hybridd(8) - poetic nonsense for syslog

Today's stupid software idea comes courtesy of the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica, which featured (as some previous stories have) the Hybrid, the organic controller of a Cylon base star (aka the big pointy bad guy space ships). This week, though, saw probably more Hybrid than any other.

Hybrids, you see, continually babble, a stream of consciousness mixing what sounds like system diagnostics, physics and poetry. After the episode ended, I thought "wait, system diagnostics? Well, if I open up Console, I have those. What if there was an additional process - call it hybridd - which emitted poetry to go along with the more prosaic debugging and whatnot that my computer spits out?"

I have an idea how to do it, too. Algorithm::MarkovChain is a venerable Perl module that puts out almost, but not quite, meaningful sentences, based on an input corpus. Tie that in to the syslog function, a bit of Launch Services, and there you are. (I'm sure you could do a bogstandard Unix version too.)

A further step would be to replace the Console UI with one that boils down the actual computer stuff and tries to fit it in with the hybrid's poetry, but that idea's a lot harder to do well, I'm sure.

Anyway. hybridd - an idea whose time has come. And now, thanks to Tom Insam, here's a Perl version. Requires the aforementioned module, along with File::Tail and Unix::Syslog, both available at your nearest CPAN mirror.