[ale] Cross platform notification

[Alex Carver]

I was looking into notification methods that I could use for one of my
projects to send quick messages to multiple machines (pretty much every
desktop or mobile platform currently in use) on my local network.  I see
Growl seems to be available for nearly every platform and seems to be a
fairly simple protocol.  I just wanted to solicit opinions on this kind
of notification method.  The originating computer is going to be one of
the Linux machines and I've been experimenting with sending by bash
script which is nice, simple, and requires no libraries, just netcat.  I
might later write up a small transmitter in C but I think bash will
probably work well for now.