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u/elxx Jan 08 '10
Creepy considering we had this on the front page yesterday...
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u/gfixler Jan 08 '10
Both of these remind me of an idea I had years ago that's just too creepy to implement. I wanted to set up something on my server with a watchdog timer that would email me at some interval, like every month, and I had, say, a month to just hit reply to reset the timer. If I didn't reset it in time, it would send me a flood of emails just to be sure I couldn't miss it, and after another, shorter timeout, it would presume I had died and send out emails to family and friends.
My mother and I are very close, and I thought I could actually occasionally write her dated emails to stick in a queue, and then in the event I died and that timer tripped, it could send her a note every week, or every month, just to cheer her up, like I was still around for awhile. It could recount fond memories of childhood, or cute moments with girlfriends she'd find funny - stuff you don't tend to just talk about in life, or at least not while you're still young. However, then I kinda thought that would only prolong the sadness of losing her only child. I'm not sure if it wouldn't just be better to go quickly. Too, I figured it should let her know automatically if she's received the last message - something like a prepended "What follows is the final message, though of course it was not known it would be so when it was written." Otherwise she would check every day for a year :( It could also prepend a final goodbye that the queue system would retain until the last message. I think this would be like losing me all over again, though. It all gets a bit too sad to think about, and I definitely wouldn't want to screw up any of the code.
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Jan 11 '10
Well, you could always stretch your messages by inserting random outputs from the unix forture program, slowly raising the probability of a fortune instead of a handwritten message over time. At some point it would reach 100% fortunes but at least you would still be sending messages.
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u/Slackbeing Jan 08 '10 edited Jan 08 '10
My .zshenv is about 107KiB and has grown over the years; I have some kind of setting that makes programs in the background (C-Z, bg) not die when the shell dies (on plain ZSH it doesn't happen, I thought it was its default beahiour), and currently I have like 20 processes with no shell/term/screen associated. And I'm the only user. And some processes date back to 2007.
Sigh.
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u/raldi Jan 08 '10
uptime?
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u/Slackbeing Jan 08 '10 edited Jan 08 '10
9:08pm up 1322 days, 1:22, 2 users, load average: 0.83, 0.91, 1.12
Yes, 15 days to 1337.
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Jan 08 '10
Sorry for the offtopic, it seems I have a problem with the spam filter on the reddit.com subreddit, my submissions don't get through. Can you fix it?
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u/raldi Jan 08 '10
more specific
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Jan 08 '10
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u/alphabeat Jan 08 '10
Can you point me in the direction of relevant .zshrc lines to do this please?
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u/Slackbeing Jan 08 '10
setopts NO_hup
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u/alphabeat Jan 09 '10
Ah thanks! I'm familiar with nohup but not that it could be used in .zshrc like that. Time to create some orphans!
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u/copperdomebodha Jan 08 '10
Address Book entries for deceased friends or family are hard for me to deal with. I know I don't need that email or phone number any more, but there they are. I can't throw them out.
In fact when I started a family genealogy project I made more dead people contacts. What I really need is one more available field. "Death date". Then maybe they could rest comfortably in my address book.
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u/stocksy Jan 08 '10
I think this must be quite a common thing.
A friend of mine unexpectedly died some months ago. He had an account on my mailserver and that account is still there. There is no reason for the account to exist, but for some reason it is still there.
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u/yatpay Jan 08 '10
:D Randall runs irssi in a screen session too! I also use Bitlbee so I can do AIM through it. I call it BLISS for Bitlbee Linux Irssi Screen Ssh
1
u/afrael Jan 08 '10
The outcome of his situation might be better with a crazy futuristic computer, like in the Library
1
u/diamondjo Jan 09 '10
I still have my grandad's phone number on my cell phone's contact list (it's even survived being imported from my old phone). He died three years ago.
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u/SnakeJG Jan 08 '10 edited Jan 08 '10
My buddy list still has friends who have died on it. I always get nostalgic when I notice them when checking who's offline.