The importance of silly projects (engineering.slideshare.net)

I like this. It reminds me of this:

Michael Gilfix and Alva L. Couch, "Peep (the Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound" Proceedings of the 2000 Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA00), New Orleans, LA, USENIX Association, Dec 6-8, 2000. Voted best student paper of LISA 2000. http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2...

The 'Lunchbot' sounds something like what I wrote a few years back, me and my girlfriend always had trouble finding films to rent and watch, so what started out as a simply imdb scraping bot turned into a web app where it would select a random film to watch, with trailers, ratings and also a database behind that of what films we had watched.

Like the Middle Men reference, awful movie, but great ideas. Need to hook some Arduino up at the office for that.

> Last week, Sylvain noticed that there was no way to know whether code was currently being deployed to the server. So he hooked up some (huge) speakers to a spare desktop and wrote a script that plays a bell sound every time the deploy script is run.

I wrote a quick five-liner that'll prevent people from deploying over each other - until you've successfully deployed, nobody else gets to. (Yes, there's ways to unlock it.)

As far as sounds go, I'm tempted to use some of the ones from here: http://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Turret_voice_lines

Almost every place I've worked has had some version of a lunch decider or another. At one place, it was a rails app I wrote in 5 minutes, just to prove to my coworker that it was faster to make than pulling names out of a hat. At another, it was a yelp scraper someone had written to find places near us.

It happens everywhere. I think it's the natural result of any problem that takes a long time but seems pretty easy: a programmer will naturally try to automate it.