webcollage1

Usage

Overview

The webcollage program pulls random image off of the World Wide Web and scatters them on the root window. One satisfied customer described it as "a nonstop pop culture brainbath." This program finds its images by doing random web searches, and extracting images from the returned pages. It places the images on the root window by using the giftopnm(1), djpeg(1), and xli(1), xv(1), or xloadimage(1) tools.

webcollage is written in perl(1) and requires Perl 5.

Options

webcollage accepts the following options:

-root

Draw on the root window. This option is manditory: drawing to a window other than the root window is not yet supported.

-verbose or -v

Print diagnostics to stderr. Multiple -v switches increase the amount of output. -v will print out only the URLs of the images; -vv will print all the commands being run; and -vvv will print more than you care about.

-delay seconds

How long to sleep between images. Default 1 second. (Remember that this program probably spends a lot of time waiting for the network.)

-background color-or-ppm

What to use for the background onto which images are pasted. This may be a color name, a hexadecimal RGB specification in the form '#rrggbb', or the name of a PPM file.

-timeout seconds

How long to wait for a URL to complete before giving up on it and moving on to the next one. Default 30 seconds.

-filter command

Filter all source images through this command. The command must take a PPM file on stdin, and write a new PPM file to stdout. One good choice for a filter would be:

webcollage -root -filter 'vidwhacker -stdin -stdout'

-filter2 command

Filter the composite image through this command. The -filter option applies to the sub-images; the -filter2 applies to the final, full-screen image.

-http-proxy host:port

If you must go through a proxy to connect to the web, you can specify it with this option, or with the $http_proxy or $HTTP_PROXY environment variables.

Environment

DISPLAY

to get the default host and display number.

XENVIRONMENT

to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.

http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY

to get the default HTTP proxy host and port.

Files and urls

/usr/dict/words or /usr/share/lib/dict/words or /usr/share/dict/words

To find the random words to feed to search engines.

http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl, http://image.altavista.com/ To find random web pages.