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Getting Your Boss To Buy Lava Lamps
jarich writes "Mike Clark's blog provides directions and code on how to wire up lava lamps to your build system. When a compile or test fails, the red lava lamp gets switched on... The delay in the lamp heating up gives you a few minutes to fix things before it becomes obvious to co-workers that you broke the build. His example uses CruiseControl but you could easily modify it. Very cool stuff and inexpensive to setup."
Pop under ads? I bought a camera from them before I even did (or so I observed) the pop under ads. I paid for 3 day shipping. Day 5 came, no camera. I called them, and the machine pointed me to email whatever address for tracking orders. So I did that. 14 months later (this is no joke), I got an email with my tracking number. Now the camera came the day after I sent the inquiry, so even if it was a timely response, it wouldnt have mattered... but 14 MONTHS?!?!?! What... the ... hell
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
That headline blurb doesn't do this book justice. I was one of the first kids on my block with a copy of this book, and I highly recommend it.
This book is not about lava lamps (although it does talk about them). This book is about using automation to keep your software project on-track... never letting things get broken... using a computer in your office as a 'virtual employee', continually building and running unit tests and letting you know if someone breaks the build.
Yes, there is a reference about automatically turning on a red lava lamp if your unit tests fail... but far more important than that, the build on my project (which uses the ideas from this book) is never broken long enough for a lava lamp to heat up.
If you are interested in Agile process (especially the XP concept of 'continuous integration'), you need this book.