Recipe for success: Lack of sleep

I always get my best ideas when I'm tired! Same happened again just an hour or so back...

I thought.. could I make the floppy drive crucnch? Like if it was trying to read a floppy.

This idea sprung from the fun I had had with the beeper program: I ran it on a computer at school and the few guys there thought the computer was gonna blow up and backed away from it... it was a pretty fun sight ;)


So I thought that making the floppy drive crunch would be a nice effect for fooling with people...

Let's see: if I try to read all files from the disk, will that cause a noise even if there's no disk in the drive? Yes!


So let's put that on an endless loop.... *DURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR*

Got my floppy noise... but hey, maybe I could make the CD tray open and close? That's simple. Just some mci stuff.


So now I have a crazy beep, a scary floppy drive noise and a cd tray which opens and closes on its own. What more?

How about the harddisk making a noise? Sure, why not...

This one was a bit more complicated as it seemed just getting all files from C wouldn't make a good noise for long so I thought I'd just loop through all drives, all folders and so on again and again, but to do that I needed a list of all hard disks.

After getting the list, making the file looping was simple.


Okay so I had together the ultimate "scare your computer illiterate friend" program... but I wanted to add more!

I know, let's make it so that every window disappears and reappears and that loops again and again! I called this the -madness parameter. It is pretty intense actually.

Madness is so mad, that it's even quite difficult to stop it! Press ctrl-alt-del and go to task manager... no! The task manager starts blinking!.. you gotta be pretty fast to stop the madness ;)

I tried using my old global keyboard hook code to create a stop command for it. The global keyboard hook would read even if the application itself wasn't visible, so it should've done the job... but it appears it didn't work in a console application and I was too lazy to make it a windows forms app. Oh well... :]


To experience the madness or scare your friends, download the exe. Parameters for the exe are -disk, -beep, -cd, -drives, -madness and -all.

-disk makes the floppy crunch, -beep beeps like a crazy, -cd opens and closes the cd tray, -drives crunches the HDD, -madness makes windows flip out and -all does everything EXCEPT -madness.. so to get everything, you need to type funnay.exe -all -madness


NOTE: If -disk breaks your floppy drive or a floppy disk inside the drive, I'm not responsible. I don't know if the drive can take the constant polling for very long periods of time.