100+ Custom Emptiness

Five months since v0.1 was released, Emptiness Theme has been downloaded 5,867 times and given 4/5 stars average rating. Not bad. Even though it’s not as popular as other themes with fancy graphic design, I think Emptiness has its own target audience with it’s simplistic style.

I’m particularly happy to find (via Google search) more than 100 blogs using Emptiness Theme with customised header image and some with customised css. Check them out on my Picasa Web album.

I used Nautilus Image Converter to resize all images via a simple select all, right click, and resize. If only it also has an auto image quality compression then it would be perfect.

BuildMonitor v0.8

BuildMonitor v0.8 is finally here, you can download it from Firefox Add-ons page. This release has a number of nice improvements…

Multiple feeds monitoring

Now you can monitor multiple Hudson instances by configuring their feeds in BuildMonitor preferences. All feed status icons will be displayed on the Firefox status bar, you can mouseover or click each icon to get the build details for the corresponding feed.

Feed status display

The way BuildMonitor uses the orbs to represent the health summary of the feed in v0.7 has been a source of confusion to the users. Many users thought that the orb indicates the latest build status, and not the overall health of the feed.

Another source of confusion is the fact that some users use a Hudson feed with multiple projects, some use a Hudson feed with only 1 project, and some use job-specific feeds, which led to different expectation of what status should be displayed.

With that, I decided to (1) make the status icon configurable with an option to display the overall feed health or the latest build status, and (2) use the weather icon for the overall feed health, while the latest build status keeps using the orbs.

Sound and alert window notifications

v0.8 now has configurable options to enable sound and alert window notifications when there’s a build failure.

When enabled, BuildMonitor plays a shattered glass sound (kudos to The Freesound Project) following a build failure. While alert window notification is enabled by default, it shows an alert a la Growl at the bottom right corner of your desktop.

Note that alert window on OS X only works since Firefox 3.

Green is the new blue

Quite surprisingly, I got asked a number of times about why Hudson uses blue to indicate success (to which I just pointed to this thread and that thread) and why can’t BuildMonitor uses green instead.

I was quite reluctant to add green-for-success as an option in BuildMonitor considering that Hudson still uses blue and the option to use green is not there yet. But I guess if the users want to use green by configuring via BuildMonitor’s preferences menu, then at least they’re aware of the difference, so this option is included in v0.8 . Blue is still the default though.

Personally, I like blue better :p.

Crisper icons

I added several new icons from Tango Project in v0.8, and updated the existing icons with new PNGs having transparent background.

Open page in new/current tab

Now you have the option to open build pages in a new tab or the current tab.

The preferences page now looks like this in v0.8…

Firefox add-on status

The add-on is still listed as experimental on addons.mozilla.org’s sandbox, it has been 4 months since I nominated it for approval. The AMO editors are still working on clearing up a huge list of add-ons to approve, I don’t know when BuildMonitor will be approved. I agree that the approval process can scale, but it doesn’t.

With almost 400 active BuildMonitor users (according to addons.mozilla.org), it would be very nice to auto-upgrade all of them. But since we’re still waiting for approval, you have to login again to download, sorry.

Please let me know what you think about this new release. Any comments? suggestions? criticisms?

You Know You Grew Up Eating Indonesian Food When…

your guests ask why you have various types of sambal (chilli sauce) in your home.

Left to right: sambal terasi, sambal Lampung, sambal Dua Belibis, sambal ABC, dodgy chilli oil, Chiu Chow chilli oil.

When I first moved to Australia, I didn’t realise that Indonesians’ affinity with chilli is unusual. It wasn’t until a Singaporean friend said to me “Wow, you Indos sure put chilli in everything,” before I poured a large amount of sambal Lampung on my slices of pizza.