To keep updated with the tool visit the project’s homepage at: http://netifera.com/download
Details
Netifera is a new modular open source platform for creating network security tools. This project provides many advantages for both security developers and researchers who want to implement new tools as well as the community of users of these tools.
Often times you want to keep a file in sync, much like .mac, between computers. Or maybe you just need to make sure your files are backed up to the web. Enter a product called Dropbox.
Last year I created a tool one weekend that could randomly choose a wallpaper from a source, download it (if required) and display it as the gnome background.
It worked great for Hardy, but broke horribly for Intrepid. I was updating gconf with the correct details and making sure the backgrounds selection was all handled correctly. I was doing things the right way. But gconf can no longer be modified from a user’s crontab and my program died.
I was not prepared to create a crontab like daemon just for the task of changing the desktop wallpaper, it falls foul of the DRYs (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. We shouldn’t need to replicate functionally when a perfectly good system infrastructural component will do it and save the user running resources (especially when my replacement for crontab would have been written in python).
So, I’ve managed to get around the problem by doing it the wrong way, instead of updating gconf the program will now just replace a backgrounds file in .gnome2/ settings folder and make sure that an entry exists in your appearance options. So long as that entry is selected, your background will be random.
Do report bugs in the launchpad project if you try it out and find some. I’d like to get this into the main repositories at some point.
