“But there was something special about ‘w’ for me. In those days of shared servers I would auto-run a shell script that would parse ‘w’ and highlight my friends and see what they were up to and if they were available to talk. If they were in Pine of course you wouldn’t bug them, but if they were just idle in a shell or working on homework, they were probably up for talking or helping you find some new warez site or want to meet up for a slice of pizza.
Andre Torrez: notes on “i miss w”
This reminds me of a simple app I wrote when I worked for Apple. It was 2003-2004, the heyday of post-iPod but pre-music store iTunes, and the local subnet at 1 Infinite Loop was rife with hundreds of employee iTunes shares. I had my own, of course, and I was always disappointed that iTunes provided no way to see who was listening to my music and what they were listening to. So I wrote a really simple Cocoa app that parsed the output of the UNIX “lsof” command to show me, in a pretty, iTunes-style window on my desktop, which remote hosts were accessing files in the directory where iTunes stored its MP3 files. It was a crude hack, but I could generally tell which songs were being played (I even used the iTunes database to match a song title to the filename) and, often, who was playing them based on hostnames. It felt pretty magical to take an opaque system like that and figure out a way to surface the hidden human activity behind it.
