Net coke machine?
Don Fearn
--
{ Pooder - Rochester, MN - DoD #591 }
{ }
{ "What do _you_ care what other people think?" }
{ --Arline Feynman }
a.B. Mayers; BOTmaster
>ab...@crux5.cit.cornell.edu (a.B. Mayers; BOTmaster) writes:
>> Aaron G Goldstein <ag...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>> >I haven't actually seen the machine in question, but it most
>> >definitely CAN be fingered! :)
>>
>> Mark that one as F. Here's the results of the above advice:
>> ...
>> Something is wrong! My hardware is failing to communicate reliably,
>> and my sig.@@@.@..44 breaking up. Can you ~~!` me Major Tom?
>> I apologize for the (I hope) temporary inconvenience, and hope you
>> will ^&# $)#!#$)
>>
>> The CMU CS Department Coke Machine
>Is there a notation for "currently false, but only because you picked
>the wrong week to check"? The hardware that counts the number of
>bottles in each column went wonky at the begining of the month and is
>being worked on.
I find that very hard to believe...so when did Coke start writing code
for machines that would refer to their repairman by name? How come the
"response" is full of line noise and the "Dept. Coke Machine" thing
is fine? Besides, there are tons of smileys buried in the crap after
"I hope you will", so I have just taken its advice, and not taken it
seriously. I'll give you a Fb., but I'll need MUCH harder proof than your
word. a document with an ISBN would be nice (yes, I will look it up.)
-aB Mayers
hpctdfc
: >> Something is wrong! My hardware is failing to communicate reliably,
: >> and my sig.@@@.@..44 breaking up. Can you ~~!` me Major Tom?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
: >> I apologize for the (I hope) temporary inconvenience, and hope you
: >> will ^&# $)#!#$)
: >>
: >> The CMU CS Department Coke Machine
: I find that very hard to believe...so when did Coke start writing code
: for machines that would refer to their repairman by name? How come the
Repairman? You obviously aren't familiar with any David Bowie
tunes...
Rick
Carl J Lydick
=I find that very hard to believe...so when did Coke start writing code
=for machines that would refer to their repairman by name?
Guess you went to a liberal arts college. I've never heard of a vending
machine company that didn't hire undergrads to service their machines on
campus, and don't find it at all hard to believe that the students at CMU hired
in that capacity would add hardware to monitor the contents of the machine.
=How come the "response" is full of line noise and the "Dept. Coke Machine"
=thing is fine?
It's a joke, son. LOTS of programmers use humorous error messages in
non-critical applications.
=Besides, there are tons of smileys buried in the crap after
="I hope you will", so I have just taken its advice, and not taken it
=seriously. I'll give you a Fb., but I'll need MUCH harder proof than your
=word. a document with an ISBN would be nice (yes, I will look it up.)
How about just waiting for a couple of weeks before making up your mind?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carl J Lydick | INTERnet: CA...@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU | NSI/HEPnet: SOL1::CARL
Disclaimer: Hey, I understand VAXen and VMS. That's what I get paid for. My
understanding of astronomy is purely at the amateur level (or below). So
unless what I'm saying is directly related to VAX/VMS, don't hold me or my
organization responsible for it. If it IS related to VAX/VMS, you can try to
hold me responsible for it, but my organization had nothing to do with it.
Paul Tomblin
>: >> Something is wrong! My hardware is failing to communicate reliably,
>: >> and my sig.@@@.@..44 breaking up. Can you ~~!` me Major Tom?
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>: I find that very hard to believe...so when did Coke start writing code
>: for machines that would refer to their repairman by name? How come the
>Repairman? You obviously aren't familiar with any David Bowie
>tunes...
I never should have told the AFU crowd that AFC is such a fertile trolling
ground. It's like the Grand Banks all over again.
Paul "Here, coddy, coddy, coddy" Tomblin
Carl J Lydick
=r...@col.hp.com (hpctdfc) writes:
=
=>: >> Something is wrong! My hardware is failing to communicate reliably,
=>: >> and my sig.@@@.@..44 breaking up. Can you ~~!` me Major Tom?
=> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
=
=>: I find that very hard to believe...so when did Coke start writing code
=>: for machines that would refer to their repairman by name? How come the
=
=>Repairman? You obviously aren't familiar with any David Bowie
=>tunes...
