Here's a description of a workable open hackathon - that actually took place and got stuff built. Almost.
I just released a new version of the wintools package. I've added two tools. SendEmail will let you - well you've probably already guessed that. And reply.com will let you get user input in batch scripts.
There's an extension that does the above. No more "minimize all| finde IE icon|start IE|copy paste shortcut".
Although a bit old ( odd you tend to call web hacks old, when they've been around for half a year) I still think this needs to be mentioned. A simple IPv6 reverse proxy that will provide IPv6 access to your website. The only thing you need to do is create one quad-A record. Guess you don't loose that many visitors by not having IPv6 support. But it's a nice POC hack.
Geoff Goodell from Harward wrote this nice hack, that makes you able to browse ( or whatever you have to do on the internet) anonymously via the DNS protocol through the use of Tor and Dan Kamiskys OzymanDNS. In other words you can use closed hotspots or other networks that only allow DNS traffic to browse anonymously. And you don't even have to set up your own OzymanDNS server.
Tim Bray has two highly diggable posts on writing more XML schemas instead of reusing existing ones. His advice is: Just don't do it. And if you do, do as little damage as possible. I feel his pain daily. The domain business (in which I work) is a world with tons of vendors all of whom have APIs of some sort, all of which API's do more or less the same thing and frightfully many of which API's are different, sometimes ever so slightly, but enough that you need to handle each case on it's own. There's even an established standard - but of course only the most stringent and controlled ov vendors abide by the standard. Most add their own gunk to it. In the best case, this is done in a stringent and documented manner, but occasionally it's just broken and badly so (when it gets really bad the XML is not even XML).
Also, this post is a reminder for myself about the acronym YAGNI.
Vmware surely opened the box when they released the Vmware Player. The Player opens opportunities for hackers to create and distribute Vmware images. But it also gives ordinary users an introduction to virtualization. Get ready to forget about installation. Servers are something you download and run. Get the Player, get the machines, and go hack. Be sure to read this comment before you start hacking.
IronPython - the Microsoft sponsored .NET version of Python - is almost ready for primetime as the first beta of the 1.0 release comes out. There are too many languages on my language todo-list to make it realistic that I'll be spending serious time on IronPython - but since we're using .NET (just not quite yet in my little core group of 3 people) I've gotta like the ability to whip up stuff using a proper open language.
Our most excellent sysadmin where I work, Simon, produces an internal distribution of tools that makes the windows command line environtment tolerable. It's just a compilation of ports of tools other people made, but in one convenient package on sourceforge, here. It contains a ton of stuff you'd like to have for tooling machines from the command line - notably all the common GNU utilities, a version of perl, some Windows specifics process interrogation tools and some DNS related tools. There's more to be done, but just having the package is tremendously useful.