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Getting Your Boss To Buy Lava Lamps
Posted by
michael
on Thu Aug 26, 2004 12:45 PM
from the boogie-down dept.
from the boogie-down dept.
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."
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Yeah Sure... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll ask my boss when he gets back from playing golf with the VC group.
Re:Yeah Sure... (Score:5, Funny)
-
They'll look great next to the bean-bag chairs and the espresso bar.
For full effect you should put a disco ball on the ceiling of the conference room and have polyester fridays.Parent
Re:Yeah Sure... (Score:4, Funny)
Hooking a computer up to a lava lamp is neat (however not as cool as the Ambient Orb [ambientdevices.com]), but treating programmers like Pavlovian dogs is ridiculous.
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Re:Yeah Sure... (Score:5, Funny)
My boss had a thing with people not answering the phone, so the phone light moved from being a modified desk lamp, to being a strobe light, to being two strobe lights, to being two strobe lights and a red rotating police light.
All this being said, and since I know for a fact its a pretty easy electrical hack, why stop with a silly lava lamp? If my old General Manager was in IT these days, a failed build would result in a temporarily blind and deaf dev team, and an office space that would occasionally have the lighting and decible range of a metal concert.
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Apple Cube solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Apple Cube solution (Score:5, Interesting)
That might not be a bad idea for a casemod on some of the latest P4s. Run a heat pipe from the CPU over to a lava lamp.
However, IIRC a lava lamp works with just a 40W bulb. With some of the latest CPUs throwing off >200W of heat, you might need a whole row of lava lamps on top of the machine. Maybe the entire side of the case could be filled with gloop and made into a wall of lava.
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Re:Apple Cube solution (Score:4, Funny)
Wow ... the iLamp ;).
Parent
cool, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cool, but... (Score:4, Funny)
It'll go nicely with my nerf guns, huge pile of empty soda cans and my blacklight-lit office!
Er, wait, I don't live in the college dorms anymore. Nevermind.
Parent
Re:cool, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets say somehow you convince your boss to buy you one. How long are you going to spend hooking it up. Then how long are you going to spend hooking it up to other things (it must be raining out, the green lamp is on and the red is off). Then how long are you going to spend testing the other apps you've hooked it up to. (New story on slashdot, both lamps are on!).
Re:cool, but... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:cool, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cool, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
X10 Hardware?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:X10 Hardware?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:X10 Hardware?! (Score:5, Informative)
One doesn't necessarily have to come from the other, and it's a shame that the vendor has ruined a perfectly useful technology, even shaming it doubly by making poor-quality electronics.
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Re:X10 Hardware?! (Score:4, Informative)
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/.'ed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:/.'ed (Score:5, Funny)
Off = No Bugs /.
Yellow Lamp = Warnings
Red Lamp = Broken Code
Exploding Lamp = Got linked off of
Parent
Workaround... (Score:3, Funny)
Instead of Lava Lamps... (Score:4, Funny)
I think we should have an air raid siren hooked up to it. Not only would it alert you to a problem, it would also scare the crap out of everyone and wake them up for a nice productive afternoon.
It's either that or electrodes into your chair.
Re:Instead of Lava Lamps... (Score:5, Funny)
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Room 101 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Room 101 (Score:5, Funny)
Better make sure you specify wild rats. If they were fancy rats, they'd probably just lick your nose or snuffle in your ear or something. Then you might want to break the build on purpose just for giggles.
--Rob
Parent
Re:Room 101 (Score:4, Funny)
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Conficting reports (Score:3, Funny)
conflicting reports are rising from the break room.
better idea (Score:4, Funny)
Coffee maker (Score:5, Funny)
Lava lamps have many uses for IT (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember seeing that, and thinking, hey, not all ideas that emerge from a cloud of dope smoke are bad.
Re:Lava lamps have many uses for IT (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Lava lamps have many uses for IT (Score:4, Informative)
It was the Silicon Graphics (SGI) Lavarand implementation, which was at lavarand.sgi.com.
It seems to live on at lavarnd.org [lavarnd.org]
Parent
Slashdot effect.... (Score:3, Funny)
firewall mod? (Score:3, Funny)
Non /.'ed CruiseControl Info (Score:5, Informative)
article text in case of /.ing (Score:4, Informative)
Your software is being automatically built and tested on a schedule. It even sends you an email when the code doesn't compile or pass its tests. You're certainly ahead of most projects, but email is just so 90s. Even if you could manage to find those build failure emails amidst all that spam, you're reading yesterday's news. Indeed, you may already be ignoring the status of the scheduled build.
The Monitoring chapter of the book offers alternative, in-your-face, worth-getting-up-for-in-the-morning techniques for monitoring scheduled builds. The most popular technique came by way of a story contributed by Alberto Savoia. He describes how his project uses red and green lava lamps to radiate the status of their scheduled build. Better yet, those lamps are controlled using X10 devices such as those used to turn on your household lamps so that you don't arrive home to a dark house.
