Benjamin Mako Hill introduced the idea of conference backgrounds to me. It's kind of funny, to setup a background image on your laptop that is entirely inoffensive (so noone can bring up a reason why you shouldn't use it) but extremely distracting.

Not as good as his example background are some of these: optical illusions (I guess some people will think these are animated, or can at least explain why they find them distracting)

If you are giving a presentation, you should probably pick something else though... ;-) I can really recommend checking out Pixelgirlpresents, which contains many entirely inoffensive, but interesting and pretty backgrounds. In the featured section, check out the background "Batty". That one is great (I didn't find a way to "permalink" there, unfortunately)

Oh, and never forget that people will judge you by your desktop backgrounds (just like they do by the icon chaos you have there, if any) - putting some art there is generally a good thing. (And if it's cute, chicks will dig it!)

A friend of mine was asked to write a configuration frontend for amavis.

Poor guy: he'll never be able to support it properly. There is just too much sick stuff you can do in amavis' config: it's not a config file, it's a perl program.

Every time I upgrade amavis (to be precise: amavisd-new) on my mail server I'm cursing the developers for their stupid config file. (Note: apparently amavis-ng has a saner configuration file) Even with powerful tools such as Meld it is a PITA to merge my changes into a new version of the config file. Apart from the file being unreadable in general anyway...

Of course there are cases where you can benefit. For example, if you want to get configuration paramters from LDAP, instead of modifying the perl script code of amavis, you can just write your perl script code into the perl script config file... From what I've heart, using LDAP in amavis is really slow, too. (Except maybe if you spend much time on also implementing some caching, of course you can do that in the config file, instead of the script source...)

So please, whenever you write a program, design the configfile in a way such that other programs will be able to read and write it, too! (e.g. by using an XML format)