I can tell you. .. But then I'll have to kill you.

nah, more seriously I've been learning perl for about two weeks to prepare myself for next university year (last one before a master in computer security) I decided to write a surveillance/log management system that would parse logs, fill dublin core style tables in a mysql database and then run diagnostics to detect discrepancies that might indicate hostile activities
with that data it would write reports and email them. Each main unit should be able to run on a separate machine. Hence the message queue issue