Tinderbox

A chain of upscale retail tobacco shops located in ritzy malls throughout the United States.

I had the good fortune to work at the one located at White Flint Mall in Rockville, MD during the spring of 1984, shortly before my first move to Florida. Product knowledge was of utmost importance, of course. Besides knowing about different types of cigars, tobaccos and accessories, employees were expected to learn about the various pipes that were sold there as well.

My co-workers and I used to play a type of quiz game to see who knew the relevant facts about the 100 or so pipes displayed on this one wall. Winners had their much deserved bragging rights. And the losers? They had to smoke a Te Amo: one of those foul, black, stubby cigars that Clint Eastwood used to smoke in his old Western movies. One Saturday morning a very badly hung-over associate lost more than the Pipe Wall challenge... After smoking that nasty Te Amo he lost his cookies in the drawer of the cash register! Argh!

A tool developed by the Mozilla project for monitoring a set of builds from a source tree.

It consists of a web-based interface (CGI, written in perl) providing a table containing a column for each different type of build (normally multiple platforms). The top of the table represents the current moment, and as you go down the table, you're going backwards in time. Each individual build (ie, a compile of all source code) is represented by a table cell. When a build is completed, the table cell which represents it is coloured green (if the build is successful), or red (if the build broke).

You can easily view build logs and see the times of checkins (thanks to integration with Bonsai), which makes it easy to track down exactly what actually broke the build, and either get it fixed or reverse the changes out of the tree.

Various open source projects use it, but obviously it's main use is as part of the sophisticated structure of the Mozilla project.