noidle (pronounced noyd-l)
Many firewalls disconnect your sessions when they’ve been idle for a long time. noidle was written to combat this, by making sure your terminal session has data being sent to it frequently (default: every 30 seconds). It has actually become much more, it now provides a lot of useful information on the title bar of your terminal window such as mail count, system load and stock quotes. noidle is most useful when used in conjunction with screen [gnu.org].
Note: noidle requires at least perl 5.
Original concept: Josh Colbeck.