Pragmatic Automation

Ah, it’s Friday—the end of another long week slaving behind a hot keyboard. I thought you might like to try a little something fun around the office. Disclaimer: This so-called fun won’t have universal appeal in all environments, and I’m not responsible for someone being shown the door. That said, I saved the following Slashdot post from bADlOGIN for those of you just itchin’ to spice up your scheduled build process:

I’ve been using CruiseControl for about half a year now, and the Ant sound task works well. Just crank up the speakers and collect a directory of Success and Failure sounds. It’s hard to ignore the audio track from the Psycho shower scene when a build fails, or a snip of the Indiana Jones theme music when it passes.

Our build machine recently switched to a rack mount in the server room, so I wrote a little Ant task that loops and parses the CruiseControl RSS feed (mentioned in Pragmatic Project Automation) and sets the build status based on that, playing a set of sounds on a workstation locally. We get punk covers of show tunes (from Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies "Are a Drag") and Office Space quotes when the build fails. The sounds are different from our usual workstation collection, and nothing says you missed a file check-in or config change like Bill Lumberg saying "Uh… we have sort of a Problem here.." at max volume. :)