AFTER taking time out for a well-deserved coffee, you return to your computer
to find that the masterpiece you were working on has been wiped out. The only
clue to what happened is the nonchalant cat asleep on the keyboard. Sound
familiar? Well, help is at hand for those whose cats have a penchant for
strolling across keyboards, sending programs into a spin and dumping important
documents into an electronic black hole.
A software house in Tucson, Arizona, has developed a $20 software
package for PCs that can detect 鈥渃at typing鈥�, block further keyboard inputs and
sound a whining harmonica noise to shoo the cat away. BitBoost Systems, an
e-business that sells its PawSense package over the web from www.bitboost.com,
says that sensing a cat鈥檚 key depressions can be done within 鈥渙ne or two
pawsteps鈥�. The trick is to recognise the combinations of two or three keys that
a cat鈥檚 paw is likely to press simultaneously, says BitBoost鈥檚 president Chris
Niswander. Cats can do quite a lot of damage quite quickly, causing crashes or
inserting garbage in text or bugs in programs. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 look too good a
proofreader if you don鈥檛 notice such changes to your work and send it to
someone,鈥� he says.
His 75 kilobyte program runs in the background, continually monitoring
keyboard activity. If you run software, such as some games, that require unusual
key combinations to be pressed, you can program these into PawSense so it won鈥檛
go into feline fear mode when you blast an alien.
Advertisement
But Lisa Lidderdale, editor of Cat World magazine, predicts that some
mischievous cats will be drawn to the alarm noise. 鈥淎fter all, there are plenty
of cats who like to run up and down piano keyboards,鈥� she says.