Taking the idea of using Lava Lamps as notification tools for your Continuous Integration status, green lamp for success, red lamp for failure, the so called eXtreme Feedback Devices, and using as a guide the instructions in Pragmatic Automation, I have made some improvements to use remote notification, meaning that lamps don't need to be connected to the build server, and a more automated process, that will turn off the lamps out of business hours.

There are two parts, one for Apache Continuum and one for CruiseControl.

Actually, it is not necessary to use lava lamps but you can turn on and off any device you plug to the X10 power adapters. Imagine a loud siren, or my favorite, electric discharges to developer's chairs!!! (we'll leave this as an idea for future projects)

Using Lava Lamps for Continuous Integration build status notifications

For Continuum, it connects through the XML-RPC interface and gets the status of all public builds. For CruiseControl it gets the XML feed from the dashboard and parses it to see if there's any build failing.