I arrived in Ipswich, UK on 4th December. After an initial stay for one week at the Lattice Lodge, I moved to the Great Colman Street. One of my colleagues was leaving back for India but there were two more days to go. Hence, instead of the usual five people staying at the place, we were six and I was left without a bed.

I put down a thin matress for me to sleep. I didn't have any proper blanket, just a thin one which did no good in the chilly winters. And to make the matters worse, the heaters were not working either. I would have succumbed to the cold but as usual technology came in for my rescue. I was having a Toshiba Protege 300 (don't laugh, I didn't purchase it) which was running hot and good enough to save me from the cold. A friend in need is a friend indeed.

I was sitting with a friend of mine in a canteen when he started discussing about crude oil. It takes thousands of years to create crude but we have exhausted it within a century. Now, companies are spending a fortune on Research and Development to make cars that can run on alternative power. The day crude is exhausted, all these companies will show their work. Everyone is preparing.

My abstract side clicked. And these companies do a mass production of their new species of cars. Everyone is preparing to purchase them when all of a sudden crude is present everywhere. No limits, no charge, take as much as you want. What would be the scenario, these car manufacturers would go "What duh ..".

Before I progressed further my friend said "What duh .."

I had created this application a few years back and released it only to a limited audience. It was a code snippet from Microsoft Coding4Fun site. It was having limited features hence I started modifying it and ended up making this feature rich application. There are a few dedicated users of this application and today when I received a personal message asking for a copy of this application, I blogged about it.

It requires .NET framework to be installed. I don't remember which version exactly.
It works great on Windows XP as well as Windows Vista and is pretty user friendly, so no need of help files. (I am bored and I don't doubt your intelligence.)

It makes only a single change in registry that too if you want it to auto-start with Windows.

Features:
1. Doesn't create a wallpaper list, but searches it on the fly.
2. Ability to search folders recursively.
3. Random as well as Sequential wallpaper shuffling. The option seed allows you to define which wallpaper you want to show. Seed can either be positive or negative number.
If you have the wallpapers Bliss001, Bliss002,..., Bliss020 and you specify the seed as 5, it will show Bliss001, Bliss006, Bliss011, Bliss16 and then back again.
4. You can specify the no of seconds, minutes, hours, days or weeks to wait before cycling the wallpaper (1 Second to 3 Weeks).
5. Double click on the tray icon changes the wallpaper.
6. Right clicking the icon, has many options such as Pausing the change.
7. Remove wallpaper (Handy if someone is knocking your door and you have set some bold wallpaper)
8. Only 64 KB
9. No install needed.

Download
Mirror 1

On visiting the Google homepage, I saw the link to download "Google Chrome (BETA)" - the new web browser from Google. I gave it a test drive. It imported the setting from IE7 and I was ready for my adventure.

The page viewing area offered by Google Chrome is large - thanks to the uncluttered layout. The only two bars visible are address bar and tabs. I couldn't even live without this primary necessities of browsing. I started a download and the download was saved to my default downloading folder. The downloading status bar went right to the bottom of the window. The status bar is visible only in the tab where the downloading started. Days will tell whether this is a boon or a curse. On the right side of this status bar, there is an option that shows all the downloads. The moment I clicked on it, a tab with title downloads was opened. This tab comes with a search box. I would have loved this feature if it would have searched my complete download's directory but it didn't. It only searches the files downloaded through chrome.

I haven't tried many sites yet but I found the pages were rendered pretty quickly. The address bar searches the pages browsed previously. The New Tab shows the most visited tabs and the recently closed tabs. The New Tab comes with a search box for history. The search boxes found everywhere proves that this product is from Google. These were the first fifteen minutes experience with Chrome and I am impressed.

Yes, I am posting this through Chrome and the question in my mind is when will Chrome be out of beta!

Majority of the population is blessed to have leaves. Students know it as vacations (summer vacations, winter vacations, etc) while the working generation avail earned leaves (popularly termed as paid leaves) which comes with many ifs and buts. Earned leaves come in a virtual basket. People are aware about the amount of leaves they are entitled to and can take them at will (though at times there are ifs and buts here as well).

Now, if leaves came in some physical bags and people are given their leaves in bags, can you think about the chaos it can create. Imagine an organisation A gave its employees their share of leaves and while they are happily calculating on how they can spend it, a mob comes and robs them off. News channel would start flashing "Breaking News - Employees of Organisation A robbed, no leaves this year".

Now, imagine a newly married couple have left for their honeymoon. A wicked person comes in and robs leaves from either of them. This causes the couple to split, one is at honeymoon and the other back at work. And if both of them are robbed, both are back to work. Now someone asks them "Hey, how was your honeymoon?" and the reply is "Sad. We were looted."

Now, students enjoy some massive holidays (somewhere around 3 months). Now lets imagine students from a college A loot holidays from student's of college B, C and D. College A will remain close through out the year while students from colleges B, C and D will starve for leaves.

It can be fun, just imagine some scenario's and do comment in here.