I usually let my meandering interests and hobbies lead me towards good ideas for code. For instance, right now I am trying to learn go. I'd like to play friends over the Internet Go Server but it's a primitive telnet system, and the various clients don't work behind firewalls. I'd like to work on a very simple client-server app so I can play from behind the firewall on company time. Playing go on company time is a personal mandate.

This is the way I usually get a code idea. Something annoys me, and so I write some code to fix it.

e-mail neshura

> Coding just for class isn't a great experience.
Well, yeah, generally, if you only write for the assignment...
One thing I had to do for my CS 2 class was to format a (Java) program into pretty HTML. Although my initial result was kind of ugly (on the code side), it worked. A few months later, I basically redid it, and broke up each step into its own thread so

• I could learn about threads in more depth
• you could easily change the input language/parsing engine/output format/etc. (that is, made the entire program more flexible)

If you romp around here a lot, you may become bothered by some things. You can try adding to the back-end (scary :)), or write front-end stuff (chatterbox clients, PerlMonks.org related scripts).

There is also a web site that lists abandoned open source programs, but I forget what it was. :( You may want to see if something there interests you.

Remember, most (all?) personal projects are created to scratch an itch. If you don't have any itches, you should become bothered by things easier. ;)

--== [N] ==--

That sounds like a fun project, and I'm currently stuck on Jellybean, so that'll be a fun diversion.

I've also toyed with doing a Perl version of Rogue for the Perl Power Tools project (shhhh, don't tell). That's what's on my plate at the moment, besides work stuff.

Maybe I'm just blessed with a short attention span and too much information not to think these things are neat.

Most of mine come from my boss or my customers. =) Without them, most of my code would be tinkering with stuff like this site or Blogger and on odd days, mucking with words, numbers, and graphics to see what I can do.

My best code has to be the stuff I write to prove other people wrong =)

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

Program ideas for me come from two general places: outside of the computer realm and useful apps for computer operations. Things outside of the computer realm include games like card games and sports (kind of). It also includes things such as science or math. Things like that.

If I want to use the computer to do some kind of boring operation, etc. I would rather spend my time programming an app to make the process faster for me. I assume this is where most of peoples ideas come from.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot. The best place to get ideas is on the job site. If you boss says, "Do this!!" Then you have no problem and you have the project idea placed right before you. :-)

Zenon Zabinski | zdog | zdog7@hotmail.com

Instant perl project! I ended up writing a piece of code that, after 2 rounds of modifications, ran two processes, one to take a picture every nth interval of time, and the other to clean up. The pictures were stored in a tree such that every 24 hours, it would loop back and overwrite the previous day's pics, but the cleanup process was used to insure that all old pics really were removed. This was necessary since it used the sleep() command and it wasn't guaranteed to take exactly 5 pictures per minute every minute.

It's been sitting idly waiting for more work, though. I'd like to modify it so it's not as intense on the webcam server end. It may also have to do with the webcam software, which I don't have much control over. In the end, though, it's a pretty cool little script since you can specify what server you want to hit, so if there's a webcam out on the web that spits out a live feed, but only a single frame per hit on the server, this will let you effectively build a 24 hour period archive.

Oh yeah, if you tell it to stop, as in 'wackyass.pl stop' at the command line, it will kill the archiving process, and within the next minute (whenever the cleanup process wakes up) it will do last minute cleanup and then kill that process.

I guess if you want to have something to do, like I do sometimes, find a stupid little pet project to work on. Look for the smallest necessity, and then take it to a grand level. I know next time I am actually looking for work, I'm going to use that script to demonstrate what my code is like.

ALL HAIL BRAK!!!

PsychoSpunk,
First of all you got a ++ because you responded with a valid reply, but even if I didn't do that, you'd get a hell of a ++ for the ALL HAIL BRAK!!! Ahh, space ghost...How far did you get with the webCam program? Did you use any modules or did you write it from scratch?

I should be getting my laptop back tomorrow ( forty days it was gone... ) so my programming projects should kick into gear since I'll have it where ever I am. We'll see if Best Buy will actually give me the thing back or not.

Macphisto

Everyone has their demons....

Wackyass is the program. Take a look. This is the first full program I've put on PM. Good luck with Best Buy, they're evil. My roommate works there, and the only good thing he credits them with is the discount he gets.

If anybody wants to play with Wackyass, feel free, I'd love to get more ideas on it, where to take it. I left it pretty much doing its thing since it was pretty good at getting the job I wanted done. I wanted to play with it some more, and maybe tie it into a thumbnail catalog or something. Basically, I wanted to get it to do archiving and searching.

ALL HAIL BRAK!!!

Cool Uses for Perl

All in all, I received some great ideas, and the best two for my situation were:

1. Small trial programs built around CPAN modules as I run through them to hone my skills (suggested by chromatic).
2. Diving into Open Source projects and trying to help out. More info can be found at SourceForge.Net.

-- Just another Perl slacker
Steampunk.