Two blind mice
On Sat, Sep 09, 2000 at 01:35:04PM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Thursday 7 September 2000, at 10 h 37, the keyboard of "Jeffrey F.
Cuff"
> <jeff@cuff.com> wrote:
>
> > My own kids are Gr. I and IV
>
> Could people on this international list use ages for the kids, not
US-specific
> grades?
>
Your point is taken, though a parochial frame of reference is not
limited to the US (: I and IV are actually =Canadian= (and a particular
provincial school jurisdiction at that)) but even when managing to think
globally, age designations are bit misleading too, as personal factors
vary wildly (which was what i was trying to get around by using grades
rather than ages in the 1st place).
Which led me to further thought about designing an
platform/distribution/UI for a child, whose needs and expectations can
be expected to vary more widely over the course of a few years than an
adult's will.
Particularly, I hearken back to the age of toddler-on-daddys-knee, level
of use, when the
Delete key (aka "The Eater") was the major application on a
character-based terminal. The first application (I wrote specifically
for a kid simply displayed whatever was typed in great big letters (10 x
8 on a CGA screen) . This was rapidly superceded once I got Linux and
eventually Xwindows. Now it was possible to use xPaint instead, with a
huge font size, to deliver essentially the same application: the Eater.
Adapting xPaint to become Eater v0.2 involved changing default settings
other than font size. Over-maximizing the paint window so that the
title bar and resizing bars lay outside
the viewport meant that the application was less prone to being
accidentaly minimized or terminated. Not a new application, just an
adaptation and redeployment of an existing one.
All that is needed in a baby-centric distribution in this case is a stub
in fvwnrc
launching the application in an oversized window at screen negative xy
offset.
The question I am getting at is whether a kid distribution is just a
collection of packages deemed to be of interest/use to kids, or if
custom compiled defaults etc for other applications is the also the way
to go.
The latter is more work to maintain, but if it is not done, the same
process and frustrations
must be addressed by each parent who attempts to adapt software to a
younger than intended user.
The Linux for Kids mission statement states that the target audience
is "under the age of 10", but it seems to me that it probably means
4-10, with BabyDebian (Linux for Babies?) being a removable
customization option ... like bicycle training wheels.
***
Speaking of training wheels I've been trying to get a second mouse
running under X. Provision for it occurs
commented out in XFConfig but uncommenting it, creating /dev/mouse2 and
running
# gpm -m /dev/mouse -t bare -M -m /dev/mouse2 -t bare
doesnt seem to help. I'm certainly no expert in the intricacies of X,
but it seemed worth trying, since
and "extra" mouse cursor (even a non-clickable one) would be useful in
teaching situations (and reduce
the finger smudges on the monitor from the teacher pointing at where to
click.
At the risk of mixing metaphores: it would be even niftier if the second
mouse were also functional or
over-ride the input to the first mouse (like the second brake in
drivers' ed cars). I expect it will happen anyway over the next couple
of years, as more people find themselves with an spare com port, this
might even drive the creation of a few two mouse applications.
Maybe an extra mouse driver needs to be compiled into X? I don't know.
But this is the sort of thing which, if enabled in a kids distribution
(and documented:) would be useful for adults and children using the
same machine together. Another case of extending or reconfiguring
existing tools to be more appropriate in a kid environment.
My apologies for rambling a bit. It's Friday afternoon and my computer
is in pieces with the attempt
to get a second DB-9 connector installed to attach the second mouse.
Like most parents, this is not the
sort of thing I want to try to solve through casual experiment but would
certainly be able to use if it were
part of the distribution.
Suddenly, I really =want= to have two xteddies under the control of two
separate mice.
,,,jfc
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