So in an earlier post I wrote about tweaking the Virtual Earth Screen Saver (VESS) code to allow it to see both of my monitors.

After I did that I thought that maybe the VESS developer may want my code. So I contacted him from the CodePlexVESS home page and asked if he wanted my code contribution. The lead developer's name is Keith Kinnan and he was very friendly and open to having me contribute on the project. So he made me a dev on the Virtual Earth Screen Saver project.

So far I have uploaded code to implement multi-monitor support, proxy support, conversion to VE v6, and a few other minor changes. Once Keith looks over the code he may roll what I did into a new release of the Virtual Earth Screen Saver. Very cool.

It's a very small project but being the first time I have REALLY contributed to an open source project this is probably a good thing. Just getting to communicate and quasi-work with Keith is cool. He is a heavy hitter in the Virtual Earth project.

This program is in C#. Not a language I program in daily. But being a .NET language it's not too far of a leap from VB.NET which is what I use daily.

I have leached off of and learned from open source so many times in the past that it feels real good to finally contribute on some level.

I'll post more as this project develops.

I started working on a Point Of Interest (POI/P.O.I.) mapping project.

A few months ago I bought a Garmin C550 GPS unit and absolutely LOVE it! I immediately learned how to add custom POI files and soon had a rather big collection of POI files I gathered from different sources on the Internet and made myself.

I could not find a FREE/easy way to view all my POI files. So I started work on a solution.

My POI Plotter uses the Virtual Earth API (v5 as of this writing but I will upgrade to the current version, v6, soon).

The POI Plotter allows you to upload your POI file and plot it on a map to see where your POIs are.

It is in its infancy so expect many features to be added in the near future.

POI Plotter

So, as seen in the previous blog post, my employer sent me 2 new 19" Dell monitors. I was very upset to see that my all time favorite screen saver did not support dual monitors.

I have been using This Virtual Earth Screen Saver. It's a screen saver using Virtual Earth APIs which reads RSS feeds to show interesting Virtual Earth birdseye and satellite images from users with information about those images.

The good news is that the Virtual Earth Screen Saver is hosted on CodePlex and the source code is available. I went and checked it out. The code is written in C# and I'm a VB.NET developer but I can usually find my way around C# just fine. I downloaded the code, figured out how to add dual monitor support and BAM! My favorite screen saver now uses both of my beautiful new monitors. Love it. I'll try and contact the Virtual Earth Screen Saver developer team to see of they want my changes.

I don't blog much but today is a good day! The FAA just sent me 2 new 19" Dell monitors. I love this set up. Watch my productivity go through the roof! It hard to tell from the photos but these things are HUGE. They take up most of my desk. Love 'em though.

www.flickr.com dugrhill's Doug's Home office photoset