wackyd README ( pronounced: "wack key dee" ) WHAT IS IT? ----------- wackyd is a daemon that controls the LED lights on your extended keyboard. By default it sets the lights in motion in a Knight Rider pattern. To wackyd that pattern looks like this: xoo,oxo,oox,oxo To many, Knight Rider was a very stupid American television show. Its only redeeming social value was, of course, the blinking lights. WHAT CAN I DO WITH IT? ---------------------- For one thing, it should help you impress the chicks. As you know, nerds are the sex gods of the new millenium. Why? Skills necessary to obtain a good job have changed over the last several thousand years. There's not a lot of demand for a mastodon hunter any more. Now firewall configuration skills are in more demand then club carving skills. Chicks dig this. A guy capable of controlling his keyboard lights is capable of landing a good job or, at the very least, capable of putting paper in the printer. Either way, she'll be impressed. Impressing chicks is key but so is keeping your boss off your back. Don't worry, wackyd actually has legitimate business usages. Apart from improving your status with the ladies, wackyd also serves as a notification system. It listens for patterns on port 9193. You've mail??? Send it a pattern. The NT server is down AGAIN? Send it a different pattern. Your keyboard lights will keep you informed... HUH? ---- I used to have a utility for the Apple Macintosh named Wacky Lights That program pretty much made the keyboard lights go from NUM LOCK to CAPS LOCK to SCROLL LOCK. It was a freeware program distributed without source. This meant the Macintosh community was ahead of the Linux community in wacky lights technology. That discrepancy was cause for alarm. We couldn't let the Mac Weenies gloat, to tell us that we had to have a Mac in order to have wacky lights. Something had to be done. So I took it upon myself to bring open wacky lights technology to the masses. So under threat of violence and moonings from the Mac community, I barracaded myself in a room for an hour or so and developed an open source version of wacky lights. The gap had been bridged. But now I'm thinking: Can't these stupid lights do more than blink? If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it... And if I'm notified that I've got mail but my screen saver is on... You get the idea. A natural progression occured. Wackyd was transformed from a pointless blinker to a notification system. In all fairness, one person in this universe found a use for wackyd prior to its morph to notification system. Colm Linehand writes: "I'd like to say thanks for making Wackyd. It's solved a problem I had with my Compaq Linux box. It sits under my desk, and I access it via SSH from my Win Box, but it kept going to sleep because of something in the Compaq bios that checks for keyboard and mouse activity. I installed Wackyd, which solved the problem, because the hardware now thinks the keyboard is constantly active." Perhaps now it will keep Compaqs alive as it keeps YOU informed.... WHERE IS IT? ------------ The latest version of wackyd is available via anonymous ftp: ftp://ftp.armstrong.com/wackyd/wackyd-latest.tar.gz It is mirrored and available via http at joedog.org. http://www.joedog.org/wackyd INSTALLATION ------------ wackyd was built with GNU autoconf. If you are familiar with GNU software, then you should be comfortable installing wackyd. Please consult the file INSTALL for more details. DOCUMENTATION ------------- Documentation is available in man pages wackyd(1) An html manual is included with this distribution: doc/wackyd.html. LICENSE ------- Please consult the file, COPYING for complete license information. Copyright (C) 2001 Jeffrey Fulmer Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn. Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions, provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.