Put Your Screen Saver to Work

Ever intend to start your computer working on a big job when you walk away so it'll be done when you come back an hour later? Ever walk away and forget to start it? That was happening to me a lot, so I wrote a screen saver that runs stuff while it's active, thereby automatically making use of my computer's idle time. I'm posting it here in case any of you would like to use it.

Since there doesn't seem to be an attachment mechanism, it's embedded in the image to the left. Just follow the instructions on the image. I got this simple method of embedding the file in the image from here: http://www.tricksystem.com/2008/12/secretly-hide-any-file-inside-jpg-image.html. You should get a file out of it named "Jobs@Home.scr". That's the screen saver. Just put it in c:\windows\system32, and it'll be selectable as a screen saver. MD5 checksum if you want to check it:

$ cat Jobs@Home.scr.md5
1f190b9e2db877fe07d683f551d621a3 *Jobs@Home.scr

How it works:

First, it's Windows-only. Sorry Linux guys. I wrote and am using it on Windows XP Home and Professional. Next, it's quite primitive. There is no configuration of the screen saver itself. It's hard-coded to read from a file named "c:\ssavejobs". This should be a plain text file with a command per line. The screen saver reads the lines from the file and executes each one in sequence (not parallel). When it finishes executing one line, it removes it from the file and begins the next one, so the file acts as a FIFO queue. Each line is executed by running the following command in a new process:

c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c <line from file>

Note that the ssavejobs file is *not* a .bat file. It is simply a series of one-line commands, each of which is executed as an independent process.

Example ssavejobs:

copy c:\test.txt c:\test2.txt
del c:\test.txt
move c:\test2.txt c:\test.txt
c:\foo\bar\rip.bat d: c:\rippedMusic
c:\foo\bar\encode.bat c:\rippedMusic\*

With the above example, the screen saver, when it comes on, would copy a file, delete a file, move the file back where it was (just trivial stuff to give you an idea of how it works), then rip music from your d: drive to a directory on your c: drive, and finally encode all the ripped music (assuming you have a rip.bat and encode.bat file that will do that for you). Keep in mind that unless you expect to be away from your computer for long enough for all the jobs to execute, you should make each job as short as possible. That way, when you do come back, either the current job will finish quickly, or you can cancel the current job without losing a ton of work. I.e in the above example, it would be better to rip and encode each track (or whatever) individually than doing two, large batch jobs.

Caveats:

The big one is that the screen saver can only update the ssavejobs file when it's on. That means if you come back to your computer and kill the saver while it's in the middle of a job, the job will continue (it's a separate process), but that same job will also remain at the top of the ssavejobs file. If this happens, you should either kill the process and let it restart later or let the job finish and manually remove the top line from ssavejobs. I might try to fix this if it becomes too big a headache.

Another problem is that the screen saver starts its background work when it displays in the "Display Properties" screen saver tab--you know, the tiny preview of it that you see in the picture of the monitor. So you might inadvertently start it by going to the screen saver dialog. It also starts, obviously, when you use the Preview button.

A potential deficiency is that the stdout of the processes being executed isn't captured anywhere, so you have no logs of what happened. You can only look at whatever outputs you were expecting to see if thing went as expected. I'll probably change this to print stdout/stderr to a log file if I can figure out how.

Finally, the dots (the screen saver itself) are not my doing. They were in the skeleton code that I downloaded to explain how to write a screen saver. They're more exciting than a blank screen, so I've left them on for now.