Best abuse of the user: Edward Rosten Oxford University 34 The Chilterns Gloucester Green Oxford OX1 2DF United Kingdom http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat1148 Judges' Comments: To build: make rosten Try: ./rosten 1.03 ./rosten 1.00 For some abuse, try: ./rosten 0.99 Friction can be your friend if it does not rub you (or your mouse cursor) in the wrong way. :-) Selected Author's Comments: 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. It also has 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 recognised 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 tabstops every 8 spaces. 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 if 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 I 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.