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.
