October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
489 pages
12h 2m
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Randomize Your Mac Desktop Background
Leave your Mac desktop picture to chance with Yahoo!, Perl, and AppleScript.
Windows users aren’t the only ones who can experience the fun that is random desktop backgrounds [Hack #83] . By using Yahoo! as your own image database, you can automatically change your Mac desktop background picture when the mood strikes.
If you use Mac OS X just to browse the Web and send email, you might not be aware that there’s a powerful Unix-based operating system under the hood. In fact, in addition to AppleScript (the Mac scripting language), Mac OS X ships with Perl installed. This hack takes advantage of both Perl and AppleScript to bring some randomness to your desktop.
The Code
Perl is a great language for making HTTP requests and working with the responses. But it’s not as good as AppleScript at performing Mac system tasks, such as setting a desktop image. Luckily, a Perl module called
Mac::AppleScript lets you execute AppleScript code from within your Perl scripts. To install this module, open a Terminal window and type the following command:
sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Mac::AppleScript'Before you begin, you’ll need to install a couple of other Perl modules. As with most of the Perl examples in this book, you’ll need LWP::Simple and XML::Simple to make Yahoo! requests and parse responses.
Once these prerequisites are installed, save the following code to a file named ybackground.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl # ybackground.pl # Accepts a query term and sets a ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.