ITAPPMONROBOT (2007)(thedailywtf.com)
68 pointsby ColinWright10 days ago8 comments
  • anilakar10 days ago
    I once wrote a social CD tray app at the company christmas party after a few beers. It was a simple program that polled the CD tray on the local computer and whenever the user closed it, the daemon would trigger eject on another machine.

    Luckily the source code has been lost.

    • bayindirh10 days ago
      > Luckily the source code has been lost.

      I chuckled.

  • qiqitori10 days ago
    https://eject.kokuda.org/examples/ eject command users group (Japanese)

    I've also used the CD drive to repeatedly press a button on an embedded device for debugging purposes. And yes, I learned about this usage from the linked thedailywtf article :D

  • dvh10 days ago
    I used cd rom and string when I was etching hole in stainless steel, after few minutes bubbles accumulated and significantly slowed down the process, pulling it out of solution every minute would burst the bubbles and etching could continue.

    Another time I used led from keyboard (NumLock/capslock/scrollock) to trigger reed switch relay that would ground piece of aluminum foil taped to the phone screen (I was grinding in some MMORPG game).

  • stuartjohnson1210 days ago
    This brings me back. I'm 23 (born 2001) and my father is a techie. Reading these kinds of funny stories about sysadmin shenanigans in the late 2000s and early 2010s is a core memory of my childhood. I miss this kind of writing, it seems to have largely tapered off in the era of cloud managed infrastructure.
  • probably_wrong10 days ago
    > I mean, I don't know anything about circuitry, or how to build robots.

    Every time I read this story I wonder what else could Erik had done in his circumstances that would have been any better than what he did. Is there something out there for the programmer who wants his computer to push a button but doesn't know anything about circuits?

    • alnwlsn10 days ago
      You should have been able to get a kit that controls relays with a parallel or serial port from Radio shack in 2000. Then it's just 2 wires to the switch.
    • virtualcharles10 days ago
      These days yeah, lots of home automation gizmos for instance like the SwitchBot line. Plus it wouldn’t take nearly the amount of engineering know-how it once did to rig up something with an Arduino and a little hobby motor, probably like a $20 project from Adafruit. AI for the code these days, or just a bit of googling. Crazy to think about how easy to get that sort of thing has become in just a couple of decades.
    • gbuk201310 days ago
      Network controlled PDUs are a thing. I’ve used APC switched rack PDUs several jobs ago to control lab equipment - we had a checkout page and if a unit was not checked out it would be powered off at the end of the day and powered back on if someone checked it out. It was as easy as an API call - could be sent by health check script.

      Not sure how healthy that is for the circuits vs reset button though - we didn’t have any problems but some consumer hardware might be more delicate.

  • krige10 days ago
    Eh dunno, the reset buttons I know would not be impressed by the pushing prowess of the CD tray. If anything, you'd just break the motor encoder of your CD drive.
    • bayindirh10 days ago
      Many of the reset buttons I still encounter doesn't require any extraordinary pressure. Some of them are a bit too recessed requiring a paperclip, but again, they're not harder to press.
      • onionisafruit10 days ago
        Going by memory, server reset buttons were bigger and more prominent 20 years ago. But maybe those were just the particular Dell servers I happened to work with the most. I don’t remember ever needing a paper clip to trigger one, but I don’t doubt there were some of that style.

        My mental image of this story has a pencil stub taped to the cd tray so the eraser hits the button, but rereading it today there is no mention of that. I wonder if I saw that somewhere else or just imagined it last time I read this.

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