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MIT's Bathroom Server
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Some of the undergrads wired Random Hall's (an undergraduate dorm) bathroom system up to the net so that you can visit http://bathroom.mit.edu and see which stalls on which floors are vacant, and if they're in use, how long whoever's been in there. It's a pretty good idea-- you can scout your stall from your dorm room, and watch it to make sure nobody's taken a s$#% there recently."
Ok, so it's almost a month out of date, but this at least lets you know what it looks like.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Site slashdotted, google cache.
0 :b athroom.mit.edu/fusion+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:8EknSqPV1b
This is the text-only version, too.
-enneff
Most Original!
The Active Bat location system from AT&T, Cambridge doesn't invade bathrooms but locates people down to 3cm.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/bat/
This bathroom sensor would certainly be useful for waiting in line on aircraft...
lyndsay williams
http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/lyn/
The reason that you need a bathroom server at Random is that there are only 2 bathrooms per floor (14 residents), and the bathrooms are private (1 person at a time, usually). So on busy weekday mornings, it is some times necessary to go to a bathroom on a different floor. With the bathroom server, you can tell which bathrooms on other floor are open before you go down there. It can make the difference between being on time to class and being late (and thus getting those dirty looks from your profs).
/.ed. :P The institute ripped out our wiring, but I glad to see Jim, Riad and company did such a great job with this new version.
:)
There was a bathroom server before this one that my friend Ben built. We only had about half the dorm's bathrooms wired though and no pretty graphics interface. But we also didn't worry about being
The laundry server is the coolest, still. It was down for a few weeks last year and I think that half the dorm actually stopped doing laundry.
And Mjolnir literally shakes the whole dorm when you turn it up. Good times.
Ol' Random Fogie
The Switzerland Coke Machine
Actually, it doesn't seem to be working now. Oh well.
As an entering frosh at MIT, I've already seen bathroom and laundry. But it wasn't until I moved to 3rd East that I came upon sodalord.mit.edu. We've got a really old soda machine in the hall, and it's connected to a server. Log in to your account, get your soda, put it on your tab. Check out the hall's habits, or any member thereof, on the web. Fun.
-InsaneFolder
My other char is '!'
Wow. We weren't ready for Slashdot. We knew that our server couldn't take more than a handful of requests at once, and were planning on fixing that before sending anything off to Slashdot.
I moved the IP address to a faster machine that performs proper caching of the generated images, etc, so this one should have absolutely no problem handling the load (assuming that our building's network can take it).
Don't forget to try out the finger interface, much preferred by all here in the dorm. "finger @bathroom.mit.edu" to see it.
One of these days we'll get around to putting up a page describing how the hardware and software works for both that and our friendly laundry server.
jim@jtan.com, for Random Nerds