So my Linux on a cash register hobby page thing was on Slashdot. Way cool. I have no idea how the guy that submitted it found it. He might have been searching google for Linux POS systems or something and came across it. I was up in Phoenix visiting my folks when I decided to borrow my mom's PC and check the haps online. I nearly spit coffee out of my nose when I saw my site on Slashdot. I didn't think my project was terribly novel, but I got some positive comments. Slashdot had some blackout/protest thing directed at it that week, so maybe they were hard up for new or something. They certainly seemed to put out a lot of news items during the week. I thought it was interesting to see the "/. effect" firsthand. My provider stayed up nicely.

I got about 35,000 individual visitors in a couple days time. The page hits have trickled off to about 4000 a day (I usually get about 400-500 per day). I had people from Slovenia and Malaysia and the Russian Federation and every other continent besides Antarctica stopping by. I had a Qualcomm person or two come by as well. And my 404 page got quite a bit of notice as well. I don't have a 003.html, so the pics are "out of sequence". Quite a few people noticed this and started requesting the "missing" page. It might have been in the Slashdot comments too. I forget.

The best part was the email I got. I had 40-something emails from people, all of them very nice. I answered every single one of them (and I can be real bad about letting emails languish, so I made a conscious effort to respond to them all). Some people had bought used POS systems like the one I have and wanted info on them (one fella in particular was in deep need of help, and I sent him a bunch of links as well as info on the unit). Another group sent me POS links, had info about the hardware, and the like. I have some really great pointers to stuff and I'll post them here tomorrow or thereabouts. The last group of emails was along the lines of "nice hack". The LED-on-a-stick was especially popular, and I got some emails asking what plans I had for it. Not sure yet. Yet another future MG post.

The comments in the Slashdot post were pretty damn amusing. Tracy got a kick out of a couple of them in particular. Most comments were of the "this ain't no big deal" category. They're right: it really isn't a big deal. I'm just doing it to have fun. I like taking stuff apart. I only took pictures because I've got a handy thumbnailing script and I wanted to show Trey the progress so I annotated the pages. Besides, how was I supposed to know what the things were made of? For all I knew, they had StrongARM CPUs in them. And it's been fun getting the LED-on-a-stick working. I didn't mind the harsher comments. You can't please everyone all the time, especially when you aren't trying to please anyone at all.

Oddly, since little project became "famous", I haven't done squat with it. I brought a cash drawer back with me, so I'm going to hook that up soon. It's on the floor right now. I did yank out the Voodoo3 card and put in an old SoundBlaster AWE16 I had, but that's not hardly progress. And there's these guys with a LCD display daemon project who are writing driver support for my LED-on-a-stick (and those like it; apparently my model is fairly common). I'm going to help them beta test. So stuff'll get done. Trouble is, I discovered the HTML::CalendarMonthSimple perl module and had to write a database-driven event calendar right quick (it even has my birthday in it). I'm gonna use it as the base for the web site for my parents' cabin. Yet one more future MG post. I'll have to write more often I think. Oh yeah, I even submitted a patch for the module which allows for table cell font resizing.

All in all a very amusing situation. I really wished I would have put the URL to the cash register on the web too. I have apache logging to the printer. I'd have loved to be able to save that receipt.