS. I was presented with the idea of making it a telnet server by friend and colleague Mike Lynn. It took about an hour of work to set up the animation to run at the right size (80x24), work on various terminals, and execute from a telnet connection.