Little Programs Needed

Here are some tools and things I need, but have not written or found.

isholiday

isholiday [country-code]

Filter writes current holiday name, or nothing, to stdout. Returns true if it is a holiday. Should do its best with no extra input, but take a file of dates and names, or (extra credit) take a little language for computing other holidays. Options to add religeous holidays not officially observed. (I.e. in the US, Good Friday is a national holiday, and would be included in the default output. Yom Kippur and similar high Jewish holidays would be included with -r).

iscloudy

iscloudy [zip|airport-code]

Return true if it is cloudy out. Could get information from various weather sites, general aviation information, or whatever. Option to define how much cloud cover means "cloudy".

"Cloudy" means don't bother announcing astronomical or other space events, it is simply too cloudy out to be worth the bother. Maybe >60% coverage?

Small to Medium Projects

Build a decent stock report for the iPhone

Theirs stinks. Start with the SRC chart format. Include earnings and dividend data, stock splits, ex-dividends and (extra credit) portfolio activity. I have prototypes, but no knowledge how to interact with the iPhone. Perhaps this is mostly a Javascript thing.

GroanAlarm

I suspect that it is easier to detect that a PC has been hacked in real time than it might be to block all attacks. I propose a small program that monitors files, the registry, memory, etc., and if it sees that the machine was just hacked, emits a painful groan.

The idea is that the user will have feedback for a bad action within a few seconds, and may be able to learn about which actions exactly do bad things to his machine.

Big Jobs

Mythlecture

A Myth plugin that makes numerous lecture series available to Myth users. Include Google videos, Ted, fora.tv, the Princeton Tanner lecture series, Stanford's EE380 talks, talks from PARC, etc.

Port Peapod to FreeBSD

I think this is an exciting new way to slice the jail/sandbox containment problem. It appears to be much simpler to configure and understand than other current proposals.

I would like to see this uniformly implemented over Linuxes and FreeBSD, and configuration file generated for a variety of common client and server configurations.