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In the realm of small, useful things: a utility that connects a Linux serial port to a TCP/IP port, with support for multiple network connections, status pin control and reporting, and adjustable escape characters. One .c file, nice and simple. x86 executable here.
This, I'm pretty proud of, even though in its current form its UI leaves rather a lot to be desired. This came from a serendipitous find of 60 years - sixty, count 'em - of family film reels. (Don't worry, won't make you watch them.) They were splayed on the floor, victim of a random fall and a busted box. First thought of course was to make copies. "Copies" is the key here, because don't let anyone ever tell you that a DVD-RW will last near as long as celluloid, but it's easy to make two bytes from one, over and over until you can't possibly lose them all.
So, want to go from film to bytes. Plenty of firms and stores that do this, and they do good work. But I was just nervous enough (did I mention 60 years?) to want to keep an eye on the film myself, so I gathered together two generous sets of parents' worth of film gear, and set to work. Easy, yes? No. Film runs at 24 frames per second, digital systems at 29.97fps. This is (one reason) why sometimes people seem to be flailing about somewhat hysterically when you see old film clips on TV, if the film was transferred frame-per-frame for TV transmission. And this is why the firms and stores have a business - invest in some special mechanical hardware to do the transfer properly, without the shutter getting in the way of every fifth or sixth frame, and get your investment back a family vacation at a time.
But, as mentioned, wanted to hold on to the films. Realized the projector could run the film at 6 frames per second, which would ensure that for each film frame, there would be several digital frames popping out of the camcorder. Do some sampling, some interpolating, some compensating for a very confused camcorder iris, and you have a rather good digital movie footage from your films. Hence, FilMovie.
This is version 0.something of this code, nothing I'd give to someone I liked to just go and use. But if you're interested, check it out. I'm working on a real version (probably in Java, so the UI is a little more friendly and flexible) and I'm hoping to iron out the Mysterious Windows APIs that magically take care of the codec functions, because that's the kind of thing that will make it work fine on one machine and lousy on another thanks to something totally irrelevant like which version of Media Player is installed. The overall approach, though, of supersampling the film and then taking care of all the rest in software, might help you the next time you stumble Narnia-like across a storage room with a small explosion of family films.
Let me say for the record that I really respect Linux. As an engineer, it is smartly designed, well thought-out. So why, oh why oh why, are applications for it released in such a haphazard manner? I clicked on the "Install Apache Web server" straight from the Fedora 6 install disk, nothing clever or unusual. But the distributed configuration file was version-skewed from its own distributed modules! Anyway. Insert sad story of then trying to update the Apache install to be self-consistent here.
In the meantime, still had to get the Website up. So this is the code talking to your browser right now. I distribute it here really strictly as a demonstration of how simple a Web server can be, with thanks and credit for the core of it to Patrick Niemeyer & Jonathan Knudsen.
As long as I'm flaying poorly-deployed software, let me include myself in the category. These are not final-product software deliveries! These are utilities I've toyed with on my own, for other people interested in toying with the same thing. For Interest Only. Because deploying real software for real use is much too important to do halfheartedly.