• Antony (unregistered) in reply to Aris
    Aris:
    You should take into account the fact that in 1996, almost no one really knew how to code good GUI code, since good gui frameworks did not exist (and the documentation). The guy applied what looked like a correct thing in a DOS environment (doing business logic in keypressed handlers, since it was when a key was pressed that you launched it - no threads, no message passing, no OO framework).

    People did know how to write good GUI code... It is just that a large number of code monkeys did not bother to read the reference books.

    For example. A programming book for a 32bit PC OS with a GUI reccomended back in 1992 that for any background processing, a seperate thread should be created and semaphores be used to indicate completion. The handling of any UI event should never take longer than 20ms. This book was printed by Microsoft so... there is no excuse.

  • Martin (unregistered) in reply to Antony

    A shame that most of the developers of explorer(And ipconfig) for Windows XP did not read that book.

  • mithanon (unregistered) in reply to SteveCody
    SteveCody:
    In the old days of Win3 and 95 you COULD make a page scroll faster by wiggling the mouse.
    It still works (at least in firefox), go to any long page (a wikipedia article for example), hold down your mouse as if to highlight the page and drag off the page so it just starts scrolling. Then jiggle your mouse pointer side to side...it scrolls faster

    also, TrueCrypt asks you to move your mouse randomly when generating an encryption key

  • b0ttomfeeder (unregistered) in reply to some coder
    some coder:
    b0ttomfeeder:
    Please move your mouse rapidly from side to side so the rest of this comment can be loaded.

    nothing is happening. it must be the damm Interweb again...dialing IT

    Are you sure you were moving it fast enough? Try again, but this time give it some welly.

  • RealUlli (unregistered) in reply to Nerf Herder

    There's even a reason for that. A very good reason actually: they're trying to collect random data by looking at the mouse events and using just a fraction of the data. (LSB or something)

    IMHO not a WTF, but rather an elegant solution for systems without a reliable /dev/random...

    And yes, AFAIR, it's Putty.

  • (cs) in reply to Nicholas Sherlock
    Nicholas Sherlock:
    Thomas:
    Recently, I was asked to move my mouse to generate entropy (or, as the text stated "perform work on the machine"). The program (openssl) then used some data to generate a keypair halfway (I guess it was the character buffer or something), before simply waiting for the mouse to move.

    Unfortunately, I was connected through ssh, with no mouse support. And it made no differense whether or not I logged in to another terminal and ran other programs, it did not count. I ended up generating the keypair on another machine, where I could access the mouse.

    Bearshare (if that program still exists) does this right: You can add entropy through any combination of mashing the keyboard and wiggling the mouse.

    I believe Linux programs typically use /dev/random, which collects entropy from input devices, some interrupts and disk activity. For input devices, the actual event is used, for interrupts and disks only timing data. Most network card drivers don't seem to supply irq randomness, so mashing keys over ssh is unlikely to help. However, starting a kernel compilation will generate a whole bunch of disk activity, which replenishes the entropy pool.

  • Mobile Guru (unregistered) in reply to G
    G:
    If I remember right Tasks/Processes were switched when mousemove()...

    You recall somewhat correctly. There was a discrete system call you made to allow other apps to run GetNextEvent(); . It wasn't just to get mouse events, but any system/user event such as being alerted to redraw a window, display a menu or deal with a new volume that was mounted. When you called this the OS would allot time for other apps to run. You could manipulate how often you app performed that system call to alter how much runtime you got.

    So you think this is part of past time? Nope, it works same way in the new Palm Centro. It will even skip incoming calls, if your program doesn't poll events during long calculations.

  • Tony P (unregistered)

    "So, we decided to put a lot of the background logic in the application's MouseMove event."

    I'm seriously stunned. I've seen a lot of stupid code but this, coming from the LEAD DEVELOPER. Now that's pretty crazy.

  • (cs) in reply to SteveCody
    SteveCody:
    In the old days of Win3 and 95 you COULD make a page scroll faster by wiggling the mouse. Just start a selection and drag to the bottom of the screen where upon the page will start to scroll up. Drag past the bottom of the document window and start wigging. Voila! Faster scroll.

    Not the same thing at all. This behavior is by design (intentional), and not an artifact of something else.

