... 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

In reply to If I had a Free Two Months... by samizdat

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.