Digital Art

If you are looking for some great digital art to use as desktop wallpaper, I highly recommend Digital Blasphemy. There are a lot of very nice images. (For Linux only) I wrote a little Perl script to change the background image and then used a CRON script to run it every 5 minutes. The script it below: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use File::stat;

@files;
$bg_files_dir = "/home/blain/MyDocs/backgrounds";

opendir(DIRHANDLE, $bg_files_dir) or die "couldn't open /usr/bin : $!";
while ( defined ($filename = readdir(DIRHANDLE)) ) {
    push @files, $filename;
}
closedir(DIRHANDLE);

$r_file = $files[rand @files];

$inode = stat("$bg_files_dir/$r_file")        
                 or die "Couldn't stat $bg_files_dir/$r_file : $!";

$size = $inode->size;
$mode = "centered";
if($size < 300000) { $mode = "stretched"; }


system("gconftool-2 -t str --set ".
."/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename $bg_files_dir/$r_file");
system("gconftool-2 -t str --set ".
."/desktop/gnome/background/picture_options \"$mode\"");

List of Open Problems in CS

I thought this was neet. It is a list of problems in theoretical computer science.

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Need to look up a computer science related term? Try looking at NIST's Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Programming Test Data

I have had trouble finding data to populate the databases that I develop with test data. A friend found some data files that contain the names of people in the USA along with some stats. They come from the 1990 US Census. Here are the file:

You can find more info about them here: http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/names_files.html