A small break from Icefall. My network has been a bit flakey recently, and it was irritating because it wasn’t always immediately obvious when it died. So I wrote a little application that can sit in the notification area and send a regular ping to a designated address/site, and make a sound if it suddenly dies (and when it comes back).

Also, I’ve been using C# for a couple of projects, and I wanted to step back from the managed, garbage collected goodness for a while. So I decided to forego all UI toolkits and just write direct Win32 API calls to create all my UI elements. Painful, yes! But fun too 🙂 Here’s the application:

It also includes full FreePascal source code. I managed to remove all external dependencies on other code, so it will compile solely from the FPC Win32 RTL. I’ve also commented almost every line, so on the off chance someone is as crazy as me and wants to see how to program the raw Win32 API from FPC, this is probably a good example!

You can download the application (and source code) from this link.