If you can’t get through to your home number, a script can check the line status and send a signal to you via the Web to tell you when the line is free.

The Perl interpreter, perl, doesn’t often crash, but if it happens, not even the excellent Perl debugger will be able to help you.

They say darkness is the friend of thieves, but the Perl daemon in this month’s column illuminates dastardly deeds, exposing hidden activities and alerting the admin when things seem to be going awry.

In this month’s Perl column, we will introduce a system to water your plants while you are away from home. With a little help from Perl, a friendly, Linux-based irrigation system waters your plants twice a day.

My low-budget router has just crashed, and there is no way to reset the beast remotely via a network. Never fear – an X10 module, controlled by a web GUI with an Ajax interface, can actuate the mains switch.

SecurID tokens use an authentication system by RSA Security to give the user a valid key for logging onto the target system. A home-grown optical character recognition tool in Perl monitors the key generator.

An uninterruptible power supply can help get you through a short power outage without losing data or damaging hardware. A Nagios script written in Perl checks UPS health and initiates a controlled powerdown if the unit exhausts its battery capacity.

When foreign characters occur in program code or data, Perl programmers need a solution that avoids the tribulations of Babel.