Visual Notifications: X10 and Lava Lamps

Wednesday, Nov. 24 2004 | Author: DarkBlue

Mike Clark has written an in-depth article on how he uses X10 and two lava lamps to create a visual software-build monitoring system.

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…

I love this. I would love to set up something similar to indicate web-server status!

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6 Responses for "Visual Notifications: X10 and Lava Lamps"

JC

November 24th, 2004 at 12:27 am
1

heh. I remember reading something about this… not sure if it was this one or another… but they’d put some kind of sensor or something in the lava lamp… the lamp kicked on if you tried to compile and it failed… and if you didn’t fix it by the time the lava lamp warmed up enough to start moving, the sensor chimed or buzzed or something so everyone could see who’d screwed up… encouragement to check before you tried a compile or something.

I wonder if those nifty glass ball things from Ambient Devices could be set up to monitor webservers and so on.

At any rate, have you ever looked at Spotlight On Webservers from Quest? And the rest of their stuff, of course. Funnelweb is great, and free now… but spotlight’s the one that does kinda what you were talking about for webserver status
Jonathan M. Hollin (DarkBlue)

November 24th, 2004 at 12:38 am
2

I’m sure I’ve read that the Ambient Devices’ Orbs can be configured to respond to server status.

I’ve never seen Spotlight on Webservers or Funnelweb. We use a system based on heartbeat and mon, which works very well.

Even so, I would like to rig up something like the lava lamp system simply because of its “cool value”!
Nicole

November 24th, 2004 at 1:19 am
3

JC, you probably read it ForeverGeek. That entry includes a link to an article on setting up the ambient orb to monitor project status. Someone also left a comment with a link to a tutorial similar (maybe the same one? I didn’t check) to the one above.
JC

November 24th, 2004 at 1:22 am
4

wow, Nicole, that ForeverGeek place is a pretty cool website, huh?

lol
Jonathan M. Hollin (DarkBlue)

November 24th, 2004 at 1:27 am
5

Yep. I knew I’d seen it somewhere! :-)
Nicole

November 24th, 2004 at 1:42 am
6

We’re just becoming self-referential. :) Soon we can catch everyone in our tangled web and they will travel in circles and never escape.