I've tried a few wallpaper changing apps in my time, but none of them really had the feature-set I wanted. There's a few main features I wanted in a wallpaper-changing app:

• It should support multiple monitors. I have two monitors on my work computer, but all the wallpaper changer apps I tried only detected the resolution of the first one, so if I set them to "auto-resize", the image would be the same on both. What I ended up having to do was resize the images manually, and set the app to not resize, and "tile" the wallpaper. But that got annoying, cause it meant I had to resize pretty much every wallpaper I downloaded.
• It should set the wallpaper at a certain time every day. The apps I tried all had a "change wallpaper every (xx) hours" feature, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted the wallpaper to change in the night, when I wasn't there. I could set the app to change the wallpaper every 24 hours, but then it ends up doing it at whatever time I set it up, usually when I'm in the middle of something. It's not the worst thing in the world, but the flash the screen gives when it changes is annoying.
• Finally, if I add a new wallpaper to my collection, I didn't want to have to go back to the wallpaper changer app and add it to the list.

So, in true computer-geek style, I wrote my own. And also, in true computer-geek style, I'm uploading it to my website so that others can find it just as useful as I do :)

Now, without further ado... I give to you... Wallpaper Changer verion 1.0! You'll need the .NET Framework v1.1, but once you download, just unzip it to some folder and run it. It lets you set it to start automatically and everything. Features include, but are not limited to:

• Takes multiple monitors into account. If you have more than one monitor, it'll resize the image so that it's big enough to fill all monitors.
• Resizes the wallpaper at a certain (configurable) time every day. I set mine to change at midnight every day. What's more, if you turn your computer off over the night, it'll still change the wallpaper when it starts back up!
• If you add a new image to the folder you've configured for your wallpapers, it'll automatically pick the image up.

Enjoy! And if you like it, leave a comment. If you don't like it, leave a comment. In fact, just leave a comment, damnit!!

Why, O why is there DVD-RW and DVD+RW? Please, someone tell me: it makes no sense at all to have two standards that are exactly the same (as far as I can see) and yet are incompatible with each other (in that a DVD+RW drive can't write to DVD-RW discs)

I'm just annoyed because I just paid AU $65 to buy 50 DVD-R discs, only to get home and find that my DVD burner is a DVD+RW drive. I could have sworn it was DVD-RW, but I guess I was wrong (I even asked a mate of mine who's got the same laptop as me what kind the burner is, and he said DVD-RW as well). Now I got $65 worth of coasters, and I still haven't burnt the videos I wanted to burn!

Well, thank goodness NeroVision Express lets you save your DVD layout, so at least I can do that, buy some DVD+R discs and burn them tomorrow. *sigh*

A few days ago, Michael Kaplan posted a blog titled Why that is positively Ethiopic! in which he talks about Ethipoic numbers, and offers a challenge: write an app which is able to convert to/from Ethiopic numbers.

It didn't take much to convince me to give it a shot, and you can download the fruits of my efforts by clicking here. You can also see a screenshot of the app here:

The code is slightly modified from the one I posted in the comments of Michael's blog, mostly I renamed the EthiopianNumber class to NumberConverter, and rearranged it to be a bit more generic and easier to understand. What I really wanted to do is re-do the main algorithm, now that I understand the problems a bit better (I pretty much just wrote the algorithm for FromEthiopian as I went, and added to it as I found more cases it had to handle). Now that I know all the problems, I could probably do a much more efficient and easy-to-understand version, but I think instead I'll just leave it as an exercise for the reader :)

Welcome to the Codeka.Com blogs page!

I've pretty much just installed b2evolution and set up a couple of users, etc. Eventually I guess, I should customize the look/feel of the blogs so that at least it's consistent with the rest of codeka.com, but at the same time, I'm probably going to ditch the somewhat pre-2000 layout of that site anyway (at least get rid of the white-on-black colour scheme!)

Anyway, I'm hoping to starting posting some stuff at least somewhat regularly, but I guess until I get the hang of the whole blog thing, it might be a bit erratic.