RE: [OT] A question for programmers - Inspiration

["Brooks R. Robinson" <brooks.robinson@rides.com>]

<BIG SNIP>
| >The first is looking to other people for problems to be solved.  You'll
| >never find the inspiration in solving problems that don't affect you.
| >Since you don't feel the itch, you don't get much satisfaction from the
| >scratch.

Greetings,
	I agree whole-heartedly.  Find a program/package that you actually use that
doesn't work quite the way you want it too.  This can be a messy
configuration or from function overload or you think that you just plain do
it better.  For example, I've somewhat recently been working on a
fetchmail/getmail replacement.  I think that fetchmail suffers from function
overload; and getmail, written in python, can be slow.  I wanted a quick and
simple POP3 tool.  I have written a tool called gathermail to be just that.
It's, IMHO, 621 lines of straightforward, well(?) documented C code that
does just what RFC 1939 says to do.  I'm not entirely happy with it, but I'm
getting there.
	In short, find something that doesn't work and fix it.

HTH,

Brooks