Until today integrating a siren of shame device into non-continuous integration workflows has involved either writing a custom app or paying for a Team CI Pro subscription to get a custom HTTP endpoint for your siren. Even still the Linux story has been weak and the Mac story has been non-existent.
Today we are happy to release a new tool to address non-CI, cross-platform, custom workflow requirements of siren owners. That tool is soscmd-1.0.jar.
As with everything, soscmd is open source. All of the hardest work was performed with a generous contribution from Filip Hanik. We are very grateful to him for his help.
Finally, this tool is also our first step in working toward a truly cross platform CI monitoring solution. More details to come.
With any luck you'll get something like this: usage: soscmd -[i|ra|rl|m|l|a|sa|sl]
-i Retrieve info about device -ra List audio patterns -rl List led patterns -m Manually set LED's -l Play an LED pattern -a Play an audio pattern -sa Stop audio -sl Stop LED's
At this point you should be able to connect a siren and do java -jar soscmd-1.0.jar -i
and get something like this: Firmware Version: 2
Hardware Type: Standard Hardware Version: 1 Audio Mode: 0 Audio Play Seconds Remaining: 0 Led Mode: 0 Led Play Seconds Remaining: 0 External Memory Size: 0
Now if you want to manually light up some of the light bars you can do
java -jar soscmd-1.0.jar -m 128 0 255 0 0
which will set the 1st led bar to 50%, the 3rd led bar to 100% and the remaining bars to off.
To view the led or light patterns that your device has (which is based on your device's firmware) enter either the -ra or -rl command and you'll get something like this:
If you want to play one of the audio commands above note the ID# and specify it along with a duration in seconds like this:
java -jar soscmd-1.0.jar -a 1 5
That plays the Sad Trombone for 5 seconds. You can accomplish the same thing with a -l command to play led patterns or you can turn audio or led patterns off with -sa or -sl.
Summary
That's it! Hope you enjoy, and if you do something fun with it please let us know.
If you're a Team CI Pro user enjoying the weekly e-mails and stats, and thinking what fun you could have with that raw data (we won't judge), then we've got some fantastic news: we've opened up a new API just for you!
This API is basically a list of weekly snapshots of your teams stats. We originally took these snapshots to get the delta's that are in the e-mails. But now they're available for you to use and abuse.
API Key
To get started you'll need an API key. To get it click the new "Get Your API Key" button in the Team CI section of the site.
Then type your password, click the button and copy the resulting API Key.
Hit That API
To get the data POST to http://sirenofshame.com/ApiV1/Snapshots. To pass your credentials you can use: Content-Type: application/json with
We've fixed a bug in the Siren of Shame Android App that was turning on Android devices when users received push notifications. This issue was causing mass butt-dialing everywhere. For that we apologize to both senders and receivers alike. The issue is fixed now ... with the caveat that:
The Bad News
The idiot who build our last app (an intern, honestly, not the author of this post) lost the original Android signing key. That means the old version (1.1) won't auto-upgrade.
To get the new Android app you'll need to search Google Play for "Siren of Shame 2".
That also means we've lost all our excellent ratings. Any ratings, good or bad, you could give the new app would be greatly appreciated.
Fortunately, the individuals responsible (stupid interns) have been thoroughly chewed out, tar and feathered, and made to back up the new key by scratching it into a bar of depleted uranium, so nothing like this will ever happen again.
Today we are very proud to announce our biggest change in almost two years: it's a new service called Team CI Pro.
The CI Problem
You're trying to improve software quality. You implement continuous integration. You're lucky, you have a motivated team that rarely breaks the build and religiously fixes breaks. If this is you, Siren of Shame probably adds a some fun around the office, but is mostly a toy. In this case you likely don't need most of what Team CI Pro offers (skip to Curl to Siren, below).
If you're like the rest of us your team or program breaks the build with some regularity, fails to fix it quickly, requires nagging, and/or avoids fixing builds when someone else caused the break. If this is you, our new Team CI Pro service will provide the extra motivation your team needs to realize the full potential of continuous integration.
If it Ain't Broke?
But why a new service? Today, at little to no cost, you can increase build awareness by throwing builds up on a dedicated monitor with our free desktop app and full-screen feature. You can light up a siren when the build breaks. You can require that everyone download desktop clients to get the motivating stats and gamification information.
You could even mandate that everyone sign up for My CI to get build information, stats, and gamification information pushed to their e-mail and phones for free.
But what if you don't have the authority to require your team members do anything? How do you deal with team members less passionate about CI, and far less likely to install another app, than you? And what if you have a distributed team that can't all see the siren or the dedicated monitor?
