The end of the year is approaching as is the 5,000 monster mark.  Last time I checked the tally ShareCal had found 4,988 monster trees.  I expect number 5,000 to be found sometime over the weekend.  ShareCal (as you probably know by now if you've been following this blog) is a VB6 app that hunts for record breaking prime trees in a distributed environment.  There are a couple of problems with ShareCal, one of which I intend to fix after the year is out, the other I fixed this morning...

ShareCal runs on the client machines like an ordinary application.  This means the end user has to start the application, and then click a button to kick off processing.  My biggest problem has been getting people to run the app.  People forget to start it, and I have to keep reminding them.

I didn't want to run it as a Windows Service because then if someone actually wanted to shut it off they would have to go to the services control panel and mess around there.  That's probably raising the bar too high for the average user.  What to do?

The solution I decided upon was to reimpliment ShareCal as a screen saver.  The upside of this implementation is that I don't have to tell people to start their sharecal client... it will just start on its own.  The downside is it is no longer an option to run sharecal in the background as a desktop application if one is running the screensaver, or the application and the screensaver will step on each other since they are both accessing the same files.  However, most of the people who forget to start sharecal aren't running it in the background anyway... but still.

So for now I've decided to keep both implementations available and people can choose which client they want to run.  Here's a screenshot of the ShareCalSS screen saver:

Setting up ShareCal as a screen saver was easier than I thought it to be, especially since someone thoughtfully provided VB6 versions of the basic screen saver plumbing.  At first I had some issues with the "preview" version of the screensaver (i.e. how the application behaves in that tiny preview screen on the display properties) but I was able to solve that just by making the application display a vanilla banner when viewed in that mode:

The other major problem of the ShareCal client is that it really wants to be on the same LAN as the Dispatcher application (the server app that doles out data parcels to the client apps).

My next major change to the ShareCal/Dispatcher apps is to make the Dispatcher be web-fronted, so that people anywhere can run the client.  (Technically, you can run the client anywhere, but if you aren't on the same LAN you'll have to e-mail or sneakernet the parcels around.  Needless to say, most people don't want to do that.)

A webfronted dispatcher is going to be hard, so I'm going to wait until January to do that.  Hopefully in the meantime, the elusive D23 tree will be found and I won't need to go to all that trouble.