Software
Sometimes I write Perl code. Not a lot of it, and no big projects,
but just little applications that get a particular job done when I
need it. The following scripts I wrote primarily with exactly that in
mind, so they're not industry-quality code. They just work for me.
I wrote them on a Linux box, so they're written to work on these. Being
Perl, they might just as well work on any other operating system, but I
don't have the time or knowledge to adapt them. If somebody feels the need
to do so, go ahead; it's absolutely fine with me.
All scripts come packaged as a ZIP file with a copy of the GNU General Public License attached. Just take the *.pl script, stick it somewhere in your $PATH and you should be done. No fancy installers.
Sudoku Solver
A little text-mode program doing exactly what it says, and keeping you posted about the logic it employs. Configuring the script is not necessary. No dependencies, either.
Wordsmith
A rhyming dictionary with a GUI, written in Perl/Tk. Consequentially, you need to have Tk installed, but nothing else. In order to work, this program requires a phonetic word list. For the English language, such a word list is available in the Moby project, and can be retrieved from here. Use "Moby Pronunciator", mobypron.tar.Z. Once unpacked, load mobypron.unc into WordSmith.
Autobackup
A little script for incrementally backing up computers on a NFS-mounted backup medium, using dump/restore for ext2/ext3 partitions (its primary purpose), tar/split for other filesystems (kludgily so), and wget to back up the contents of FTP-accessible sites.
You need to configure the script before using it, do so by opening it in an editor and adjust the relevant parameters to your tastes.
