Mike Perham

I’ve noticed a problem with iChat for the last year or two: if your network drops, you stay Disconnected until you manually tell iChat to log back in. That’s pretty lame, my Comcast cable drops several times a day so I need something a little more robust than that. I found a workaround: use cron to do the work for you. Fire up a Terminal, run crontab -e and put this in it:

*/5 * * * * osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to if (processes whose name is "iChat") exists then tell application "iChat" to log in'

This uses AppleScript to tell iChat to log in every 5 minutes. Now if the network drops, you’ll only be disconnected a few minutes.