Well, as you might imagine, I could hardly wait to build my very own build-monitoring lava lamp kit. And as bonus material for readers of the book, I've crafted a bit o' software that integrates with CruiseControl. So now you too can enjoy red and green bubbles on your project!
Bill of Materials
To get started, you need some automation gear. Think of these gadgets as this year's essential project accessories:
* 4-Piece Firecracker Automation System
This kit includes:
o 1 Firecracker Computer Interface
o 1 Transceiver Module
o 1 Lamp Module
o 1 Palm Pad Remote Control
Cost: $39.99
(Props go to the folks at x10.com for supporting this project by supplying me with a complimentary kit. It all fits in a wee box, so I can carry it from project to project.)
With that kit, you can control two lava lamps -- one plugged into the transceiver module and the other plugged into the lamp module. You can optionally purchase another appliance module if you want to control two appliances. For example, you might want your build process to turn on a coffee pot when the build fails and then kick start your margarita machine when the build is fixed.
* 2 lamps, preferably the kind that boil red and green lava
I used the Hot Rock Lite F/X (yellow earth/blue liquid and red earth/purple liquid). Note for legal purposes that these lamps (shown in pictures below) are not LAVA(R) brand motion lamps, but those will work just as well.
Cost: $9.99 each at Target or Walmart
* Pragmatic Automation X10 software
It's an open source Java library that includes the CruiseControl plug-in, an API to make your wildest X10 dreams come true, detailed instructions, and an ever-so-useful collection of tests.
Way down deep, the library uses the Java Communications API to send bits out over the serial port and into the Firecracker Computer Interface. (Linux users will need the RXTX implementation). Michel Dalal's Java X10 CM17A API library, an implementation of the FireCracker (CM17A) Communications Specification, is used to send out the correct 1s and 0s in response to human-friendly commands. Many thanks to him for doing all the low-level bit twiddling and sharing the goodies with us!
Cost: Free to readers of Pragmatic Project Automation
Assembling the Kit
With that hardware in hand, you're ready to start the assembly process. The Firecracker Automation System includes instructions written for your average home electronics consumer, so your average computer/network geek should have no trouble. I'll spare you all the gory details and instead run through a quick visual tutorial of my setup.
Start by plugging the Firecracker Computer Interface into a serial port of your scheduled build machine:
This little gem sends a wireless signal from the computer to the transceiver module. Notice that you don't lose the serial port. You can plug another serial device
Seems counterproductive (Score:5, Funny)
Low Tech Works (Score:5, Funny)
We tried a white board, we tried a sign in/out sheet, it got so bad that we held a meeting and the manager decided we would use the ownership of a certain file to show who was allowed to control the tape drive.
The same manager broke his own rule immediately after the meeting.
My solution was the one that worked.
We used a really cheesy Mardi Gras necklace. Who ever had the necklace in their possession was allowed to access the tape drive. We never had a problem after that.
If you left the necklace on your desk it was perfectly okay for someone else to steal it. If you wore the cheesy thing around your neck, everyone knew you were using the tape drive.
Sometime low tech is easier, more reliable and best of all, funnier.
I live the greatest adventure anyone could wish for. - Tosk the Hunted
Reminds me of Dilbert's "lost token" (Score:4, Funny)
> allowed to access the tape drive.
Reminds me of an old Dilbert cartoon:
Dilbert: (holding a cable) we have a token ring network.
Boss: So why is it not working?
Dilbert: the token fell out. It must be somewhere in this room...
Boss: (gets on his knees to search)
Parent
More practical (Score:3, Funny)
That's ANOTHER cool use of Lava lamps in computing (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad the website [sgi.com] for it appears to be off line. SGI used to be cool, too...
Re:That's ANOTHER cool use of Lava lamps in comput (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Virtual lava-lamps. (Score:4, Funny)
If the keyboard or other input device isn't used within five minutes, a lava-lamp appears on screen.
That way, we can tell if someone hasn't been working within the past five minutes.
Personally, I prefer the futuristic virtual Lava Lamp office, where you're cubicle rises and falls according to how productive you have been.
He should have made one for webservers (Score:4, Funny)
His datacenter would be groovy right now.
Quick Fixes (Score:3, Insightful)
Does your build environment allow you to debug, build, and test a loadbuild break in the time it takes a lava lamp to heat up?
Lava lamps are supposed to be soothing man. (Score:5, Funny)
this is funny (Score:5, Interesting)
CB
Blurb doesn't do justice (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Here's a link that works: (Score:5, Informative)
-- /\ndy
But will it light the bong for me? (Score:4, Funny)
This would be more useful, if it lit up a bowl at 4:20 if the green lamp was going.
Hmmm... All I need is an automated valve and a mini blowtorch...
W.E.P.Re:A Better Mod? (Score:5, Funny)
Cause of death: missing }
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