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Sleepy
Sashazur

http://www.sashazur.com

Don't be freaked out when this URL jumps on you - 'Sasha' has a redirect to jps.net. Sasha is a software designer and a good one - and his site bespeaks his good taste too. Sleepy is a program many of us would benefit by - it tries to limit your time online. But were it not for one claim he makes we would probably have passed it over - Sasha says, and we quote: 'After the Welcome screen is gone (unless you clicked Exit), Sleepy can't be turned off.' All the rest of his claims are a straightforward piece of cake, e.g. shutting down even though open windows refuse to accept the WM_QUERYENDSESSION broadcast. But this one - not being able to stop it? Well we just had to download and try it! After a very fast install we checked the menu - because it did want to clutter our menu - and there was no menu item for starting Sleepy, only 'Sleepy Settings,' which we then fired up. And lo and behold, Sleepy told us we had EIGHT SECONDS to shut down! Woah! But before we could react, he started counting again, and then again, and then again... We went to 007 and found him all right, and hit 'Close,' and Sleepy 'beeped' - Sasha has a MessageBeep in there for the polite WM_CLOSE. Fair enough. Sort of expected that anyway. But then we went to X-tool - and Sleepy was DUST! Obliterated! Disintegrated like Ming the Merciless would have done with Flash! So much for the claim... And if you're a real addict, just delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Lazuli and the Sleepy value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. And note that 1. these are system-wide settings, so it doesn't matter who logs on; and 2. zapping these Registry entries might prevent Sleepy from running at re-boot but perhaps not help you stop an imminent shutdown, as the program probably uses an internal timer of its own - clever, Sasha! Whatever - it's a very cute app and software designers should take note and study the way this guy sets up his dialogs. There's a complete graduate course in there for the taking (not to mention what his site can teach you about turbo HTML). The disk image is unusually small for freeware or shareware - only 56,832 bytes (no static links, thank you, the uninstall information taking almost as much space) - and we found little extravagance in it, only about 600 bytes of C++/MFC bloat, a humungoid icon with 6 images and 256 colors (8,478 bytes instead of the usual paltry 766), a redundant system icon, and a pic of the man himself weighing in at 6.478 bytes. 30% bloat but it's still only a fraction of the size of ordinary wannabe apps. So you VB dilettantes out there take note. Oh, one final remark - we won't be running Sleepy just yet ourselves, we're too hooked on puters and the net for that, Sleepy will stick around in case some worried M.D. of ours prescribes it someday. But for those of you who'd fancy a snazzy and very useful - not to say life saving - app written by a guy with a genuine head on his shoulders - pick up Sleepy this very minute! It's written far far better than most of what you'll ever come across during your downloading career. It won't run as you 'don't want' on NT (uses RegisterServiceProcess on 9x) but that should be fixed shortly.

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