Want to share what you're doing with another person logged into the same system? All you need is a FIFO, cat, and script.

On your session: mkfifo foo script -f foo

On the viewer's session:

      cat foo

The viewer can then see everything that you're doing as if they're looking over your shoulder!

I said that I'd post details on my Intelligent Drink Dispenser project "soon". That was over a month ago. Whoops. I blame my new internship for that.

For those of you not in the know, the Intelligent Drink Dispenser was my senior design project at Missouri University of Science and Technology (which will forever in my heart be University of Missouri-Rolla). It's basically a smart drink dispenser that's capable of mixing, charging customers, telling the bar/restaurant owner when they need to refill the machine, etc.

The other major half of the Intelligent Drink Dispenser project was the software side of things. As with the hardware, there were some things we had to consider when beginning the design of things.

So, I've been pretty quiet about my Intelligent Drink Dispenser project so far, mostly because there was going to be a competition between myself and Clint Rutkas and I didn't want to give the enemy any details.

After spending all afternoon fighting with my new server and my DD-WRT router, I finally figured out how to get my server to PXE boot and fire up an Ubuntu install. All it really involved was setting up TFTP on another box (my desktop, to be specific), adding a line to DD-WRT's DNSMasq options, and configuring the damn server to boot from PXE, which was the hardest part. Luckily, for those of you who are struggling with it, here's how I did it.