MACCEL.DOC
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"A 'Bot shall not harm its 'Botmaster, nor through inaction
allow its 'Botmaster to come to harm."
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It's like this. There were these REALLY BIG monitors. And you
practically had to have desk space the size of Cleveland to use them.
Now, I didn't have one of these HUGE monitors, but I was living in this
tiny cubicle, with barely enough space on the desk to spill my coffee in
the morning, let alone maneuver a rodent. And I look around me, and
there are all these other 'Bots lined up in neat little rows, and they
all have about as much room on their desktops as I did.
Then one day Small Dave shows me this neat feature of Another
Desktop: the mouse response is adjustable. You can configure how
responsive it feels. He called it a mouse accelerator.
"A what?" I asked him.
"A mouse accelerator," he repeated.
"So you strap rockets on their furry little backs, or what?"
So I ask jwt, "Jim, how would you do a mouse accelerator?" Because
(as he is fond of reminding us) Jim knows everything. It's just a
matter of getting him to tell you what he knows.
"Well, I guess I'd hang off the keyboard interrupt, and..."
I was in luck. Jim was talking. So I took what he was saying, and
pidgeonholed it away into the trivia cache that I call a mind, and
waited for it to rear its ugly head again someday.
And there were these REALLY BIG monitors, and the idea spewed forth from
my tormented mind in the form of software.
The first version of the thing was really mysterious. I mean, it worked,
but here you have this three-hundred-odd byte program in your auto folder,
and nobody knows WHAT it's doing. It could be happily corrupting your FATs,
for all you know (a feature we considered adding for debugging purposes,
incidentally). But my roommate was happy with it, and he hacked it into
the driver for the HUGE monitors. Which made me happy. I saved him maybe
a day or three of head-scratching. Not to mention the potential hair loss.
But for some reason I couldn't fully comprehend, nobody wanted to use
my little program on their normal-sized monitors. So what if it
silently sat on the keyboard controller chip, gobbling up each and every
bit of mouse information that came its way? Why should it bother them
that every time the monitor's electron beam returned to the top of the
screen, my program checked its own pulse and stomped on anyone, anything
in the system that even looked like it was going to get between the
mouse accelerator and the keyboard chip?
"Would you like to try this mouse accelerator?" I'd ask, meekly.
They would give me excuses:
"It makes the mouse move too fast, I can't control it."
"I'm debugging, I can't put anything alien in my auto folder."
"I have to wash my hair."
"Could you pass me that stop button?"
"What you really want is..."
They would lie to me:
"I have plenty of space on my desk."
"I'm not wearing any pants."
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"A 'Bot shall obey the orders of its 'Botmaster, except when
doing so would conflict with the First Law."
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After a few months of rejection, I decided it was time to take
action. So I dove in again. I went out to dinner. It got a bootup
message. I did my laundry. It let you turn it on and off. I drove up
and down 101. It began taking advantage of the dreaded "Townsend
Effect". I studied Kierkegaard. It became smarter. My mother called.
Ken "nmn" made me wire up a speed switch.
I didn't let akp look at it. I knew what I REALLY wanted.
I had to let LT look at it. He told me its brains were scrambled;
it accelerated backwards. "You mean it decelerates?"
"No, it accelerates backwards. This algorithm sucks. And it could
use some more comments here and there."
So I changed the algorithm, made it accelerate forward. I added
some comments here and there. And LT said you could have it.
Put it in your auto folder, or run it from the desktop. You can
talk to it two ways, think of them as toggle switches. It goes on
and off, it goes slow and fast. Learn the language of the mouse
accelerator. Live it. Perpend:
Simultaneously press the Control, left Shift, and Alternate keys, and
at the same time, click a mouse button. Depending on which button you
click, you will tell the accelerator one of two things. The LEFT button
tells it to turn itself on and off. If it was on, it will turn itself
off. If it was off, it will come back to life. The RIGHT mouse button
tells it to toggle the amount of acceleration (if the accelerator is
active). Two speeds. Slow and fast.
For those of you with a furniture fetish, here is a table:
Action Function Settings
----------------------------------- ------------ ---------
Control-Shift-Alternate-Left Click Acceleration ON/OFF
Control-Shift-Alternate-Right Click Speed SLOW/FAST
The accelerator can talk to you in only one way: you must run it.
Run it from a shell, or double-click MACCEL.PRG on the desktop, but you
gotta run it. It will discover that it has already been installed
and remind you how to talk to it. It will also cleverly display its
current settings (on or off, slow or fast).
In operation, the mouse accelerator is well behaved. It stays out of
the way of other software, it stays installed across resolution changes,
and it doesn't noticeably slow the system down. It does noticeably
speed your mouse response up. If you move the mouse real fast, the
cursor moves farther (real fast). If you move the mouse more slowly,
the mouse cursor tracks normally. Real handy if you, like a good 'Bot,
have a desk cluttered with paperwork and other important stuff.
Since I didn't feel like I had punished myself quite enough, I
decided to make the silly thing even more the User's Friend by hacking
up a configuration program. Run MACONFIG from the desktop, and it will
ask you where MACCEL.PRG is located, read it in, ask you for the
default values you want at boot time: on or off (although why you would
want it to default to off is beyond me...), slow or fast. Then after
asking for confirmation, it will write out a new version of the
program, with the new defaults you have selected. If you modify it in
place in your auto folder, all you need do is reboot, and you will get
your favorite flavors as defaults.
If you're warped enough to want to look at the source code for these
fine programs, it is available in a separate archive file: MACCELS.ARC.
Available wherever fine foods are sold.
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"A 'Bot shall act to protect its own existence, except when
such actions would conflict with the First or Second Laws."
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