Gotta go with BlaisePascal on this one.

Most of the things I've done were itches that needed to be scratched. As an idea list, here's a few of the things I've done in Perl:

• Weather station to mySQL database, cgi-bin script that reads the database, displays weather as a web page. Also uses Festival/MBROLA to generate the weather in a spoken format.
• I designed a small PC board that connects to my amateur radio. The board decodes DTMF, sends it to the serial port on the Linux box. The Perl script takes those digits, looks for specific patterns, and when found, puts the radio in transmit mode, and plays the weather file from the previous item out the radio.
• Another cgi-bin script allows the frequency to be changed on another of my amateur radios. Assuming that the audio encoder was running on my NT machine (which it isn't at the moment), you could listen to various HF frequencies over the 'net (Voice of America, BBC News, amateur tranmissions, etc).
• A cgi-bin script that is a web interface to the Festival/MBROLA text-to-speech software. You type in a sentence, it will play it back to you as a .WAV or .AIFF file.
• Perl script that goes and gets various statistics from this site, stores them in a mySQL database. Any changes in reputations of my articles are noted, and sent to me in e-mail. (Source is here on the site, at luke_repwalker.pl)
• A Perl script that gets additional site statistics for Perlmonks, stores them in a mySQL database. Uses PHP to display them, however.
• Script that goes out to the Army Corp of Engineers website, retrieves the statistics for lake Sidney Lanier, in Buford, GA, and writes it to a mySQL database. A cgi-bin script then displays those in a tableized format (and, if the ACoE doesn't screw up *their* data, mine is actually correct, also... sigh.)
• I've let it go to hell, but some of my earlier Perl stuff scanned a database of PC peripherials I was interested in, from PriceWatch, posted them to a mySQL database. A cgi-bin script then would display the contents of the database, and allow graphs to be generated of price changes in these items. It also sent e-mail to a list of people about items they were specifically interested in.
• Igor, a small Perl mail handling script that acts as a query agent. You send him mail asking what the weather is (put the word 'weather' in the body), he'll report back the current state of my weather station. He also handles propogation forecasts for the solar flux, A & K indices. On my friends machine, you can get satellite prediction passes. (Source is here on the site, at K-Mart Blue Light E-mail Auto-responder)

As you can see, with a little ingenuity, and a few things you want to accomplish, you should be able to come with plenty of practical ideas.

And it's OK to re-invent certain wheels. Don't try to write your own version of CGI.pm, but if someone has already written a web-based CD cataloger, write another. Especially if you don't like theirs. Automate mundane tasks. Stuff like that.

--Chris

e-mail jcwren