Back in 2000, I had just finished my freshman year of college at Washington State University and was back at the best summer job you could possibly imagine: sales associate at the local OfficeMax (office supplies store). Now, by “best” I really mean “boring” but it wasn’t a bad job, especially for a 19 year old (at least I wasn’t flipping burgers, right?). Selling printer ink and paper wasn’t the best use of my time, but maybe there’s an analogy with Einstein working at the patent office (we can all dream).

Anyway, to pass the time I decided to see if I could write a fully professional-quality Windows utility from start to finish in just a few weeks. I had recently read an article by Mark Russinovich about the new Windows 2000 defragmentation APIs, and it had source code for a Contig command-line utility that would defragment 1 file. (Back then I remember there being some source code but I can’t find that now.) Using that information as a basis I decide to write my own disk defragmenter, because clearly a college sophomore knows how to do this stuff. It would have a GUI version (“Fraginator”) and a command-line version (unfrag.exe), full CHM documentation, and a mascot. I wrote it in some mangled form of Visual C++ 6.0 with STL, if I remember correctly.

“Defrag, baby!” The Fraginator was not joking around with your data (I was a bit goofier with my coding back then). The picture is actually stolen from Something Awful’s satirical Jeff K from one of his comics where he thinks he’s a buff super hero or something (warning: those links may not be safe for work, or even safe for life, but they are at least occasionally hilarious). Hopefully Lowtax won’t come after me for that.

I finished the project up, put it up with source code (GPL) on my podunk of a website (I think it was hosted at zipcon.net, a small Seattle ISP), and mostly just forgot about it…

… until last week when I searched around for it and discovered that the ReactOS guys had started to include it in the applications distro about, oh, 6 years ago. They had even converted it to Unicode and translated it to a dozen languages or so. I thought, hey that’s great, someone actually likes it and is maybe even using it! I certainly was not expecting to find anything of the sort.

I was browsing through their “new” source code tree for it and immediately found a relic in the dialog resource file, clearly from a goofier moment:

I think I had this label control in there for layout purposes only, as it clearly doesn’t show up in the UI when you boot it up. But wait, it gets better. They haven’t removed this (not a bad thing), and in fact they’ve translated it.

So there you go. “I am a monkey, here me eeK” in Norwegian (I think). If you scout around with a web search you should be able to find a bunch of other translations. The French one is probably the most romantic pick-up line you’ll ever find, and there’s no need to thank me for your next success at the bars.

The last timestamp on the Fraginator.exe sitting on my hard drive is from 2003 and it doesn’t seem to work on Windows 7 anymore, unless you use it on a FAT32 USB stick. I doubt it’ll even compile in Visual Studio 2010. Oh well I’m glad the ReactOS guys are having use and fun with it. If you want the source, you’re better off checking out their copy of it. I don’t know if I even have a ZIP of that lying around anymore, and they’ve made decent improvements since then anyway.