After Wallpaper juggler was described as cool at lifehacker, there has been a lot of download activity on the project page at codeplex. It seems after getting the app, everyone started downloading high res wallpapers from InterfaceLIFT which, of course, made the guys at InterfaceLIFT mad. After downloading 10 or so wallpapers, it block access to the whole site for the IP address where wallpapers were being downloaded from and returns following message for every request:

Your access to InterfaceLIFT has temporarily been suspended do to misuse of our servers. Please review our Terms of Service for more information. Access will be restored in a couple days. To ensure that you access is not suspended again in the future, please disable any download accelerator plugins or software you may be running.

If you believe you have not violated the Terms of Service, please contact jeff [at} interfacelift {dot] com
Error code: xx.xxx.xx.xx

Ironically, even the “Terms of Service” page doesn’t come up once you are blocked. :)

Personally, I agree to this. There are costs associated to hosting a site like InterfaceLIFT and ads are one good way to support that which doesn’t happen when Juggler pulls those pretty images from the site. But hey, we still have another source right in juggler and we will find more. Only until other sources don’t treat us the same way.

Enjoy!

Anand

Here are the solutions for level 11 to 20. :) Click on a solution image to see in original size.

Solutions for other levels: Level 1 - 10

For last few days, I've been playing this amazing game all the time. It gets insanely interesting as you cruise along the levels. I took screen shots for every level I finished and sharing 'em if someone get stuck and looking for solution.

In case you are wondering how to take screen shots of iPhone display, click Home + Sleep/Wake button together and iPhone will take photo of your display and save it in camera roll.

Here are the solutions for level 1-10. I'll be posting rest of 'em pretty soon. Click on a solution image to see in original size.

Solutions for other levels: Level 11 - 20

Update 6: Wallpaper downloads are not available from InterfaceLIFT anymore. Read details here.

Update 5: Updated InterfaceLIFT downloader to work with the changed code at interfacelift.com.

Even though the first basic version of Juggler pretty much did what it was supposed to do, there were few 'nice to have' things which were missing. So I updated it as soon as I got some free time. :)

Feature set:

Here is the list of features (existing+new) which are now included.

• Its coded and unit tested to work on Vista and XP SP2 with .Net 3.5. It should work (not tested though) on Server 2008/2003 as they borrow UI code base from Vista/XP. No words for any other OS.
• It runs in background and can be controlled from System Tray.

• It can be configured to:
  • start with Windows.
  • look for wallpapers in multiple folders including/excluding sub-folders. Best results when used with matching resolution wallpapers.
  • change wallpaper once every preferred duration between 1 min and 500 hrs. It will understand "000 Hrs/Mins 000 Min" format. It can interpret M/Min/Mins/Minutes and H/Hr/Hrs/Hour as Minutes and Hours respectively.
  • confirm before changing wallpaper
  • adjust image positioning for odd size wallpapers.

• You can also change wallpaper manually by clicking 'Juggle Now' menu or by double clicking the icon.
• It allows only one instance at a time.
• It also displays the last updated wallpaper and the time stamp when the next change will occur.
• It displays a confirmation dialog before automatically changing wallpaper. Its configurable to show a confirmation dialog and for how long the message should be displayed.

• "Active" option to enable/disable wallpaper juggling while program is running.
• Last changed wallpaper is a clickable menu which opens the wallpaper in windows explorer.
• You can download stunning wallpapers from interfaceLIFT.com and WallpaperStock.com using "Download Wallpapers" screen right within juggler.

Download:

This version uses .Net 3.5. Also, the downloads are posted at codeplex.com.

1. Download and install .Net framework v3.5 if its not installed already.
2. Navigate to Juggler release page at codeplex to download application and/or source code. The downloads are in Files section.

Implementation:

Most of the stuff is pretty straightforward. It uses Timer class to invoke code to change wallpaper. The invoked code then uses Win APIs to do the job. But there are few things which may interest you.

1. There are all kind of anonymous method illustrations. You can also find basic as well as complex lambda expressions which, I think, are nothing but fancy anonymous methods invented for LINQ.
2. It also demonstrates how to use System.Threading.Mutex to find and avoid if user is trying to run multiple instance of same application. This is the simplest and most accurate approach to create single instance application in C# (VB has some out of the box functionality). There is a catch in this approach which may disqualify this in certain cases.
3. While implementing single instance functionality, I needed to warn user that the application is already running. Simplest way is to just display a message box. But I thought if the already running (first) instance can get a notification from second instance then it can show a balloon tip which will tell user where exactly the application is running. This may sound simple but its not.
   1. As both instance are separate processes, we are talking about inter process communication (IPC) here.
   2. There is no other way than remoting in .Net 1.0-2.0 for IPC. And opening a tcp(forget about http) port seems overkill to me in this situation.
   3. So I chose a self hosted simple wcf service with named pipe binding. May be I'll post about using named pipes in WCF for IPC later some time.

