Greasymouse v0.0
1 Legal
2 Compiling and Installing
3 What does it do?
4 Why could I possibly want this?
5 Command line options
6 Bugs
7 Todo
8 Ports
9 The author
1 Legal
This program is distributed under the terms on the GNU general public license.
See www.gnu.org or read LICENSE distributed with this program.
2 Compiling and Installing
V0.0 of the program is very simple.
make greasymouse
creates the greasymouse binary.
make clean
does the same but forces a recompile
make install
copies the binary to $XDIR, which will probably need changing. It it by
/usr/X11/bin
I don't have an Imakefile, so if anyone wants to send me one, I would really
appreciate it.
It has been compiles on Linux, Solaris and Irix (several versions of each) with
no problems.
3 What does it do?
Greasy mouse does just that. It greases your mouse - it makes it slide around
the screen and bounce off the edges. It was supposed to serve no useful purpose
whatsoever, but unfortunately I came across a computer with a very bad mouse
that moved very slowly. Increasing the speed setting made it move with very low
resolution, so I ran greasymouse and it worked fine.
Esentially, it calculates the speed of the mouse and keeps moving the mouse at
that speed. It also divides the speed by a `greasyness' factor each iteration,
so it usually slows down, unless you set the greasyness to less than unity.
4 Why could I possibly want this?
Erm... for fun. It's quite amusing to run it on an unsuspecting victim's
computer and watch them gawp as the mouse starts bouncing around the screen.
It also makes small buttons *very* hard to click on but makes the mouse very
smooth to use, and afterwards it seems very jerky.
5 Command line options
gm [grease factor]
gm --help
Grease factor is any floating point number thet the speed is divided by each
iteration.
1.031 is the default
1 the mouse just keeps on going
>4 almost no noticable effect
<1 *CAREFUL* the mouse accfelerates continuously and eventually gets stuck.
If you have pointer focus on then it can be very difficult to kill if
you don't have virtual terminals or another computer to rlogin from.
6 Bugs
None, really. Except it eventually gets stuck in a corner with negative damping.
But that's not a bug.
7 Todo
Ooooh, loads of things:
* Proper command line options
* `Focal lines' if you were to have an attractive focal line along the
bottom of the screen that would be like having gravity affecting the
mouse.
* Focal points. Have you ever wondered how a charged mouse would
respond in an arcane physics experiment?
* X resources
* Bouncing relative to a non root window. This will make paint packages
much more fun.
* Some kind of speed limiting.
8 Ports
Because it's so simple, it should compile on almost C compiler with X11 libs. If
you want it ported to MacOS / BeOS / Windows / RiscOS etc, then make sure you
have a large desk, and grease it!
9 The author
It's me, Edward Rosten.
If you need to, then contact me at:
edward.rosten@stcatz.ox.ac.uk
Although, for this program, you probably won't need to.
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