We are not programmers, but enjoy writing the occasional program. If you have ever used the UNIX shell, you will know that you have a very powerful scripting language at your disposal. I wrote numerous interface programs between different programmes or extract information. As an example, I wrote a script to extract all the information from an invoice before it is send to a printer and then produce labels for shipping.

On a different system, I had to save the reports from an application on a server to be viewed at a later date. I captured the printer output into a file with a special backend driver for cups on a LINUX computer. The backend driver then moves the file into a special directory structure. HTML tags are added to the file to convert it to an HTML page. A PHP script creates the menus so the documents can be viewed with a web browser.

There are many scripting languages. For most of my work, I use PHP. What is nice about PHP is that I can use it for dynamic web pages, scripting and GUI applications. Also, I can use it in Linux and Windows. This means I can reuse my code over and over again.

A personal project of mine was to record my billable time on a computer in my car. I connected a GPS to a small notebook computer and wrote a PHP GUI program to record the times. This turned into an app for ANDROID. More about this app can be found on the project page.

On Microsoft Windows and server systems, it is sometimes a better idea to use VB script.