Maybe it's just me, but I really
dislike playing chess against a program where a clock is displayed
showing the time I and the program each take to make a move. The
clock's presence is a distraction and creates an undesirable sense of
tension. On top of that, it subtly suggests the my inferiority by
constantly highlighting how much faster the computer 'thinks' than I
do. My inclination, thus, is to disable such a clock as quickly as
possible.
Vulcan includes such a clock but
unfortunately I found it to include no option to disable the clock.
I was quite dismayed.
To correct this oversight, my first
course of action was to find the point in the program where the clock
was displayed and hack it so as to disable the display. This worked
great! Problem solved! Then I thought about other people and how
they might or might not want the clock displayed depending on their
mood, and I started feeling guilty...
So, I went on to add an option
to the Options menu to enable turning the clock on and off. This was
fine for starters. But the clock defaulted to on, I wanted it to
default to off, and others might still want it to default to on. Not
wanting to dictate the default to anybody, I added the command line
option -t (the program already has a -c command line option; '-t'
stands for 'time clock'). When included on the command line when
launching the program, this option 
starts the program with the clock
off; otherwise the program starts with the clock on.
The result is all wrapped up in a free
patch that's available at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vulcanchessmods/files/feature_patches/clock_option/.
