Friday, January 28, 2011

I DIDN'T DO IT!

Turns out that right after I get the email telling me my project has been accepted and approved by SourceForge and posted to their "OK" list, their site got hacked.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1940350/sourceforge-takes-developer-services-security-breach

http://www.techeye.net/security/hackers-hit-sourceforge

Just for the record -- I didn't do it!
:)

Wait, let me practice.
"To the best of my recollection, Senator, I did not have any particpation in nor knowledge of the events described and on the advice of my...."


--kevin

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Keep On Top and Raaaave reviews

Well, ok.. not so rave.
But I got an email from Source Forge saying that Keep On Top has been added to their "official" list of Windows products.
Said they:
"We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to keep these high standards in the future"

..like they really looked at it :)

They did test it for spyware, malware, and otherware and proclaimed it "clean", which is good.

Just thought it was kinda fun and worth a blog entry.

cheers,
--kevin

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Keep On Top

It’s been over 2 months since my last post, but I’m still kickin’.
The last 2 months has seen a lot activity – the holidays, a new job, some winter travel, a lot of football and a bit of geek stuff.

So for my first post of 2011, I decided to share some open source code I wrote. Here’s the problem space:

You’re doing something that requires attention, but not interaction. For me, this may involve watching a process run or tailing a log file. Or maybe it’s installing some new software. Whatever.
But I hate just sitting there watching the stuff. Who wants to sit and watch log files tail for 2 hours straight? All I really want to know is when it’s done or I want to see if it stops or gets any obvious errors. So I open up my email and fire off a couple. I pop open a browser. I get ping-ed on a chat client by a friend. And, maybe I play a computer game or something.
While I do this, the window I’m watching gets lost under the rest of them. So I … do what? I can randomly switch to the “watch window” and hope to catch it at the right time to see the error, I suppose. But what I really want is for that window to stay in sight while I’m doing something else.

So I wrote KeepOnTop. KeepOnTop starts up with a list of all your running applications. You pick one and it locks that window at the top of all the others. It does not give the window focus. And, in fact, the window stays on top even when you’re typing somewhere else.

The assumption is that you resize the window to be reasonably small and move it off to the side, Then you can type away at an email or whatever, while watching the log file tail. The only impact to the email app is that the part directly under the top window won’t be visible. Of course, you can move the top window anywhere you like anytime you want, so you can get by that.

KeepOnTop uses some native Windows APIs by importing user32.dll into C# as an “extern” and then exposing 3 or 4 static functions in it.

It’s not quite finished yet. I’m thinking about doing a bit of Windows explorer integration so you can right-click an executable and say “keepOnTop”, which would cause the exe to be run and automagically pushed to the top. But we’ll see.

Meanwhile, you can find it on SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/keepontop/

The source is in the subversion area. The exe is in a zip file under the “files” area.