This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

I often make quick hacks (aka customisations, workarounds, fixes) to systems in order to solve a problem or limitation, or just nifty bits of code.

I think some of my favourite are:

• Forward porting a legacy Intel video driver for XOrg to a backported version of XOrg in order to obtain proper video functionality on my Toshiba Libretto U100 laptop with Fedora 12.
• Writing backup software for a telecommunications company which connects to a legacy network device via telnet and proceeds to dump the configuration and OS binary data out over the same telnet session, capturing it and then storing it in a file on the backup server.
• Writing a tool to convert a budget USB scanner into a network scanner that outputs PDF files using scanimage for Linux and some PHP glue.
• Various little scripts, such as an automatic shutdown script to watch a process  (eg a number of downloads) and shutdown upon completion.

There are plenty of other examples that I’m sure I could look at, the above is what came to mind late at night. :-)