Final Project Ideas

Here's some ideas for the final project. Note: These ideas are to get you started! Please come up with your own useful project idea to implement. If you use one of these ideas, or a simple variant, your grade will be 20 points lower than if you implement an original idea.

Password management scripts. Unix password files have the format:
```
     loginName:encryptedPassword
     loginName:encryptedPassword
     ...
```
where the encrypted password is the user's password after it has been run through crypt(). Since crypt() is available in Perl, it is straightforward and useful to write a set of scripts which manage a password file. You could implement scripts to add a new loginName, change a password, and delete a loginName. You could build a Web-based front end to these scripts.
Phases of the moon. I have a utility on my Win98 desktop which shows the current phase of the moon. Actually, it runs in the utility tray. The documentation says that the display uses the computer's current date, and calculates the moon phase "based on the Harvey algorithm". If you locate a description of how the Harvey algorithm works, you should be able to implement this in Perl. You could write a script which takes any date and calculates the phase of the moon.
HTML Indexing. It might be useful to take an arbitrary HTML web page and generate an index. This might be useful for HTML pages containing large amounts of text, or for a set of web pages which could be indexed together.
Finally, here's an email sent to Scott Adams (the author of Dilbert). It appeared in his book The Joy of Work. This might give you some ideas for "useful" Perl scripts:
My boss required semidaily progress reports, and we all know nothing changes that quickly, especially when you work in a group of 300 software engineers on one project.
I created a computer file of status keyworkds like: 55% complete, process inspection, communication with engineers, advanced investigation, etc. Then I wrote a program that randomly combined the nonsense status phrases based on an algorithm involving the seconds showing on my PC clock. Once created, the program would automatically send the status report to my boss.
Eventually my boss used me as an example of an engineer who was following the process!