I was thinking about some itches to scratch, and I've come up with a few, which should sharpen some of my skill on many fronts.

At my current employer I get floppy disks of information to be put up on the web site. I thought about making that process interactive over the web. I think I can use a combination of XML, for the data and CGI with Perl to pull this off. The only problem now would be the authentication mechanism. I probably can find a Perl module to take care of that, too. More on that in a minute

I was also thinking of configureng screen scraper to download all of my Yahoo email. That's another itch to scratch.

On the way to work I was thinking also about how to migrate users from one computer to another (that's happening a lot now.) Usually I just copy files to a network drive, but being able to package those files would be helpful, as I can preserve the directory structure of the files I back up (or migrate.)

I have stopped working on putting Gentoo on my old desktop and laptop at home for right now. I was setting up the desktop for working on my web stuff. I found another neat way, in my opinion to utilize Gentoo in the meantime. I'm using it to generate Slackware packages for software that's not part of that distro, like ratpoison and Mozilla Firebird. A lot of the software I'd like to install at home isn't part of the Slackware distribution, so I can use Gentoo to compile a package for me to take home.