=
=I never should have told the AFU crowd that AFC is such a fertile trolling
=ground. It's like the Grand Banks all over again.
=
=Paul "Here, coddy, coddy, coddy" Tomblin
Of course, not all newsgropus are populated by three-year-olds with computer
access.
Jeremy Nelson
>I've never actually seen it, but I've been fingering it off an on for several
>months, and it seems legit :)
>$ finger co...@gu.uwa.edu.au
>[gu.uwa.edu.au]
>The UCC Coke machine.
.
.
.
>May your pink fish bing into the distance.
>$
>Chris 'Yes, I've got too much time on my hands' Mullins
>mul...@virginia.edu
It is. (We say with pride.) Coke very generously donated it to us
sans-coin counting mechanisms, on the basis that we didn't resell, etc.
It has a 68000 controlling, which helped to fail to make, in the end
leaving it up to John West to resurrect and fix. (I used nifty little
bits of paper with writing on the to mark the pins... unfortunately the
paper actually conducted and so the board didn't work <sigh>.)
The money is handled electronically, accounts are backed up of machine
(in fact of campus).
There was a push for the Coke machine to run full TCP/IP at one point.
Which was overwhelmingly crushed when it was decided someone had to work
to make it do it. At the moment it just has a serial conection to our
sun.
John (who many of you will recognize) can tell you real details.
(His address is jo...@gu.uwa.edu.au)
Watch this space for more loonie projects... you may soon be able to
get live snapshots of the UCC through a frame grabbed video camera if
Craig gets his way...
--
"And on the eighth day, after a good nap, God created Internet."
Jem. Jeremy Nelson. gu...@uniwa.uwa.edu.au :\ => :)
Peter Lewis
>What do you mean 'SEEMS legit'?? There is a large red box roughly 2m behind
Its definitely legit, if you have an account, and a possitive
cokeaccount balance (or you are all powerful like me :-) you can
even dispense cokes online. I've personally dispensed a coke from
as far away as Clifornia - but it took me four weeks to get back to
Perth, and by then some bastard had drunk it!
>needs). I finger it, and it lies about the Fanta (and this time, it really
>is a software problem).
A software problem, yeah, right that'll be a first.
>You can even send mail to it. The mail never gets anywhere near the
>machine, but us maintainers get a good laugh out of some of it.
Actually, most of us just delete it :) I keep meaning to forge some
Email replies, but I don't have quite that much time on my hands,
perhaps someone will wirse eliza up to it :)
Peter.
--
_______________________________________________________________________
Peter N Lewis <peter...@info.curtin.edu.au> Ph: +61 9 368 2055
khc...@hydra.maths.unsw.edu.au
|> Try this drink machine in Australia: co...@gu.uwa.edu.au
|> I've never actually seen it, but I've been fingering it off an on for several
|> months, and it seems legit :)
|>
|> $ finger co...@gu.uwa.edu.au
|> [gu.uwa.edu.au]
|> The UCC Coke machine.
|>
|> Checking Coke machine status...
|>
|> Slot 0 has fanta.
|> Slot 1 has diet coke.
|> Slot 2 has diet lift.
|> Slot 3 has diet coke.
|> Slot 4 has diet sprite .
|> Slot 5 has club lemon.
|> Slot 6 has coke.
|>
|> May your pink fish bing into the distance.
|> $
|>
|>
|> Chris 'Yes, I've got too much time on my hands' Mullins
|> mul...@virginia.edu
Perhaps someone at the University of Western Australia can answer that (hi, John).
Kin Hoong
Peter Cooper
>It is. (We say with pride.) Coke very generously donated it to us
>sans-coin counting mechanisms, on the basis that we didn't resell, etc.
Well, I recall they didn't actually mind giving us a money thingie, but
that the guild who own our building are somewhat wary of us controlling
a working vending machine ... and harming their monopoly :)
>It has a 68000 controlling, which helped to fail to make, in the end
>leaving it up to John West to resurrect and fix. (I used nifty little
>bits of paper with writing on the to mark the pins... unfortunately the
>paper actually conducted and so the board didn't work <sigh>.)
