Do you feel like someone is remotely jittering your mouse? Well, for one time that I felt like that, I created this HTML page to try to communicate with them, which they would purportedly see through their remote desktop access to my work computer. Note that this works well with high school computers, but in the end, there probably wasn’t anyone on the other end with remote desktop access to my work computer. What I now learned that was probably happening was due to the particulars of my hardware setup. I had monitors connected via DisplayPort/Thunderbolt plugs. Thunderbolt is a high-performance DMA-based protocol. This means that glitches on the wiring and interface can mess around quite a bit with the state of the computer itself. Or, even more likely was that the Mac’s touch pad design has a tendency to glitch up due to sub-optimal thermal design eventually causing random glitches on the touch pad.
But, anyways, here is the HTML that I’ve written that you might take interest in reusing. A nice snippet to start with, I must say.
notifier.html:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Notification Screen</title>
<style type="text/css">
#flasher { font-family: monospace; font-size: 42pt; }
#flasher p { margin: 0px; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="flasher">
<p>ISSUE: The mouse pointer jerks around the screen even when the
mouse is not plugged in.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I've filed this issue with ServiceExchange, so stop jerking the
mouse!</p>
</div>
<p><span id="activator" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px">
Activate </span></p>
<script type="text/javascript">
counter = 0;
function invertCols(obj)
{
obj.style.color = 'white';
obj.style.backgroundColor = 'black';
}
function uninvertCols(obj)
{
obj.style.color = 'black';
obj.style.backgroundColor = 'white';
}
function invertThis(event)
{ return invertCols(this); }
function uninvertThis(event)
{ return uninvertCols(this); }
function triggerInvert()
{
invertCols(this);
counter = 6;
countDown();
}
function countDown()
{
counter -= 1;
if (counter % 2 == 0)
uninvertCols(document.getElementById('flasher'));
else
invertCols(document.getElementById('flasher'));
if (counter > 0)
return window.setTimeout(countDown, 250);
}
document.getElementById('activator').onmousedown = triggerInvert;
document.getElementById('activator').onmouseup = uninvertThis;
</script>
</body>
</html>