

Ask HN: Looking for an interesting project(s) to eat up some spare time - spaghettiman

I'm looking for interesting ideas/problems that I could spend my spare time programming solutions for. Having been severely burnt out from a couple of start-up ventures that ate up 5 years of my time, I'm really just looking for something I can enjoy coding in the background of my life at a leisurely pace.<p>The ideal project would see me spending more time programming on the back-end rather than wasting a day fiddling with CSS, and having to spend lots time considering complex issues rather than doing lots of 'grunt work' coding, and ideally have no time pressures, as it's something I'd do for enjoyment, rather than trying to seek a monetary gain at the end.<p>Any ideas people care to share? Some interesting things I've thought of are:
   - A TCP/IP scripting language: Basically an interpreter that enabled a user to work at the packet level quickly and easily using simple logical statements depending on what the receiver sends back.<p><pre><code>   - Apache syslog: An Apache module that sends access logs over syslog (I know there are ways to do this already, but you need to use a pipe to logger and that just seems like crud to me).

   - Binary watermarker: Something that watermarks executables that makes discovery and tampering extremely difficult (may not be possible, but worth a shot)

   - Subversion plug-in to automatically perform static code analysis (may exist, haven't looked very hard).

   - Web-based tool for getting yourself or your website/network vulnerability scanned over the Internet.</code></pre>
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retube
Totally off-topic, but re your binary watermarker I'm looking for a data
watermarker. E.g I have an ascii data set (.csv) with say millions of rows and
10 columns. I want to either a) insert occasional "easter egg" records or b)
adjust a handful of existing records such that the data is still good, but
invisibly, yet provably, marked in some way.

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fragmede
-TCP/IP scripting language - Both ruby and python support working with low-level socket objects, so that's probably a good place to start. If you're looking for something lower-level, scapy ( <http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/> \- python) might be a worth a look.

-Binary watermarker - You might look into SELinux to see if it will do what you want.

-Subversion plug-in - A pre-commit hook that runs pylint/reek against your code and spits back FAILED is pretty cool.

-Website scanner - There's a list of a few existing scanners on google's webmaster forum ([http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=728027f66f941c6d&hl=en) ). And there is also an obvious route to monetization.

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lazyant
"Web-based tool for getting yourself or your website/network vulnerability
scanned over the Internet."

For malware/website qualys does it for free:
<http://www.qualys.com/products/qg_suite/malware_detection/>

For network in general hard to compete with QualysGuard but I guess you could
use nessus/OpenVAS

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proexploit
What's your passion? Are you a fan of cryptography, fishing or religious
fanatic? If you're looking for an interesting problem to attempt to fix in
your spare time, make it something you care about! There's unlimited problems
in the world and countless solutions.

(I'll be the "fiddly CSS guy" if you end up doing something fun that could use
a little UI design).

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nreece
I wrote about a few ideas on my blog -
<http://www.nilkanth.com/2010/05/21/6-ideas-off-my-chest/>

Have a read and see if something interests you.

