Howie's Journal: Keep half an eye on your processes

More ambient instrumentation for unix is LavaPS. It produces an animated lavalamp, where blobs in the lamp represent processes on your system. Bigger for more memory, faster moving for active processes (an idle system ends up with a load of various sized blobs sitting in the bottom of the lamp). You don't get a huge mass of numbers out of it (although you can get detail by clicking a blob), but it makes an interesting counterpoint to something like GKrellM.