[java] Project Ideas

Make yourself and FTP client and server.

Make yourself a networked poker game.

I made an auto-updater once that turned out fairly impressive with relatively little work(probably much easier than writing a game). Client Connects to server, sends a list of the files that are in a given folder, server compares list to the files on the server and begins sending the files that the client didn't have(or had older modification dates on). If you get it going both ways with an update and commit function, then you've got yourself the beginnings of an svn client. Java will do most of the work for you if you wrap your streams together neatly. Wrap a file input stream into a byte stream, put the bytes into your own object with the filename, dates, etc, then wrap a tcp socket in an object outputstream, and feed your file object into that. Do the reverse to get the file back on the harddrive at the other side, and you're pretty much done since there doesn't need to be much in the way of user interface.