Agile Otter Blog

Did you watch Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life ?  There is a great scene that takes place in the Very Big Corporation of America, excerpted here: CHAIRMAN: ...Item six on the agenda: the meaning of life. Now, uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this. HARRY:  That's right. Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and, uh, what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One:  people are not wearing enough hats.  Two: matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia. [pause] BERT: What was that about hats, again? T...

Jim Hood (of Pillar Technology) and I just installed our first ever "ambient annunciator" to announce our build's breakage. Well, technically our first two. What it does is watch for a build to fail in Jenkins, then start playing a series of randomly-selected choices from our assortment of spooky public domain sound files. Some are musical interludes, some are animal sounds, some are just weird. Annunciator #2 video, woofer, and R/L speakers. Our intention is that these sounds, playing through a decent set of speakers, will create an atmosphere of something being "not quite right." With both systems playing test noises, it was a tad eerie. You really felt that there was something different about the space. It is a bit more subtle than flashing lights, and we're hoping this will be an advantage. Developers will know the build is broken, and will have incentive to get the space back to normal (it is a little annoying) but will still be able to have co...