Desktops
I'm a packrat when it comes to desktop background images. I collect 'em. Lots of 'em. The whole "my desktop looking cool makes me happy" thing is something I've had for a while: under Linux and Solaris, it led to endless tweaking of windowmanager config files and...well, windowmanagers, whereas under OS X, it leads to having lots and lots of desktop backgrounds (394 at last count, and growing daily), which currently I have on a half-hour random rotation.
Which brings me to this post: the algorithm that OS X uses for "randomly" selecting a file from that directory is fairly demonstrably not, as I have had the same image pop up several times, even more than once in the same day, while other images have yet to show up. If I were particularly bloody-minded about it, I suppose, I'd actually attempt to do some sort of statistical analysis to figure out what sort of algorithm actually is at work here, but I can't really be bothered, so instead it's just sort of an interesting little tidbit of information.
What it did lead me to do, however, was to write a fairly brain-dead little Dashboard widget to snag the name of the current image and cough up its name and EXIF comment field into a box on the Dashboard, so I'm not stuck when someone wanders past and says, "Hey, that's a cool image--what is that?" (Most of the time, I can't remember.) Turns out widget-writing is sort of fun, and not hard at all, so I'll be interested to try a bit more of it in the future...just as soon as I find something (else) worth writing a widget for.
Oh, and just to have it in electrons, Flickr has a really nice file-naming scheme for downloaded images: a quick Google for "Flickr " (where is the first chunk of the downloaded image's default filename) produces a link to the image's Flickr page. Wait, that's almost worth writing a...naah.
Which brings me to this post: the algorithm that OS X uses for "randomly" selecting a file from that directory is fairly demonstrably not, as I have had the same image pop up several times, even more than once in the same day, while other images have yet to show up. If I were particularly bloody-minded about it, I suppose, I'd actually attempt to do some sort of statistical analysis to figure out what sort of algorithm actually is at work here, but I can't really be bothered, so instead it's just sort of an interesting little tidbit of information.
What it did lead me to do, however, was to write a fairly brain-dead little Dashboard widget to snag the name of the current image and cough up its name and EXIF comment field into a box on the Dashboard, so I'm not stuck when someone wanders past and says, "Hey, that's a cool image--what is that?" (Most of the time, I can't remember.) Turns out widget-writing is sort of fun, and not hard at all, so I'll be interested to try a bit more of it in the future...just as soon as I find something (else) worth writing a widget for.
Oh, and just to have it in electrons, Flickr has a really nice file-naming scheme for downloaded images: a quick Google for "Flickr " (where is the first chunk of the downloaded image's default filename) produces a link to the image's Flickr page. Wait, that's almost worth writing a...naah.