Have you tried the 'forking' and shutdown your local computer to see if the
program continues to run?

If this needs to run all of the time would it be better to start this program
via a cron job when the machine boots. I know this can be done as I have a
Linux machine (not Ubuntu) that does this without a login and without kb,
mouse, monitor.
This should be a command added to your runlevel section in like rc.local,
don't have my Ubuntu running at this time (switch OS's).