Even if you could mandate desktop clients and My CI for all, there's a bigger problem. If a desktop client instance is turned off it can get out of sync. For instance when developer #1 goes on vacation for a week, their client misses a week's worth of reputation changes and achievements from their team mates.
It's hard to brag about your superior reputation or "Consecutive Successful Build (FSB)" score when everyone has different numbers.
Feature #1 - Consolidated Accounts
Team CI Pro inherently addresses these problems with an architecture designed around a single instance of the desktop client.
Continuous integration data flows in from the CI server (bottom right) through a single desktop client (and maybe fewer, see A Shameful Future below for details) into Siren of Shame Online. The desktop client sync's its stats and achievements to SoS Online, where the information is distributed to team members through a variety of mediums.
To facilitate distributing information to team members, teams maintain a single Team CI Pro master account on Siren of Shame Online. Desktop clients sync to the master account in the SoS Online menu as if they were doing My CI.
Once that master account has signed up for Team CI Pro (via the 'start free trial' button at of the Team CI Page) it can access a configuration page where it can add team member accounts that will receive the master account's data.
Team members added to the configuration page gain access to a number of cool new features.
#protip - Syncing to a team master account and adding yourself as a team member allows your team to continue with Team CI Pro in the event you ever leave the team.
Feature #2 - Reputation Over Time
While the web client isn't new, Team CI Pro adds some new features. Team members will get a new chart at the bottom of their Team CI page so they can see reputation over time.
Feature #3 - Team Heckling
Team Members will also get the ability to chat (via the blue floating button in the bottom left). Chat messages are sent as news items to Shame Extruders (see below), mobile clients, and other web clients in realtime so team members can taunt, brag, heckle, or worst case discuss actual work.
Feature #4 - Web Full Screen Mode
All web clients now get a new full screen view (via the leftmost red button in the screenshot above). The page is fully responsive and is designed to look good at tiny phone resolutions as well as large, high-dpi displays.
The full screen page could easily replace the full screen view in the desktop client and teams could throw identical build data up on multiple information radiators around the office, or around multiple distributed offices. Just hit F11 (or Command+Control+F).
Feature #5 - Personalized Mobile Clients
The Android, iOS, Win Phone, and Windows Store mobile clients today show your build information, your placement and stats among a large list of virtual strangers on the SoS Online Leaderboard, and a list of news items that mostly don't relate to you or your team.
Members of Team CI Pro will immediately have news items replaced with only news items relevant to your project (build events, achievements of fellow team members, and chat messages).
Team CI Pro members will also see their placement and stats among just their team members. The end result is the data displayed will be more meaningful and engaging.
And of course Team CI Pro members will continue to receive push notifications about build events and badge updates with the number of currently broken builds just like they did with My CI.
Feature #6 - Shame Extruders
A very exciting new feature for Team CI Pro members are Shame Extruders. Shame Extruders are lightweight desktop clients that give team members all the benefits of desktop clients without any of the polling (updates are sent via SignalR).
Specifically team members can install the Shame Extruder from our download page to get
Tray notifications
Build status, leaderboards, and news
The ability to connect USB Sirens (see the data flow diagram earlier)
Team chat
They can even configure rules
While nice for individuals Shame Extruders make it even easier to install multiple sirens in different rooms or at different locations around an office with a large or distributed team.
Feature #7 - Weekly Recap E-mails
My CI sent team leads e-mails when achievements were unlocked or builds broken (including stats like highest CSB attained). Team CI extends these features by sending e-mails directly to appropriate team members.
Better yet it provides a weekly recap e-mail with overall pass/fail ratio and a summary of team members standings and delta's to help maintain the team's continued focus on quality.
Feature #8 - Curl To Siren
We're extremely excited by the potential of this last feature. Curl to Siren allows the master account to light up any siren in their network that's connected via a shame extruder by hitting a REST based URL.
To make it work fire up a Shame Extruder, log on as the team owner account or a team member, and connect a USB siren. Now navigate to the master account's My CI page. The red button furthest left should have a badge with the number of Extruder's connected.
When you click you can select "test" to fire a quick default audio and led pattern. Or if you click the "curl" button you'll be presented with a CURL builder that will allow you to build the exact command you can run from the command line on any computer in the world to light up that siren.
You can extrapolate how you would light up the siren via JavaScript or your favorite language, but let us know if you have difficulty and we'll be glad to help.
This feature should enable you to integrate sirens into all kinds of things. Stock ticker watchers, e-mail notifiers, room busy indicators, train schedules, or ifttt. We can't wait to hear what you come up with.
