When looking around for a quicker way to generate Rainbow Tables , I ran into a distributed network computing project.

It is a great way to be a part of some very useful projects.

BOINC Stats only updates once a day.  BOINC Synergy updates every few hours.  All Project Stats updates the project stats every few hours, but lags on the total credits.

The answer to my initial problem was to simply download the completed Rainbow Tables from BitTorrent .

UPDATE: Unfortunately, they don't tell you that the Shmoo Group tables won't work without a little bit of work.
You have to edit the charset.txt file, and add the following line:

alpha-numeric-symbol32-space = [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789!@#$%^&*()-_+=~`[]{}|\:;"'<>,.?/ ]

This is the same as "all" + a space before the closing ].

Logging to a file

Using search.cpan.org there are many options to logging to a file.  Finding just one that does exactly what you need can be a challenge.

Here, I will talk just about one:  Log::LogLite

LogLite was almost exactly what I was looking for, but I found it to be lacking in one area:  The date output formatting was most useless, and not customizable. "YYYY-DD-MM"!?  Why not YYYY-MM-DD like most computer programmers like, since it alpha sorts correctly?

A simple change near line 69 like so:

my $line = $self->{TEMPLATE};
  $line =~ s!<date>!$self->date_string()!igoe;
  # changed to $self->date_string() so module can be customized by deriving from.

And now I can derive modules from Log::LogLite and customize the date formatting.

package MyLog;
use Log::LogLite;
 
@ISA = ("Log::LogLite");
 
sub date_string {
 my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);
 return sprintf( "%02d/%02d/%04d %02d:%02d:%02d",
  $mon + 1, $mday, $year + 1900, $hour, $min, $sec );
} # of date_string

But since I have to modify the original module in order to have the flexibility to customize it, I just renamed the module LogLite.pm to MyLog.pm, made the above two changes and copy it around to where I need it. 

So much for code reuse.