Command Line Fu
Command Line Fu
[Two men talking.] Cueball: Last night I was watching videos with this girl and my monitors kept turning off - even though I had disabled power save. Friend: Odd. Cueball: However! I wrote a command to jiggle the mouse pointer every couple minutes to keep it from going idle. Friend: Not the first hack I'd try, but see? Linux has problems, but it gives you the tools to deal with them - and save your date! Cueball: Actually, I was half an hour into the pointer scripting documentation when she got dressed and left.

The Linux command line allows a user to make their computer do nearly anything. The only hitch is that the interface is entirely text-based, and reading through user manuals to find the commands that you need can take a very long time.
In this comic, Cueball recounts how he used a command line hack to solve a problem with his monitors turning off during a movie. However, in the time that he spends trying to solve the issue, the woman he had brought home had already left, and his need for a movie to watch was gone.
The title text is the supposed moral to this story: if your user interface takes as long to operate as a command line, you may very well be denying your users the chance to get laid.
Software that jiggles the mouse actually exists, as well as instructions for linux scripting (although installing the necessary libraries might take a while).
[Two men talking.] Cueball: Last night I was watching videos with this girl and my monitors kept turning off - even though I had disabled power save. Friend: Odd. Cueball: However! I wrote a command to jiggle the mouse pointer every couple minutes to keep it from going idle. Friend: Not the first hack I'd try, but see? Linux has problems, but it gives you the tools to deal with them - and save your date! Cueball: Actually, I was half an hour into the pointer scripting documentation when she got dressed and left.