Ha! How dare you! *I* was the one who did the little bits of paper,
and the wire wrapping, sunshine ;)
Peter
--
Peter Cooper (com...@gu.uwa.edu.au) There is no God and Dirac is its Prophet
(Oh yeah. I speak only for myself. Assume IMHO at the start of each line :-)
Paul Tomblin
>In article <CFosD...@freenet.carleton.ca>, ab...@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin) writes:
>=r...@col.hp.com (hpctdfc) writes:
>=
>=>: >> Something is wrong! My hardware is failing to communicate reliably,
>=>: >> and my sig.@@@.@..44 breaking up. Can you ~~!` me Major Tom?
>=> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>=
>=>: I find that very hard to believe...so when did Coke start writing code
>=>: for machines that would refer to their repairman by name? How come the
>=
>=>Repairman? You obviously aren't familiar with any David Bowie
>=>tunes...
>=
>=I never should have told the AFU crowd that AFC is such a fertile trolling
>=ground. It's like the Grand Banks all over again.
>=
>=Paul "Here, coddy, coddy, coddy" Tomblin
>Of course, not all newsgropus are populated by three-year-olds with computer
>access.
No, some of them are populated by people with a sense of humour.
Paul "mind you, if I had to use VMS, I'd be pretty grumpy too" Tomblin
--
Paul Tomblin - Contract Programmer and "Snide Canadian"
"Meet the new boss - same as the old boss" - Jean Chretien
Aaron G Goldstein
machine? by Carl J Lyd...@SOL1.GPS.C
> access.
being, mentally, a three-year-old with computer access, I must take
offense at that remark! :)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bread mold - My opinions may have changed, but the fact that I am correct
has not. (Not sure who said that first...)
Enjoy life to it's fullest!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Bulhak
: jo...@gu.uwa.edu.au (John West) writes:
: >You can even send mail to it. The mail never gets anywhere near the
: >machine, but us maintainers get a good laugh out of some of it.
: Actually, most of us just delete it :) I keep meaning to forge some
: Email replies, but I don't have quite that much time on my hands,
: perhaps someone will wirse eliza up to it :)
Even better: recode the whole thing in emacs lisp (I'm sure that it is
possible to do embedded systems with emacs, if you try hard enough);
then you can have it run doctor.el, flame.el or kibologize.el, depending
on, say, the day of the week or the number of Cokes left. If you want to
be really zany, make it run yow.el.
Eventually you can embed an entire UNIX in the machine and have it pipe
replies, at random, through filters such as <switches screens to do
`ls ~/bin`:> b1ff, chef or mcelwaine.
--
Andrew Bulhak | Meh-na meh-na, doo DOO do-doo doo,
a...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au| Meh-na meh-na, doo-dodoo do
Monash Uni, Clayton, | Meh-na meh-na, doo DOO do-doo doo, dodoo-doo
Victoria, Australia | dodoo-doo, doodoodoo, do.
Andrew Bulhak
: >You can even send mail to it. The mail never gets anywhere near the
: >machine, but us maintainers get a good laugh out of some of it.
: Actually, most of us just delete it :) I keep meaning to forge some
: Email replies, but I don't have quite that much time on my hands,
: perhaps someone will wirse eliza up to it :)
Even better: recode the whole thing in emacs lisp (I'm sure that it is
John West
>Is there a notation for "currently false, but only because you picked
>the wrong week to check"? The hardware that counts the number of
>bottles in each column went wonky at the begining of the month and is
>being worked on.
How do you do that? We've been trying to think of (reliable) ways of
counting cans, and so far we've failed. We just have phototransistors
staring at the 'slot empty' lights - we can tell if a slot is non-empty,
but we have no idea how many cans are in there.
Another project that I hope will never happen is putting three
phototransistors at the bottom of each slot, with coloured filters in front
of them. Shine a light on the can, see what colour it is, and guess what
the drink is. I refuse to have anything to do with it.
John West
Nick Bannon
> >[...]
> >>Slot 2 has diet lift.
> >What's this? Anything like Jolt? Sounds like it has definate hacker potential.
> >although the "diet" part is a bit weird.
Hmmmm... Not sure who wrote the Diet Lift question... perhaps the
article hasn't arrived yet...
