Author:

• Name: Edward Rosten
  Location: GB - United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (United Kingdom)

To build:

    make

NOTE: this entry requires the X11/Xlib.h header file and the X11 library to compile. For more information see the FAQ on “X11”.

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: INABIAF - please DO NOT fix

For more detailed information see 2001/rosten in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./rosten [number]

WARNING: this will mess with your mouse and can make it hard to quit the program. Use at your own risk.

NOTE: number is floating point.

Try:

    ./rosten 1.03
    ./rosten 1.00

For some abuse, try:

    ./rosten 0.99

Judges’ remarks:

Friction can be your friend if it does not rub you (or your mouse cursor) in the wrong way. :-)

Author’s remarks:

NAME

rosten - make the mouse act as if it has been greased

SYNOPSIS

    ./rosten [greasiness]

DESCRIPTION

This program is designed primarily to make your X windows interface more obfuscated. Try doing something mouse driven (such as using a mouse driven editor on this program) whilst it is running. If you’re not sure what it does, looking at the code should give a fair idea.

The file greasymouse.man is a cat man page if you want to install it as a ‘utility’.

OPTIONS

It only takes one optional option: the greasiness factor. This is the number that the speed is divided by on each iteration. The default is 1.03. A setting of 1 - no friction - is fun as is 0.99.

Being an X program, it recognises the DISPLAY variable.

PORTABILITY

The program is very portable, even to non X architectures. All that is required is a large desk and some good grease.

COMMENTS

It is really rather surprising that code like this should not only be portable, but compile with almost no warnings on most of the compilers tested. It’s a kind of shame that none of the compilers do anything like this:

    $ make greasymouse
    cc greasymouse.c -o greasymouse -lX11
    greasymouse.c:30: This macro should have more text and spaces in it
    greasymouse.c:32: This is a really stupid way to perform this operation
    greasymouse.c:42: This program would look better with a newline here
    greasymouse.c:48: That's a really silly thing to do
    greasymouse.c:55: So is that
    ...
    greasymouse.c:58: This program is rubbish. I'm not going to link it.

The code is best viewed with tab stops every 8 spaces. If you use vi(m) see the FAQ on “tab stops”.

BUGS

The mouse gets stuck completely if you give it an option of less than 1 and leave it for too long. This is quite annoying if it didn’t leave the terminal it was run from in focus.

It gets very jerky if the processor is being used. There are better time functions than clock() but I haven’t used them.

It deflects slightly when it gets very slow.

It annoys other people if you run it on their display too often. Maybe I should make future versions print funny jokes to keep the humor fresh.

It’s pretty ropey over a 56K modem.

It’s even ropier over a 56K modem and tunneled through 3 ssh links.

WARNINGS

Pages and pages and pages of things, with GCC at any rate.

It suggests loads of ()s where they’re not needed.

It reckons I have not used some of the values I have computed. I would never do a thing like that: I just haven’t used them in the way it’s used to.

The MIPS compiler suggests an == instead of an = in expressions such as:

    &&(a=b)

but its suggestions would break my program. It also reckons that r() has no prototype.

Giving the -pedantic option to the MIPS compiler causes it to generate warnings about its own header files, but not any extra ones with this program.

With all warnings enabled, the DEC compiler, oddly enough finds some problems with its own include files, but none with my program.

ERRORS

The DEC compiler of this version: DEC C V5.6-079 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (Rev. 878) can’t compile the code. It thinks that preprocessor lines can not have whitespace preceding the #. Moving the preprocessor directives to the beginning of the line wrecks the layout but makes it compile.

Primary files

• rosten.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• rosten.orig.c - original source code
• greasymouse.man - cat man page

Secondary files

• 2001_rosten.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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