> It then set the name of a channel to the results (either 1-person-in-upl or X-people-in-upl), which others could check.
I'm not suggesting you don't do this, but you /could/ setup a speaker to play the classic remix of Steve Ballmer's "developers! developers!" whenever there are >=2 people in the room. On April 1st, of course.
I swear to God that all of these CS labs at different unis look the same. I am getting flashbacks of labs in Toronto that looked exactly like pictures in the post
The physics computer lab in Chamberlin Hall at UW in the 90's was a secret treasure trove of idle NeXTstation Turbo machines in an almost always empty room cooled to near refrigeration temperatures. I used to light up at least half of that room to run distributed simulations. There's probably still a 30 year old key to that lab in a junk drawer somewhere.
Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up and get my own hardware, as it was either going to be esoteric "workstation" hardware with a fifth of the horsepower of a Pentium 75 or it was going to be in a room like the UPL jammed with CRT's and the smell of warm Josta.
How do students operate these days? Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?
I had finger running on login to `finger stacy` I was at SDSU on a very large SunOS system and she was at a private school and I assume that computer was a bit more limited.
`Finger Stacy` would run every minute and typically be running for 15 minutes max... that is until I moved into the dorms and my machine was online all the time.
A few weeks go by and I get an email from the SDSU admin requesting that I stop fingering stacy as it was bothering the other Sysadmin. I remarked with a grin that all I was trying to do was in fact try to `name of the command` and they promptly deleted the script from the account.. It still makes me smile as I write this.
Back in the man.ac.uk of the early 90s, there were no cameras or YOLO models but we still wanted to know when machines (especially the colour ones! LUXURY!) were available.
We just had "`rlogin` to every machine in the lab, run `who`, and collate the output". IIRC there was an early version written by 'flup that I extended with a tidier output (including an X11 window), auto-refreshing, and easier machine selection (eg. you could select rooms by name with regex filtering.)
Another solution in the age of portable electronic devices: detect presence based on active DHCP leases. You can let then people register themselves by MAC on some web portal so they can be visible by name if they're comfortable with that.
Or Bluetooth. There are some problems (like MAC randomization) to get a real tracking with BLE, but to have a rough estimation, it's a good technique.
And you can do it with just an ESP32.
Readit News
I'm not suggesting you don't do this, but you /could/ setup a speaker to play the classic remix of Steve Ballmer's "developers! developers!" whenever there are >=2 people in the room. On April 1st, of course.
I hope this is intentional
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250
Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up and get my own hardware, as it was either going to be esoteric "workstation" hardware with a fifth of the horsepower of a Pentium 75 or it was going to be in a room like the UPL jammed with CRT's and the smell of warm Josta.
How do students operate these days? Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?
Someone wrote a script to finger everyone in the entire CS department and tell when the lab was busy, by counting people logged in.
This work fine, except for on intro courses where some labs had lots of non-CS majors in them.
`Finger Stacy` would run every minute and typically be running for 15 minutes max... that is until I moved into the dorms and my machine was online all the time.
A few weeks go by and I get an email from the SDSU admin requesting that I stop fingering stacy as it was bothering the other Sysadmin. I remarked with a grin that all I was trying to do was in fact try to `name of the command` and they promptly deleted the script from the account.. It still makes me smile as I write this.
https://door-status.ucc.asn.au/ucc
Runs off a Raspberry Pi with a bodged-up version of https://github.com/ide/pico-door-sensor/tree/main
This is at least the third iteration; some previous iterations are documented here:
https://www.ucc.asn.au/services/door.ucc
We just had "`rlogin` to every machine in the lab, run `who`, and collate the output". IIRC there was an early version written by 'flup that I extended with a tidier output (including an X11 window), auto-refreshing, and easier machine selection (eg. you could select rooms by name with regex filtering.)
Good times.
How many BT devices is the average student or faculty member toting around with them at a given point?
Could conceivably be 4+ with some combination of: phone, smartwatch, tablet, BT speaker, game device, etc.