C#

Windows Taskbar Monitor v0.3

I have just pushed a few small changes to one of my projects, Windows Taskbar Monitor.

One of the users of the app noted that they find it rather annoying having the animated progress bars and asked whether it would be possible to add an option to disable it. I agreed that it could get a little distracting so I added the option to disable the bars.

While I was there I also added a couple of command line arguments to the app so that you could configure each instance from a shortcut.

 

The options are:

-bars [true/false]

This tells the app to startup with the bars enabled or not, the default is true.

-type [cpu/mem/net]

This tells which of the three monitors the app should start up with, cpu, memory or network.

 

One way to get all three to start with different monitors when windows startup would be to use the statup folder in windows.

1) Click the windows start icon, then right click on “all programs” and click open:

2) Navigate to Programs > Startup then make three shortcuts to Windows Taskbar Monitor v0.3 you can rename the shortcuts if you like:

3) For each shortcut, right click and select properties:

4) Now enter your command line arguments in the Target field after the final .exe:

 

Et voilà when windows starts you should now have three different monitors opening!

I have pushed all the source code and the new binary files to my google code project: http://code.google.com/p/win7-taskbar-mon/

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Windows 7 Taskbar Performance Monitor v0.2

Been a long time since I have updated this little project of mine. Yep, just checked, its been almost a year since.

Oddly enough this is one of my projects I actually use on a daily basis at home and work. Im not sure why I haven’t updated it since as there have been some rather gaping bugs in it which have been very annoying but apparently not annoying enough to encourage myself to fix them or to stop using it.

Anyways, I have finally decided to fix some of the most anoying issues namely:

  • It no longer crashes when the network is lost
  • It now correctly reports the amount of physical memory used

Theres no auto-updating feature built into the tool so if you are looking for the upgrade head over to the google code page to grab it: http://code.google.com/p/win7-taskbar-mon/downloads/list

Wow! Just noticed that over 2000 people have downloaded the first version, didn’t think it was that popular!

Oh yes, I have also uploaded the latest source for this version: http://code.google.com/p/win7-taskbar-mon/source/checkout

Enjoy!

Shader Based 2D Shadowing

Those who know me know I used to do quite abit of development in c# using Microsoft’s XNA platform.

Well I like to check back in every now and then with some of the big players in the community to see what’s going on.

One of those players is Catalin Zima, who is famous for producing many great shader and effect samples.

One of Catalin’s reccent project particularly caught my eye however as I had tried to tackle the same problem several years ago when I was in my final year of university. That is, Dynamic 2D Shadows Calculated on the GPU (http://mikecann.co.uk/university-projects/shadowshader-in-rendermonkey/)

Catalin’s approach to the problem is far more elegant that my brute force iterative approach. He uses a clever technique of distorting the desired casting image about the light in such a way as not to require iterative pixel lookups.

If you are interested in the more details in the technique I encourage you to check it out over on Catalin’s blog: http://www.catalinzima.com/2010/07/my-technique-for-the-shader-based-dynamic-2d-shadows/

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