One of the first things you learn about as a Mozilla developer is Tinderbox,
Mozilla's automated build and test system. Mozilla's Tinderbox hosts a
number of "trees", specific software projects that are built and tested
independently. Tinderbox has a page that displays the current status
of whatever tree you might be interested in. For example, the display
for the Firefox 3.1 tree is here. If
everything is wonderful, the top of each column on the web page is
green, indicating that the most recent build and test run on that
machine was successful. This is called a "green tree".
In reality, the tree is rarely one hundred percent green. Developers
with patches ready for checkin (ready to "land" in Mozilla parlance)
are constantly checking to see if the tree is green. This can get
old. Justin Dolske, in a fit of Wallian
laziness, developed isthetreegreen.com
to simplify the process.
It's an unfortunate fact that lately the tree has rarely been green and
it's become more a matter of "Is the tree green enough?". I discovered
that if I had the tree status page open in Firefox, I could essentially
see the entire width of page if I stretched the window to the full
width of my screen and made the text as small as possible.
This way I could get a feel for how green the tree was at a glance.
The problem with this approach is that most of the time the browser
window was obscured by other windows. The other problem was that I
kept accidentally clicking on it, or accidentally opening other pages
in the really wide window, or hiding it and forgetting about it. It
would have worked better if I had a second monitor configured, but
frankly, if I had a second monitor I'd want to use all the screen real
estate for active work anyway.
What I'm really looking for is some kind of ambient information
display. I want to be able to catch a high level view of the tree
status with just a glance, but without it being in my way as I try to
work. This is similar to Alistair Cockburn's concept of an Information
Radiator. That's it, I want my own personal information radiator.
Then the other day, I noticed digital photo
frames at Fred Meyer. These have been around for awhile, but it's
the first time I noticed them on the shelves at the local discount
market (most likely because I haven't been paying attention). I
thought, hey wouldn't that be cool if you could set one up to display
the tree? But are there any that can run a web browser?
It turns out there is. Sony has a digital photo frame that runs
Opera. However, it looks like it's only available in Japan. On
the other hand, Samsung now has photo frames that support UbiSync,
which is their USB video technology. So technically, you'd just be
using photo frames as a more less standard multiple monitor setup. The
upside is that UbiSync doesn't require video card support, and you can
daisy chain multiple UbiSync photo frames -- apparently as many as five
or six. An UbiSync monitor doesn't have the raw performance of a
regular monitor running off of a video card, but for displaying
slow-changing information like the Tinderbox tree, it would be plenty
fast enough. Of course if you were going to go this route, it would
probably make sense to get your hands on a Samsung 22 inch UbiSync
monitor, rather than one of the 10
inch photo frames.