As always, please use it at your own risk. Feel free to rant in comments. :)

Enjoy!

Here is the album of some photos I and friends took at our trip to Las Vegas and Grand Canyon last week. You can watch the slide show at Windows Live Spaces in full screen mode.

Windows Live is coming out really good among fierce competition. Its a full suite of Web 2.0 and desktop applications and Photo Gallery is fourth app from the collection on my PC. Messenger, Writer and Mail being other three. I have been using them for quite some time now and can comfortably recommend for home and personal use. I'm sure you'll like them. Did I say I love 'em?

I think most of us will agree on this. Online ads make browsing a nightmare. Well, they make a lot of content free too but at times I felt like I was browsing just ads.

And that's not it. Most of the time browsers are busy downloading these ads and we think Internet is really slow. So, I thought it's time to give it a break and make Internet not suck. Read on if you find yourself in the same boat. :)

There are plug-ins for Firefox and IE to block ads but I use Opera. Opera has inbuilt content blocking but that is too much to do as there are a zillion ad servers out there. At times I have to use FF or IE too and this leaves me managing three different applications to block ads. On top of that, putting a plug-in in the pipeline is again adding one more step before you can see the content. And then you have to keep updating them for new releases. Not a good idea, I'd say.

Another way is to use hosts file. Description of hosts file from wikipedia:

The hosts file is a computer file used to store information on where to find a node on a computer network. This file maps hostnames to IP addresses. The hosts file is used as a supplement to (or instead of) the domain name system on networks of varying sizes. This file is (unlike DNS) under the control of the user who is using the computer.

There is a lot of information available on net which you can use to make it work. In a nutshell, here is what you need to do:

1. Download a hosts file which has updated lists of ad servers. I'm using the one from here and added few missing servers. Can you believe this list has around 6000 entries already? And if you follow the link, please don't try those shock sites. :( More hosts files can be found here.
2. Create a backup of your existing hosts file. (just give it an extn say .old.) On Vista, hosts file can be found in [System Drive]:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. See this to locate on other systems.
3. Copy the downloaded hosts file in the etc folder. If you are using the site which I did then create another hosts file in etc folder and paste the contents from browser. See this if you are trying to edit the hosts file on Vista when UAC is enabled.
4. And that's pretty much it. Try some ad plagued site like engadget and you should see blank space instead of ads.
5. Also, don't forget to update the hosts file as frequently as you can as more and more servers will be popping out every now and then.

For those who wants to know the details and have plenty of time to spend :), here are the links:

• Ad Filtering (Wikipedia)
• Answers for questions like What, Why, How et al
• The hosts file I'm using
• MVPS Site related to the subject.

Enjoy!

PS: The hosts file I am using and gave the link above has entries for known malware, trojans and user tracking sites too. It also has entries for ad servers like yahoo, msn and others which can make some sites behave unexpectedly. Please see inline comments on the site.

For all of us (including myself) who have never seen a world outside Windows, Ubuntu is one of the ZILLION available distributions of Linux. I thought of trying Unix or Linux couple of times but every time got lost in the long list of distributions and couldn't decide where to start. But believe or it not its a pretty amazing world out there.

Canonical Ltd. released Ubuntu 7.10 a couple of days ago and I decided to install whatever the case is. I didn't want to mess up the current configuration running Vista so the obvious choice was to add one more virtual machine to the pile in Virtual PC 2007.

Step by step installation process is described here.

I did run into an issue where Virtual PC was clipping the ubuntu desktop and left me with only 30% desktop visibility. It was quick to fix though by changing "Window Resizing" options in Display tab for Machine settings in Virtual PC.

Its a long a way to go for me to learn linux and for Ubuntu to establish itself as a competitor to Windows and Mac. Wait a min...., my display is all crippled after I restarted it to make changes effective so that it can allow me to choose higher resolutions. Damn it. Now I don't know how to fix this. OK, lets start from scratch again. And this time I'm going to make a base HDD and do all the experiments in differential HDD.

