Re: If I had a Free Two Months...

[jhourcle]

One of five things, that I've been putting off for various lengths of time:

• A route planning program that accepts inputs about the quality of roads (road construction information, moderated user input, etc.), and the time variability of the quality (when rush hour is, school years, night time driving conditions, etc), to provide better quality directions than mapquest and other similar programs. (after taking a road trip in 1997, based on mapquest directions, and finding that I was in a 40mph zone on I20 through Louisiana that was single laned ... which I only took to avoid the pothole poxed I30 through Arkansas) And of course, I have no GIS experience.
• A recipe system, that can provide suggestions based on available ingredients, chefs (skill level), equipment (no grilling, if you don't have a grill), diners (allergies, food intolerences, likes/dislikes). Build using some form of markup, rather than just something like the MasterCook formated stuff, so you can provide suggested alternative ingredients, track cooking times (with chef skill level) so it can suggest the whole plan for a meal so it's done at the right time, and/or help and or instructions to learn new skills. (big plans that I've been mulling over for years, but have probably gotten it to the point that it's unrealistic). Inspired from my own food intolerances, and the occassional potluck, where I'm afraid to bring stuff that someone else might react badly to (allergies, etc.)
• Finish a program to generate memorable passwords. The basic routines work, I just need to get it seeded with more content, so it doesn't create a security problem. (see the pod in it, for an explaination of the problems)
• Software for my tivo, so I can automatically grab recipes from the show I'm watching. (I have all of the necessary screen scraping so I can mine FoodNetwork's website, but never finished learning java to make a tivo front end for it, and enter it in that contest they were having)
• Figure out who the right person is to bug to submit a patch for Pod::Html, so it stops generating invalid nested lists. Okay, that one's not coding, as I already did the coding part. I just need to figure out what to do with it now.