I just spotted the following marketing blurt through testdriven.com:

[name of a build server product] helps software organizations reduce high risks of failures of projects caused by broken code base by delivering uninterrupted daily builds.

Yes! Finally! All of our software projects will be raging successes now that we have technology that builds our software automatically!

If you didn't spot the sarcasm...

It's not the tools that make continuous integration happen. It's the people. Even the most advanced build server can't do shit if the people don't integrate their changes continuously. Even the most advanced build server can't spit out a good build if the people have screwed it up.

This is not a bash against Parabuild. It could be a terrific build server. It's just that I start hearing these voices in my head when someone even remotely suggests that there's a new tool that somehow magically fixes the stupid humans.

Allan just emailed me an excellent quote by John Cage, an American composer of avant garde music that resonates with the software industry incredibly well:

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I'm frightened of the old ones.

- John Cage

(via quotationspage.com)

If you've noticed that radio, the server this blog is running on, has been intermittently unavailable, you're not alone. There's been some stability issues related to a huge volume of spam piling up to a blog without the owner of said blog cleaning them up from time to time. This apparently led the web container eventually dying and would only start again with manual intervention. I'm not intimate with the details so I might be telling tales here, though. The good news is that the problem should now be history. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen again.

Once again, Glen Alleman is at it.