... what would I code? {Assuming my wife and I don't have something more interesting to do, that is...}

I can think of lots of little things, like a sweep command that recursively applies its arguments (and their arguments) over all subdirectories. I had one of those in DOS a looong time ago. It's easy enough to handle the simple case of no arguments to the repeated command, but adding the capability to execute a complete shell command line is a little less trivial. The DOS widgie I had never learned that trick, but it should be doable on *NIX in Perl.

I've got a few bigger nuts I'd like to crack, too, but I said two months, not two years. :)

I've been a model train nut since I was a little kid, but there's always been one insoluble problem for me: no people. Blender3D gives us OSS that can render animations in real time, but how about making ghost people that load themselves onto the real models on a video screen? Now that CPUs and graphics engines are in the G-FLOP range, is that finally becoming possible?

I spent a lot of time when I was independent in business designing a little hardware trainer that would help kids get a start on computing, programming, and independent problem solving. With commodity hardware tumbling in price, anything designed for a niche market is a goner. I put it to bed with regret, before I'd dropped the hundreds of $K on tooling and production. So, I say to myself, just what software could I build that would run on one of these little *NIX boxen being designed to sell in the Third World for a hundred bucks? What would bridge the Digital Divide? What would show young people (including today's typical high-bandwith-input addicts here in the US!) that they should learn to program and think for themselves?

So, okay, what would you all dream up? :D

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