Tips&Tricks: Meet Wordle

For someone who's main field of interest is IT , I must shamefully admit that there are still very cool programs out there that, though eluded my attention :)), are well known by almost all of my friends. One such program is Wordle created by Jonathan Feinberg. Wordle is basically a toy for generating "word clouds" from given input text. In these clouds, greater prominence is given to the words that appear more frequently in the input text. What makes it unique is the fact that you can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes and save them as images for the whole wide word to see.
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Wordle also has an option for genereting clouds from RSS feeds. Here is are two clouds obtained for two of my posts. Can you guess for which ones? :))
 

Mini-Project: Shutdown Timer

Lately I got used to falling asleep while watching TV on my laptop and as my TV-tuner software is quite primitive and doesn't have the option to shutdown the computer after a predefined period of time, I started to search the web for a simple shutdown timer application. I didn't want a fancy application with a lot of options just a basic program that will enable me to select a period of time after which the system would shutdown and that, if needed, could cancel the shutdown command.
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As the first two applications found by Google that met my over demanding request were not free I decided to write my own program. I remembered a nice and useful piece of code I once stumbled upon on Torry's Delphi Pages that enables a process to aquire privileges on WinNT platforms. I used it to aquire the 'SeShutdownPrivilege' and after that, the rest of the program was done in no more than 15 minutes.
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You cand download a fully working version of Shutdown Timer (source code included) by clicking here or from the Downloads box (ShutdownTimer.zip). Ohh ... and here is a screenshot of my latest mesmerizing achievement in the field of computer software:

Application platform: WinNT

Edit: Application now supports one command line parameter: a numeric value indicating the number of minutes till shutdown.