There was a project called Peep: The Network Auralizer that when I first came across it I thought was priceless. It takes virtual events and turns them into unobtrusive, organic sounds such as the call of the hermit thrush.

I enjoyed playing with it so much that I started extending things here and there just to hear what kind of sound montages I could make and to monitor some machines I looked after. After awhile, I was having some problems because the client modules (the clients are written in Perl and the server in C) were in need of some reorganization. So I decided to rewrite them.

After the rewrite, alot of possibilities started opening up with the code. I continued to refine it and add things that I wanted and improved the stability. (I was pleasantly surprised what can get done putting in a few hours here and there!) The original author was also making strides on the server side.

The product of the effort is now the Net::Peep module on the CPAN, and I'm quite pleased with it. We got 115 downloads from SourceForge in a single day a few weeks ago and there's been some discussion of it going into an upcoming Debian release (nothing definite yet).

All told, it is nice to see that others find useful what I wrote for fun. It's kind of like cooking a superb meal: You might cook one for yourself once in awhile if you're into cooking as I am, but it's especially nice when you can share it with others.