Stupidest thing you've coded just to see if you could

2. Around the same time I wrote a JenniCam bot. It downloaded Jenni's current picture and saved it with a timestamped filename, every fifteen minutes. I let it run for a little more than two weeks. I got nearly 1500 consecutive pictures of Jenni, thoughout her life.
That sounds pretty cool until you think about how much time she spends sleeping, out of camera, etc. So, of 1500 images, about 4 were worth keeping.

Viva la geek.

I'm pleased to say that the prof had a great sense of humor, and gave it a very good grade despite its singular defect: that it was possible for the pointer to warp itself out of the application window.

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When it ran it ate up all the available processes on the server. This meant that I had no obvious way of stopping it running because there were no free processes that I could use to kill it. Unfortunately the whole class were working on the now overwhelmed machine and found they couldn't do anything with it.

Eventually, I got it by logging onto another server with access to the same hard disk and deleting the script file.

The stupidest program I have written has to be a program I wrote to annoy someone in the programming class before mine in high school. I knew this character always used the same computer that I did and that his class was always at the same time. I downloaded a C++ TSR library known as tsr100je.zip from SimTel and coded up a program that would stay resident and then launch at the appointed time. I then modified COMMAND.COM on the computer so it load a different file at startup than AUTOEXEC.BAT, and stuck my TSR into the new AUTOEXEC.BAT. I turned off my computer and then left.

Apparently, the program worked and it really perplexed its itended target and my programming teacher. She had me check the computer for virii when I was in class, so I removed the program from the new AUTOEXEC.BAT and that was the end of that.

Any way, the program would start off pretty benign: it would print random characters on the screen at random intervals. Then the real fireworks began. I had just learned how to change the colors in the color pallete in text mode, so I had the screen appear to fade to black. For effect, I had the program fade the monitor in and out for awhile using random colors. Finally, I disabled Ctrl+Alt+Delete and printed some random messages on the screen.

It was fun to write, but boy was it useless.

"Wheel Of Lunch". At this company where I worked for three weeks, we went out to lunch every day, often on the company's dime. It got to be so much mental effort to choose a restaurant that one of my co-workers set up a MySQL database with various information about nearby restaurants (e.g. vegetarian meals available, cheap vs. expensive) and I whomped up a little Perl script that would, given certain criteria, pick a place for lunch at random.

The really sad thing is, this tiny app was a lot more useful than the software that the company made its revenue from. But that's a story for another day.

"Ms. Restivo has big boobies!"

Ms. Restivo, my 25-year old fourth grade teacher found it, and easily decoded it in about three seconds, then sent us both to the principal's office. It was the only time I was ever sent there, and the principal laughed so hard I was afraid he was going to die. I just about peed myself in terror. He went ahead and called my parents, who were rather less amused by the whole ordeal.