A lot of people asked me about the percentage in my messenger nickname. Some of them thought it was the actual completion state of any of the project I'm involved, and they were wondering how in hell was I able to measure it so precisely.

In fact, the percentage in my nickname (actually 63,78%) is not related to technology, but to nature. It's the level of the water reserve in Madrid. I've been monitoring it during the last 5 or 6 weeks. Daily. Going to the local water company and checking it manually. It actually surprised me how we moved from a poor 27% to the actual reserve in such a little time frame. Amazing. And obviously, it's pretty welcomed.

But this task it's boring. Really boring. I wanted that info directly on my desktop. So, this seemed like a perfect place for Inspector Gadget to play with Vista!!!

We first need a simple Html page to host all the gadget code. It's simple javascript + html, also know as the pretty famous dhtml. We then need a simple icon to show in the Gadget Library and of course bunch of nice javascript intervals, json, webservices, xml and xsl parsers to get all the data.

So I managed to get access to a webservice providing the percentage of water reserve for Madrid and wrote the code to embed it into a Gadget, dragged it to my Sidebar and et voilá! it's doing the hard work for me.

If you feel like curious about how it's done, download the actual Agua Gadget and inspect the code. It's pretty simple yet. I plan to upgrade it to support settings, nicer graphics and be able to monitor more areas of Spain (my current knowledge about water distribution is limited to Spain, but if you know any source of data to your region, don't hesitate to contact me and I would love to include it)

Download Agua Gadget 0.1 for Windows Vista. To install, simply unzip it and double click de .gadget file. Windows Vista would install it for you :)

You can find more info on how to create a basic Sidebar Gadget at this step by step tutorial and more info at the System.Gadget namespace reference.

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