[TAG] Fwd: Xteddy. :)

[Thomas Adam]

I am liking this.  :)

-- Thomas Adam

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stefan Gustavson <stegu at itn.liu.se>
To: TAG <tag at lists.linuxgazette.net>
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:09:03 +0100
Subject: Re: Xteddy. :)
To: Thomas Adam <thomas.adam22 at gmail.com>

Thanks for the XTeddy fan mail. It's always nice
to hear from people who like him. I don't get more
than a few messages per year about him these days,
but it's nice to see that he's still out there.

The real life XTeddy is a present from my wife,
she got it for me as a stress relief in 1994
when I was a PhD student, and I must say it
still works. He still sits on my desk, or
rather on a shelf just above my desk, in clear
view and ready to comfort me when things get
rough. (Although his mere presence actually
seems to stop things from getting too rough.)

Like most teddy bears, he has a real life name,
and it happen to be "Lufs", which is a cutesy
Swedish bear name whose point gets more or less lost
in translation, but I'll try anyway:

The name "Lufs" means nothing in particular, but the
kind of slow trotting and wobbling walk that real live
bears tend to do when they are not in any hurry is
referred to as "lufsa" (a verb) in Swedish, and when
we were kids, both my wife and I had read a story
by the Swedish author G?sta Knutsson about a little
bear cub named "Nalle Lufs", ("Nalle" is an old Swedish
word for "bear", often used as a synonym for "teddy bear".)

I can't remember whether it was me of my wife who
named him. It kind of grew on him more than being
a planned naming. I'm not even sure if we were
consciously aware of that childhood story at the
time, but we both recalled reading it when we saw
it a few years ago.

The XTeddy program was my first and so far only attempt
at writing a native program for X Windows. It makes very
simple use of the Shape extension and a pixmap background,
and the original version was about one page of code.
It has since been extended with better image loading
functions, but the basic window functionality is still
just a shaped window with a background pixmap, and a
simple, low level mouse event handler to move it around.

It was also a counterstatement to "xeyes", the only
other shaped window program that was around in 1994.
I thought it was a bad and ugly demo for a good extension.
Xeyes is kind of cute the first time you try it, but
it is kind of intrusive (someone or something is watching
your every move with the mouse) and therefore has very
little staying power with most users.

XTeddy is rather the opposite to xeyes: Nonintrusive,
motionless unless you pick him up, doesn't really care
what you are doing and watches *you*, not your work or
lack thereof, in patient silence. He's basically useless,
but cute, and always available.


That was probably more background information than
you ever wanted, but you did ask for it. :)

 > xteddy has been personified into a bot that gives people hugs.

He's very good at that. Good thinking! :)

   Stefan G