At the time that the coke machine was fixed (and now, even!) we had a
dire shortage of 'real' drinks - there was only Coke and a little lemon
drink left ::-(
Lift, and hence diet lift, is a 'standard' lemon drink, like Club
Lemon. I think the Coca-Cola company makes it...
Diet food... horrible invention!
Nick.
John West
>>What's this? Anything like Jolt? Sounds like it has definate hacker potential.
>>although the "diet" part is a bit weird.
Don't panic. Nothing at all like Jolt. No hacker potential at all - missing
a little caffiene, like the drink they call Mountain Dew here. Diet Lift is
the diet version of Lift. Lift is Coke's answer to those yellow lemonish
things. The machine is full of the stuff because some idiot filled dozens
of slots with it and it hasn't been selling. The coke slot holds 4 times as
much as the others, so I'm happy.
John West
Daniel M Silevitch
|> "Jonathan R. Ferro" <jf...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
|>
|> >Is there a notation for "currently false, but only because you picked
|> >the wrong week to check"? The hardware that counts the number of
|> >bottles in each column went wonky at the begining of the month and is
|> >being worked on.
|>
|> How do you do that? We've been trying to think of (reliable) ways of
|> counting cans, and so far we've failed. We just have phototransistors
|> staring at the 'slot empty' lights - we can tell if a slot is non-empty,
|> but we have no idea how many cans are in there.
How about using a digital scale at the bottom of the slot, and then dividing
the total weight by the weight of each can. May not be precisely accurate,
but since the size of the can quanta is rather large, it shouldn't be a
problem.
|> John West
--
Daniel Silevitch dms...@mit.edu
``May the Source be with you.''
Andrew Bulhak
Hmmmm..... Is there a net.coke-machine-design FAQ?
Perhaps there should be a newsgroup for the netification of coke
machines? It looks like the next net.trend.
-- Andrew "Of course, don't forget the MIT Tampax machine....." Bulhak
--
Andrew Bulhak |
a...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au| "Don't call me `white male';
Monash Uni, Clayton, | I'm `differently oppressed', OK?"
Victoria, Australia |
Bear Giles
>In article <abm1.75...@crux1.cit.cornell.edu>, ab...@crux3.cit.cornell.edu (a.B. Mayers; BOTmaster) writes:
>=How come the "response" is full of line noise and the "Dept. Coke Machine"
>=thing is fine?
>
>It's a joke, son. LOTS of programmers use humorous error messages in
>non-critical applications.
Or they're playing mind games.
A while back I worked for a company producing semi-custom software and
we heard a rumor that a client had edited the binary file to delete the
copyright notice. This was supposed to be a pretty sloppy job; the
notice was replaced with spaces, instead of modifying the executable
to not make the call to display the notice at all.
I was asked to come up with a way to determine if this happened, so
I tossed in a checksum on the copyright notice and if the checksum was
incorrect I printed the message:
Fatal error: Elephants stampeding in Zimbabwe.
Call 1-303-555-1234 for technical support.
The idea was that anyone who got that message would be so shocked that
they would call our technical support line without considering the
possibility it was a message which *we* would recognize as:
"Hi. I'm *really* stupid and calling you to report that I've
been screwing around with your copyright notice."
Alas, the guy confessed (and was reprimanded) before my message could
get released. But for 6 months various managers would look at me and
shake their head, wondering how anyone could ever come up with an
error message like that...
--
Bear Giles
be...@cs.colorado.edu/fsl.noaa.gov
Alan J Rosenthal
>|> counting cans, and so far we've failed.
>
>the total weight by the weight of each can.
How about a sonar beam from the top of the column to measure the distance to
the uppermost can? Activate the sonar beams only when fingered, of course.
(Or otherwise accessed.) This is not a serious comment.
I know: Tie a seagull to the top of the column, then have a spout which drops
alka-seltzer onto the uppermost can. When the seagull explodes, you know
you've released enough alka-seltzer to make a pile high enough to reach the
seagull (who will immediately eat some because it's been so hungry with nothing
to eat while tied to the top of the column). Then when the seagull explodes,
automatic machinery goes out and catches another seagull. Water cascades down
inside the machine to clean it, and the bottom of the machine drains into the
sewer.
Alan "trying desperately to catch up in AFU, and finding that people have been
discussing me in my absence, which is always flattering" Rosenthal