Why is it that people want to get interrupted?

I don't know about you, but this is very useful for me if I am waiting for someone to push a bugfix or pull request.

I've been using http://psionides.github.com/Gitifier/ (which can keep an eye on any git repo not just github) but I might have to give this a try.

Somewhat related, is it worth trying to build something that pushes to growl remotely? Seems like world of port blocking issues but maybe their is something out there that makes it simple.

I dont see why not. There are ways to push growl to your iOS devices, I cant see why we cant push them to our desktops.

Here is an example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1109786/growl-notificatio...

Boxcar (disclosure: I helped build it) will allow you to send remote pushes to your desktop and mobile devices. On the desktop, we partner with Growl to display messages as a pop-up.

FWIW, we also push Github notifications.

My program, lerner (http://github.com/zhemao/lerner) does something similar on Linux using libnotify.

Notifo + GrowlNotifo was a way better way to do this since it was push