A couple of days ago we had an issue where a new test I’d checked in passed locally but failed on the build machine and I didn’t get a build failure notification. Everyone who did get a build notification thought I was working on it and the build stayed broken overnight. Clearly, we need a really obvious way of reporting build failures that everyone notices and continues to notice until the build is fixed again.

The classic way to achieve that is with lava lamps but that generally requires X10 hardware and with our office layout it wouldn’t be in everyone’s line of sight anyway. Instead, I took the old PowerBook G4 that I needed to get rid of before moving and set it up with a simple shell script and an mp3 of Beethoven’s 5th. Voila, one build siren at no cost and about 30 minutes worth of effort.

If anyone’s interested, the script is available but it does require OS X and iTunes. Should be trivial to adapt it for Linux by using mpg123 instead of iTunes though. It even mutes the sound volume when it’s not meant to be playing to avoid any extraneous system beeps.