I'm in the process of writing my next little script. This one is going to be in Perl, so people who are interested might want to download perl if they don't already have it.
The reason I'm using perl is that I find it to be a nice language that's a bit more approachable than C++, and I think it has very good documentation. Also, I think Perl might be a good place for people to start programming.
I don't want to get into any 'holy-wars' (
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/holy-wars.html), but generally, Perl seems most useful for handy little scripts that people need to write. It isn't so good for large projects, especially not large projects that multiple people need to maintain. Generally, for those, people prefer to use other languages.
-----
There were a couple reasons I picked that batch script as a starting tutorial. The first was that I thought it would prod people towards using Google to find information. Ideally, it should have entered a couple lines into something called the 'hosts' file.
This file associates urls with IP addresses. The IP address, as someone pointed out, was for the site, 'cutelittlekittens.com'
Normally, when you load hacker.org, your computer asks a server, "what's the IP address for hacker.org" This is a lot like looking in a phone book, in that there's a big list with names on one side and numbers on the other. Your computer would then 'dial' that IP address and get information.
The hosts file is kind of like the sticky notes some people keep by a phone. The important thing is that your computer will check there
before going to the 'phone book'. So, your browser would say, "oh, clearly, hacker.org is at the location 127.0.0.1, no need to do a formal lookup" and then it would show you the information sent by that site.
Firefox and internet explorer tend to only look at the 'hosts' file when they start up, so if you noticed that no changes took effect until you restarted your browser, that might be why.
Of course, this makes it so that the computer pulls up pictures of cats instead of a puzzle-site. (You can have some relatively harmless fun with this on people's computers, too. One thing to keep in mind is that your computer thinks of
www.cnn.com as a different domain than cnn.com)
Next, there were the little bits of code. The command 'echo' just returns whatever was in the quotes. The command '>>' means 'concatenate' or roughly 'stick onto the end of the file'
So, "echo foo >> file" says, "take the string 'foo' and stick it onto the end of 'file'."
Finally, the little script was intended to get people used to playing around with configuration files. This is something that will come up a lot later, so I figured it would be good if people got used to the idea of playing with their computer's settings.
As a final note, there was no particular reason for cutelittlekittens.com. I considered goatse, but decided that was done to death, and that having hacker.org suddenly turn into an overly cute site would be funny and clue people in that the problem was local (instead of the hacker.org site being hacked)
I own a Mac, running OS-X 
. Could you please add Mac samples of code?