In the late 90s, I was working in a univ lab as a post-doc, when the IPO market was hot. There there was this brokerage company ("Wit Capital") which would give

In the late 90s, I was working in a univ lab as a post-doc, when the IPO market was hot. There there was this brokerage company ("Wit Capital") which would give out IPOs to us serfs on a first-come, first-served basis. They usually got very few shares (maybe a couple of 1000 at most), and gave out only 100 to each applicant; and the competition was fierce. I wrote a Perl script which would poll their site (usually they announced an IPO in the evening), and if there was an IPO, it would fill out the web forms and submit it immediately. (This was before WWW:Mechanize and all those modules). I got in on quite a few of those, flipped them, and made a nice sum. Later, ETrade got in the game. They would give you at most 100 shares. But I realized that you could open multiple accounts in ETrade and increase your chances of getting the IPOs. So I opened 35 accounts in all. Once again I wrote Perl scripts to fill in the multi-step forms and submit them. This was pure screen scraping and LWP. Once again I got into a lot of IPOs. (Side note: but this time I decided to hang on to many of them, instead of flipping them immediately. Sadly, I ended up losing a good chunk of money too; but overall still came out quite ahead :) ). ----- When I was in the univ lab, the dorms got ethernet. Lots of students started sharing their disks via Windows. I hacked together a "search engine" with smbclient and Perl which would crawl their shares and index their contents; and with a simple Perl+curses app, I could pick stuff and download it. Soon I had 10s of GBs of music, movies, etc.