Breaking the build

Andy Marks talks about determining how broken your build is. Two solutions are offered separately, in separate blogs:

• Vincent Massol wants to make the build unbreakable.
• Cedric Beust wants to keep developers from performing the build.

I think that Cedric means "full product build", and in that sense I think he's right. The last time I worked for a company large enough to have dedicated configuration management staff, they were responsible for the shipping build—not the developers. Unfortunately, many of us work for companies or organizations so small we barely have a development team, much less a dedicated CM team.

I really like Vincent's idea. The thing that's a little scary about it is the asynchronous nature of the SCM commit—I don't know if that's possible with current tools. I may have to play with this idea once I get a continuous integration server running locally.

How to fix Mom's computer

Thank you, Gina, thank you for your guide to cleaning up a Windows box. I haven't used Windows for anything more than compatibility testing for over four years now, so I've lost whatever mad skillz I may have had in that department. With this guide in hand, I'm cleaning up my wife's computer. I'll also be sending it to my father (for fixing Mom's computer) and my brother-in-law (his mother has been complaining of problems with her computer).

(Then again, the last Windows box in our house may become a thing of the past, if rumors of a sub-US$600 iMac come to pass.)

Christmas, apparently, is over.

Our tree just fell over, still fully loaded with ornaments. So far, it looks like we lost only one glass ball, but until I can put the tree back upright, we won't know for sure.