I wish it was more user friendly. When you compare it with Windows and Mac, the barrier of entry is very high. And the best part is, if someone asks anything on community forums, those xorg geeks start telling them terminal commands. I think this is one major part Linux is lacking at. :)

Still, I think its fun to use Ubuntu and it has tremendous possibilities. Being free and major community involvement for localization, I think it will really help bringing people (non-IT) towards computers in countries like mine.

This is huge. Actually, not huge but still. :) Scott Guthrie today posted that Microsoft will be opening up the source code of some parts of .Net framework. And the plan is to keep doing it for rest of the libraries.

Its not like we can't browse through the .Net framework source code now but the really nice thing about this move is that you can step through the actual .Net code while debugging your source code.

So, you are on a breakpoint on .Net method call in your code and if you hit F11, you will land right inside the .Net framework code. I can't remember how many times I went back to Reflector to find what exactly was going on. This is going to help everyone, big time. Even Microsoft will gain something in this. I bet they will cut a lot on support calls. :)

Now, don't confuse this with Open-Source as lots of people are. This is NOT Open-Source. The source is released under Microsoft Reference License. As the name suggests, this is just for your reference to help you understand .Net better (if you opt to) and allow to step through .Net source while debugging.

Amazing decision. Development will be fun now. I mean, more fun. :P

Enjoy!

By now you should already have a huge collection of wallpapers. If you don't, go to previous posts to get direct downloads and a tool to download high quality wallpapers.

Vladstudio Wallpaper Collection

Now the next thing is to use these wallpapers. Going back to "Personalization" settings every time is really not something I'd prefer. So I, again, coded up a small and handy app which can do this for us.

• It runs in background and can be controlled from System Tray.
• It can be configured to
  • start with Windows.
  • look for wallpapers in a specific directory. Best way to use this is to dump all wallpapers matching your resolution in one folder and configure to use that folder.
  • change wallpaper once in half, one or two hrs.
• You can also manually change wallpaper by using Juggle menu or double clicking the icon.
• You've got the source. So, change it if you want more features. :)

And that's pretty much it. I'm using it on Vista (1920x1200). It will NOT work on XP (or anything other than Vista for that matter) as XP doesn't support JPEG images as wallpapers and that's what I am using. I may update it later if I could spare some time. You can get a tool which may work with XP at Coding4Fun. And if you want you can always change the code [link below]. Updated to work with Vista and XP.

Remember, its not fully tested or final app. I just coded and left it when it started doing I wanted. So, no negative testing. :)

Juggler.exe.zip [Independent Executable]

Juggler.source.zip [Source Code, VS 2005]

Links disabled for outdated app. Follow the link below for updated links.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I've updated this app with fixes and more features. Please navigate to the detailed post for description and download.

Before I say anything else, I have to admit that InterfaceLIFT has the best high resolution wallpapers. There are handful of artists who post their work on this site. Look at the fabulous samples:

There are thousands of them like these and in all possible resolutions. So the next question is how to get them. I tried the traditional way (read browsing) but it was really difficult to click on each one of them and save manually.

I though it would be really great if I can automate this or some kind of tool that can do this for me. So yesterday night, without wasting anymore time, I decided to code one up. Here is how it looks:

Its simple. Choose the resolution you want, choose the location to want to save images to and hit "Search and Download Wallpapers". You may also want to change the sorting to Ratings or Downloads to get community rated wallpapers first.

And here is how it works: On the website, interfacelift uses javascript to prepare the links for actual images. I checked the HTML source and thought I could exploit that approach.

• It get the HTML markup for first page.
• Search for javascript method calls and get the unique identifiers for wallpapers on current page and prepare a list of actual image names.
• Loop through all images on current page.
• Download one at a time and save to local disk.
• Get markup for the the next page.
• Go to step 2.
• Keep doing this until user hits Stop or we run out of pages.

And that's it. Its pretty simple. I ran it on Vista and XP against .Net 2.0. You can download the independent executable and/or source (C#). See update below to download.

WallpaperCrawler.exe.zip [Independent Executable]

WallpaperCrawler.source.zip [Complete Source Code, VS 2005]

I know it can be enhanced or make more robust. But hey I just coded it in couple of hours for the functionality I needed. I haven't even tested it properly but it did what I was looking for.

Enjoy!

PS 1. If you find any issues with it, put your sleeves up and change the code. And yes, please don't forget to tell/send me the updates you made so that I can add them for others. :)

PS 2. By no means its a tested and final app. I don't take any responsibilities for the issues you may run into by using this.

Update: This program is now part of Juggler (another app I created for changing wallpapers). Please navigate to the description page to download the latest version.