When I have a lot of work (like lately), PerlMonks is a curse, because I find it so interesting to hang around here that I end up spending too little time working. So I wrote this little program to remind myself of what I should be doing :-)

A couple of points:

• Sorry for the use of system to send email. But I spent a whole 5 minutes writing this script, and I really didn't feel like looking up Mail::Internet or whatever other module might have done the job.
• I made it wait and loop itself instead of putting it in crontab to be able to have the $DISPLAY variable set.

Of course, writing this script and posting it here was just another excuse for not getting back to work. So here it is:

#!/usr/local/perl-5.6.0/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use PerlMonks;
use PerlMonks::Users;

my $n=PerlMonks::Users->new;
while(1) {
        my %u=$n->users;
        if (exists($u{ZZamboni})) {
                system(q(echo Get to work | /usr/bin/mailx -s "Shouldn
+'t you be working on your thesis?" zamboni));
                if ($ENV{DISPLAY}) {
                        system(q(wmessage -t "What are you doing?" --c
+enter "Get back to work!"));
                }
        }
        sleep 300;
}
[download]

--ZZamboni

Update: fixed typo: s/spend/spent/