What Does Your Dead Man's Switch Do?

LqdEngineer asks: "How many of you use or have used a Dead Man's Switch designed to perform some action if you don't check in for a certain amount of time? Recently, I decided to put one together using MySQL and some cron jobs, but I wanted to see what others have their switches set up to do in the event you fail to check in. E-mails to loved ones? Send encryption keys to friends/family? Hate mail to your boss? Has anyone ever been on the receiving end of the results of such a system?"

Comments

Re:First things first

[Anonymous Coward]

Object-oriented kittens have no ->microwave() method, but real world microwave ovens use a procedural model.

You're doing it wrong. The Microwave is an object capable of manipulating other objects. So make sure that Kitten implements the Microwavable interface, then pass Kitten to Microwave.microwave().

Yeash, kids these days.

Re:Halo.

[zippthorne]

Woah woah.. Truce...

Maybe s/he's irritated by reading post after post of painfully obviously bad grammar. Irritated to the point of complaining about it.

How is that worse than being irritated by the complaints?

Or complaining about complaints of being irritated by the complaints of irritation?

Re:Halo.

[onkelonkel]

When I read what sometimes passes for "grammer and speling" (sic) on Slashdot my first thought is usually some sort of mix of sympathy and pity, like what you get watching someone with no arms paint pictures holding the brush in his teeth. Something like "Poor courageous bastard; despite his handicap he still managed to post on Slashdot". My next thought is usually to wonder if he is housebroken, or makes messes in the corners.