Pricing
Pricing starts as low as $10 per month for small teams. Check out our pricing page for more details.
Or better yet try it out at no cost for a month. It's one click to get started. No credit cards, or DNA samples required.
A Shameful Future
We've got some exciting things in the works, but limited resources. Please vote here to let us know what you'd like to see us work on next:
Shame Extruder for Mac - Right now the Shame Extruders are for Windows clients only. Vote for this option if you use a Mac and like Team CI Pro, but the web and mobile options aren't cutting it.
Team CI On Premise - Behind a firewall but still want all that Team CI Pro goodness?
Bluetooth Controlled Power Plug - For integrating lava lamps, model trains, or other on/off items into your CI pipeline. This is actually prototyped out and just about ready to go.
Shame Whisperer - Wouldn't it be great to cut out polling and the Desktop Client all together? Shame Whisperers are Plugins to CI servers that send data up to Siren of Shame Online.
Productized Raspberry Pi - You can hook your siren up to a Raspberry Pi today with some fiddling. Wouldn't it be great if you could buy a pre-configured Raspberry Pi or download an image to turn your siren into an IoT device with virtually no effort? Even cooler with curl to siren.
Full Desktop Client for Mac - This is expensive and time consuming, but if a Shame Extruder and/or a Shame Whisperer isn't right for you we're ready to start work on a native Mac client today.
Slack Integration - If you use Slack and want your gamification data integrated vote for this.
What Else? - There's a write in option. Please submit any other great ideas, we'd love to hear them all.
Summary
We've put a lot into these features and hope you love them. We hope you'll check out the free trial. We've also got some exciting plans for what's next, and we hope you'll help us choose our next direction. As always please let us know what you think in the comments, on twitter, facebook, or google+.
We just released version 2.3.10 to prod. If you were on 2.3.7 (our last non-beta version) you now get:
Support for Team City 9.X
This was generously contributed by @tupac21354
A Slew of TFS Fixes
TFS was showing "IndividualCI" instead of the author and comment while build definitions were building. This has been fixed and a large part of the TFS logic rewritten (Issue #53)
Fixed an issue in TFS where you couldn't easily select all build definitions (Issue #44)
And Some Misc Fixes
Fixed SOS was ignorning "Never check for updates (Issue #50)
Fixed a bug where you can't set "Who I Am" in the settings page
Summary
Short and sweet this time. Please shoot us a note at support at our domain name if you need help or drop a bug on github if you find any issues.
We just released verison 2.3.7 and took the 2.3.x line out of beta. If you've been sticking with the more stable 2.2 line then you now have the following features and bug fixes to look forward to:
TFS 2013
We now support Team Foundation Server 2013 including the new Git based projects. You may also be happy to learn we fixed some issues we had with watching builds from multiple project collections. You can also search and add new builds more easily for those with large TFS repo's.
If you have a large Jenkins repository you can now filter and select all nodes more easily.
CruiseControl.Net
CruiseControl.Net now returns comments and build names. Big thanks to Benoit Martin (benoit808) and Jonathan Ritchie for these contributions.
Bug Fixes
The chat box in news now only appears if you're a Team CI member - in which case it allows you to chat with your team only (What is Team CI? More on this later.)
Fixed the issue with adding and playing custom .mp3's when you had upgraded via wyGet
You can now type your username in "Who I Am" rather than having to wait until you perform a build (Issue #47)
The full screen shortcut key ("F") is now Alt-F, fixing a problem with using that character while chatting :)
Fixes performance issues when watching many builds (see Issue #38 and Issue #16 on Github)
When a build definition is unavailable, Team City no longer breaks (thanks @monovo for this contribution)
In TeamCity when one build fails to connect we now return unknown build status rather than mark the entire server an unavailable (Issue #24)
Summary
That's it for now. This update sets the stage for a big announcement we'll have shortly. In the meantime thanks for all your support!
Give it a name and select the following scopes: repo, user:email, write:repo_hook, repo:status, read:org, repo_deployment
Click Generate Token
Copy the token's value and paste it into the textbox
Click "Generate Token" and we will initiate a request to Travis (using the URL you specified on the previous screen) to create a travis API access token.
Upon success the new travis api access token will be entered into the textbox on the configure server page and you can click "Add" and then "Add" again
Bug Fixes
Can now open up the Sounds menu from a fresh install
When a build definition is unavailable, Team City no longer breaks (thanks @monovo for this contribution)
Summary
We hope you enjoy the new features. Shoot us a note at support at our domain name if you need help or drop a bug on github if you find any issues.
