Today I fixed and maintained some internal web pages and wrote a few scripts that I've been wanting to write for a while. This is deeply satisfying to me.
First, I wrote a server that sits on my desktop machine (Windows XP) and listens for URL's. When it gets a URL, it opens that URL in a browser. Then I wrote a client that sends URL's to the server from our firewall/mail host.
The upshot is that when I read mail in my preferred environment (vm under XEmacs), I can move point onto a URL in an e-mail message, hit RET, and the URL opens in an Internet Explorer window on my desktop.
Almost as though I was reading my mail in Outlook, sneer the Outlook zombies.
Almost. Except without the security risks.
Second, I wrote a server that sits on a windows machine and listens for requests. It understands two commands. GET makes it dump the contents of the clipboard. SET makes it set the contents of the clipboard to whatever you pass in after the "SET".
Then I wrote a cgi script that sits on our internal web server. I can GET the clipboard from any of our windows desktop machines and then copy that to the clipboard of any other machine.
This is something akin to the Holy Grail for us. What it means is, I can say to my wife, "Hey, check out this site." And she can grab it from my clipboard. Or while we're coding, suppose I'm driving; she can find a code snippet and send it to my clipboard and then I can paste it into whatever I'm doing.
Also I fixed the 'cvs annotate' feature of cvsweb, and made the revision numbers in the left margin be links, because that was cool and I could do it easily.
Excuse me, though. I have to go read 'OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today' e-mails. I'm still enjoying not having to select, reconstitute, and paste the damned URL's.