Those of you who have watched Pee Wee's Playhouse, you know that when you hear the secret word, you’re supposed to “yell real loud.” I always thought this was a clever hack: programming millions of kids nationwide to scream, seemingly at random, for the rest of the day. Heck, I know *I* did it, and I was twenty at the time. So that’s what this init does: it picks a secret word, and if you type the word (in any application, including the Finder), your Mac will yell at you.
The init will display an icon at startup time only if it has a problem. Otherwise it is a “stealth init” suitable for slipping into your co-workers’ Extensions folders.
I want to take this opportunity to express the opinion that free men everywhere should be allowed to spank their monkey anywhere they like. Free Pee Wee!
The list of secret words is chosen randomly from a list stored in a STR# resource. Feel free to edit and add to this list with ResEdit -- if you’re up to these Power User sorts of things. Don't make a string longer than 16 characters. I suppose you can change the sound if you like, but the default sound is authentic Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
For you techies: the way this works is by head-patching PostEvent() and recording the last several keypresses. For non-keypress events, it only costs about twelve instructions or so extra; the performance cost is negligable. The sound resource is kept resident, so it won't go to your hard drive all the time, and it eats about 40K. I let the Notification Manager play the sound.
This program is chocolateware. If you like it, or don’t like it, send e-mail to max@rice.edu.
I hope it brings you as many laughs as it has brought me.