    You fail computer basics 101. Nice try, though. :-)

  • (cs) in reply to mithanon
    mithanon:
    It still works (at least in firefox), go to any long page (a wikipedia article for example), hold down your mouse as if to highlight the page and drag off the page so it just starts scrolling. Then jiggle your mouse pointer side to side...it scrolls faster

    also, TrueCrypt asks you to move your mouse randomly when generating an encryption key

    Again, neither of these are the same thing at all.

    Please take a course in basic computer operation before posting so you don't embarrass yourself any further. :-)

  • Edss (unregistered)

    At least they didn't do the same thing for the DOS version...

  • AC (unregistered)

    TRWTF:

    "After several meetings, it was decided that it wasn't the best idea to put critical code in an app's MouseMove event."

    Took 'em several meetings to decide that?

  • (cs) in reply to beau29
    beau29:

    I think Windows 95 (and Windows NT, for a few of us) introduced preemption and threading, which is designed to address this kind of issue.

    When I ran the first edition of XP, it felt eerily like using Win3.1. I don't think they brought back cooperative multitasking, but I think they went overboard with aggressive thread locking to fix some bugs and perhaps to achieve easy determinism for some of their new code.

    That's that ill-conceived indexing service. When it kicks in, all other processes suffer. It still sucks, though. Just disable this shit.

  • Rhialto (unregistered) in reply to Aris
    Aris:
    You should take into account the fact that in 1996, almost no one really knew how to code good GUI code, since good gui frameworks did not exist (and the documentation).
    That is not actually true: Amiga's Intuition was a perfectly good GUI with lots of documentation. For 10 years already, by 1996.
  • Anonymouse (unregistered)

    I applaud TaxQuick for NOT releasing the program anyway. If it happened again today they would ship it and fix it in a service pack.

    -ellie

  • Random832 (unregistered) in reply to SteveCody
    SteveCody:
    Ryan:
    And here all those people who say shaking their mouse back and forth makes the sand fall quicker in the hour glass were actually on to something.

    In the old days of Win3 and 95 you COULD make a page scroll faster by wiggling the mouse. Just start a selection and drag to the bottom of the screen where upon the page will start to scroll up. Drag past the bottom of the document window and start wigging. Voila! Faster scroll.

    I can do it on my current XP machine by opening a largish document and clicking the middle mouse button (to get that scrolly thing that nobody actually uses). Move the mouse just down from the click point and the window contents should start to scroll slowly. Wiggle the mouse from side-to-side and the scrolling speeds up. Stop wiggling and it slows down again.

    It also still works with selections, just like in Win 3.

  • Anon on the DL (unregistered)

    Lacerte. I knew it!

  • (cs) in reply to Meh
    Meh:
    So if you never move your mouse will it update?
    I don't think you'd like what the mouse would update to -- think "Jurassic Park" with a giant omnivorous rodent nibbling away at your feet.

    I can just see the support email if this thing ever gets into production, though ...

    Support: Plz send meh teh mowze droppinz!

  • well, what is it then? (unregistered) in reply to KenW

    So, enlighten us with your computer basic 101 knowledge as to how this was a design feature... or did you fail as well?

  • enlighten us (unregistered) in reply to KenW

    first of all, neither of them said they were the same thing, they most likely know that its a design feature, but were simply relating it as functions that use movement of the mouse, one for scrolling and the other for entropy.

    However, since you seem to know so much, why don't you enlighten us on some basic computer operation, KenW

  • K (unregistered) in reply to well, what is it then?
    well:
    So, enlighten us with your computer basic 101 knowledge as to how this was a design feature... or did you fail as well?

    I don't see why this isn't intentional. It uses the mouse movement to determine the speed. It is much more user friendly to accelerate by moving the mouse from side to side, then to press some sort of combo button

  • nameless (unregistered) in reply to Trinian

    lol, maybe it's based out of Sydney Australia... reminds me of "the good old days"

  • IHasYerCheezburger (unregistered)

    It is a true story, but some of the details are wrong. It's not from 1996, but from 2008. And it's not a tax ap, but an SAP Employee Self Service intranet portal. I tried to run for cover when I saw the onMouseMove in the HTML source, but I was too late. Now I'm roadkill.

  • ponedonkey (unregistered) in reply to AF
    AF:
    At this rate, TaxQuik will hopefully have a Windows Vista version by 2012.

    Fair enough. Isn't that when people are going to start buying Vista?

    Wait, people are going to buy vista?

  • B.o.B. (unregistered)

    Racking! Is that tax deductible?

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