Following on from the usual sensible, structured discussions you
find on IRC, a remark was made about
Eliza, the program
which acts as a Rogerian therapist (and which can lead to
chaos)
and the
other
programs which talk back to input you give them. Simultaneously,
another conversation produced a remark about computers telling you,
No! Don't do that! You'll regret it!
For some reason, the combination amused me, and I thought you could have a little Eliza running as a panel applet. And, playing with the newer GNOME stuff, I had two panels. And I remembered a few bored hours spent cutting and pasting responses between three of this sort of programs: Hal2000; a puppet on a MUSH which both picked up remarks from other people and filtered them through a style which made the remarks sound like the puppet was genuinely talking to you; and a certain Doctor mode in a certain popular editor.
And I thought, Hey, you could have Eliza or something in one, and
Hal2000 or something in the other panel, and drag and drop the
responses
.
And someone who shall remain nameless (but he wrote gnome-iconedit) pointed out that CORBA (which is not, apparently, a misspelling of a snake, but something purported to be useful, though I currently doubt this) would mean you didn't need to drag and drop: you could simply watch them talk to each other...
That's it, really.
Well, that's it except that refinements (ahem) to this idea have
varied from furbies, to furbies throwing rocks at things in the other
panel, to the conversation being piped through the speakers to my
personal favourite (well, except for rock-throwing furbies): having
something like Eliza respond to the parsed resultss of periodic sweeps
through df and du with Why do you feel full?
What do you think would help? Do you really think deleting the whole of
/var is a good idea?
and so on. (Actually, there's a bizarre
system management tool in the making somewhere there...) I really
thought that conversations like this would be a lot more entertaining
than the cursing that currently happens as I try to find out what ate
the diskspace this time and nuke it.
Fortunately, however, the problems (everything from AI to copyright: I suspect whoever makes furbies would probably have opinions on rock-throwing furbies...) seem to preclude the chance of yet another silly panel app to document :)