RE: [SLE] OT, but funny > Linux card reader?
Sounds cool.... what Card reader are you using..? ...or is that custom written ?
-----Original Message----- From: Derek Fountain [SMTP:fountai@hursley.ibm.com] Sent: Monday, July 24, 2000 1:57 PM To: SuSE English Subject: [SLE] OT, but funny
This is almost completely off topic, but it's pretty funny so I have to share it with you.
Some time ago our coffee bar here at the Hursley IBM site put the price of coffee up to what was considered unreasonable heights. In the face of a minor revolution, the boss of my department arranged for an industrial sized coffee machine to be installed in our little kitchen area, which would provide coffee for the people of this department at cost price. The payment is done by a card reader - we make a coffee then swipe a card through a reader which logs the drink. At some point we go to the boss and settle up with cash. It happens pretty much on trust, and works rather well. The machine which the card reader is attached to is a Linux box attached to the network. The data about coffee purchases goes into a MySQL table which the boss keeps updated as people pay money.
(Bear with me, it gets better.)
We operate here with static IP addresses, except for about a dozen dynamically allocated addresses which visitors can use to connect their laptops etc. to our network. The DHCP server was an NT box in our server room which, you may be astonished to hear, wasn't too reliable. Some time ago the thing keeled over and we've been without DHCP for some while. This morning the boss finally decided that the DHCP needed to be reinstated, and he wanted it immediately and at zero cost, like bosses do.
Guess where the eyes turned?
We now have a Linux machine which serves both coffee and dynamic IP addresses. The machine in our little kitchen now has a "Mission Critical" label on it.
:-)
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I'm also interested in what he is using to read the cards an the software to interface to the card reader. jack At 03:02 PM 7/24/00 +0100, Bains, Surjit (London) wrote:
Sounds cool....
what Card reader are you using..? ...or is that custom written ?
-----Original Message----- From: Derek Fountain [SMTP:fountai@hursley.ibm.com] Sent: Monday, July 24, 2000 1:57 PM To: SuSE English Subject: [SLE] OT, but funny
This is almost completely off topic, but it's pretty funny so I have to share it with you.
Some time ago our coffee bar here at the Hursley IBM site put the price of coffee up to what was considered unreasonable heights. In the face of a minor revolution, the boss of my department arranged for an industrial sized coffee machine to be installed in our little kitchen area, which would provide coffee for the people of this department at cost price. The payment is done by a card reader - we make a coffee then swipe a card through a reader which logs the drink. At some point we go to the boss and settle up with cash. It happens pretty much on trust, and works rather well. The machine which the card reader is attached to is a Linux box attached to the network. The data about coffee purchases goes into a MySQL table which the boss keeps updated as people pay money.
(Bear with me, it gets better.)
We operate here with static IP addresses, except for about a dozen dynamically allocated addresses which visitors can use to connect their laptops etc. to our network. The DHCP server was an NT box in our server room which, you may be astonished to hear, wasn't too reliable. Some time ago the thing keeled over and we've been without DHCP for some while. This morning the boss finally decided that the DHCP needed to be reinstated, and he wanted it immediately and at zero cost, like bosses do.
Guess where the eyes turned?
We now have a Linux machine which serves both coffee and dynamic IP addresses. The machine in our little kitchen now has a "Mission Critical" label on it.
:-)
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Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq
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Jack Malone East Texas Lighthouse for the Blind dba Horizon Industries jack@malone.tyler.com 903-595-3444 fax 903-595-3447 -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq
Dunno. Nothing custom about it. It fits into the keyboard socket (in line with the keyboard), so when someone swipes a card the behaviour is exactly as if someone typed a string of characters into the keyboard very quickly. Most card readers work like this. I believe the card string is read by a perl script (from it's standard input of course) and put into a MySQL table entry. Quite neat really.
what Card reader are you using..? ...or is that custom written ?
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Cool, do you know if there is any way to put one of these on a serial port
or something?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Derek Fountain"
Dunno. Nothing custom about it. It fits into the keyboard socket (in line with the keyboard), so when someone swipes a card the behaviour is exactly as if someone typed a string of characters into the keyboard very quickly.
Most card readers work like this. I believe the card string is read by a perl script (from it's standard input of course) and put into a MySQL table entry. Quite neat really.
what Card reader are you using..? ...or is that custom written ?
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I'd have thought so, but I'm no expert. I just spoke about what I saw on the machine we have here. Try entering "card reader serial port" into Google and see what you get...
Cool, do you know if there is any way to put one of these on a serial port or something?
Dunno. Nothing custom about it. It fits into the keyboard socket (in line with the keyboard), so when someone swipes a card the behaviour is exactly as if someone typed a string of characters into the keyboard very quickly.
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participants (4)
-
fountai＠hursley.ibm.com -
jack＠malone.tyler.com -
jharr＠mad.scientist.com -
Surjit.Bains＠merhsbc.com