Evolution of a hack

[wintrmute]

The other day someone discovered that they could remotely set the status message on the front of the printer

Comments

[wintrmute]

Although now there are too many people doing the hack; the screen flips constantly from one thing to another, a disparate series of frames like someone flipping TV channels.

Heaven help anyone trying to actually get a document out to print :)

[xfesty]

hahah, what a productive workplace.

[wintrmute]

When you have to wait 5 hours for your regression tests to run before you can commit something, you end up with a lot of time on your hands :(

[strawberryfrog]

5 hours? Eeep, way too long. What are they doing, not just creating a DB and populating it, but installing the OS from scratch? You know you need to split them into fast regression tests and slower integration tests.

[wintrmute]

Five hours isn't a complete regression test, actually. that's just the largest subset. There's only one machine, so they can't be run in parallel, and that one machine is... antique. And there's 30-odd developers using it.

My quad-core desktop with 4Gb of RAM runs my xterminals and ssh /really, really fast/ though! :D

[strawberryfrog]

However, Unit tests run fast. If they don't run fast, they aren't unit tests.

Tests that do other things aren't bad. It is important to be able to separate them from true unit tests so that you can keep a set of tests that you can run fast whenever you make changes."

Someone needs to think about thier approach, and thier hardware budget.

Re: http://xkcd.com/303/

[redcountess]

You can now buy the t-shirt as well :)

Re: http://xkcd.com/303/

[strawberryfrog]

Excellent!

[fnoo]

By the time I read it somebody'd replaced it with 'SHIT' in ascii-caps. Which I thought might cause trouble.

So I asked Toby to re-run it again :)

[wintrmute]

It's now outputting Kafka, 80 characters at a time..

I should just go home :)