Category Archives: Office

The roof is on fire

  By Ron | February 17, 2012 - 15:53 | , ,
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So, Development was (for the most part) working away nicely on a Friday afternoon, when we noticed a plume of smoke outside the window.  Of course, the thought of a field trip was irresistible, so we all climbed the fire escape to the building roof, and noticed this:

Yes, that’s a veld fire in the District Six area.  Obviously, we don’t know what caused it, but as everything in Cape Town is extremely dry after some pretty intense heat that we’ve been having lately, it probably wouldn’t take much for a cigarette end carelessly flicked out of some motorist’s window to set that off.

Of course, this being Cape Town, the wind blew the fire across the road:

Now, for those unfamiliar with the area, just behind that other building in the office park lies the N2 freeway.  Hate to think what visibility is like for those motorists right now.

And then of course, the smoke plume gets blown over towards the CBD:

Two things to consider: the aforementioned visibility problem on the N2 (which you can’t even see in the above shot!), and the fact that it’s now 15:30 and people are starting to bugger off from work.

Rush hour this afternoon is going to be FUN.

(At least I leave the office at 18:00 and drive AWAY from the fire…)

SVN breakages: Wrath of the Sith!

  By Ron | September 1, 2011 - 17:08 |
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We’ve had some issues within our department previously with the misuse of SVN.  In particular, some folks were merging changes from their development branch to the trunk branch, then forgetting to commit the trunk branch – which would result in hell breaking loose a bit further down the line.

In an attempt to sort this problem out, we set up a war board system that monitors the trunk SVN repositories for any uncommited stuff.  When it finds anything, it starts flashing alerts, and the developer responsible then has to drop whatever he’s doing and fix it.  It’s worked well.

Until today, when we rigged it to additionally play the Star Wars Imperial March…

Door smash!

  By Ron | August 12, 2011 - 17:36 |
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A bit of background information to start us off – our offices are split over three floors of a four floor building.  Each floor has glass, access tag controlled doors guarding them, like so:

An office door, perfectly happy with life.

An office door, perfectly happy with life.

And this brings us to the door guarding the Development Department.  It’s had a bit of an unhealthy history of not opening properly and flexing just a little whenever it was being opened, although none of us really were concerned about it – we just used our tags to open the things and move through.

Today however, the door decided that it was sick of the perceived abuse that it had suffered, and let us know in spectacular fashion:

An office door, decidedly unhappy with life.

An office door, decidedly unhappy with life.

No humans were hurt in the act of the door performing seppuku, but that does leave us with the problem of getting the thing replaced over a weekend…