Without a doubt, dispense is one of the most singularly important things in the UCC. It is a mish-mash of software and hardware and over the years has evolved from a simple way to electronically dispense drinks to your UCC electronic wallet. Much of the software was written by an eighteen-year-old! Services, printing, phone calls, drinks and snacks are all paid for with dispense. It even allows Door group to open the electronic door lock.

Maintaining Your Coke Account

The UCC drink and snack machines do not accept money directly. To get at their delicious contents you will first need some coke credit. The usual method of doing this is to shout “Is anyone here in Coke?” in the clubroom. Assuming someone says “Yes!”, you can ask them to please add some money to your account. You will need to get a plastic bag from on top of the safe (under the windows), show them the bag with the money in it, read them the bag number (if the bag is numbered) and then put it in the slot in the top of the safe.

Using Dispense from a Console

The traditional way to use dispense is via a UNIX terminal on morwong, mermaid or mussel or martello. Typing dispense at the prompt will bring up a list of purchases available to you. You will not be able to select items you do not have enough credit for. If you do not wish to select an item you can press q to return back to the prompt. Dispense has options to pay for other items besides drinks and snacks. The selection of such items will depend on the time of year, but commonly include tickets to events and items like the UCC T-shirt. You can also pay for phone calls and paper for the laser printer this way. You can then ask someone in Coke for your item, informing them you dispensed the item. Using Dispense from the Snack Machine The snack machine has also been connected to dispense. You can access dispense through the snack machine keypad. However first you will need to set up your account for this access. Use the ucc-set-pin command from a UNIX prompt on mussel, martello or mermaid to do this.

You can now type in your 5 digit user id, followed by your four digit PIN to authenticate to dispense. As well as the two digit codes for snacks in the machine, you can request a drink by selecting the slot number followed by an 8 (the machine will tell you what drinks are available if you wait for it to all scroll past; coke is always 68). If you were in Door group, you could also use the machine to open the door.

Dispense Version 2

People are currently working on a next generation version of dispense. The next version of dispense will give us a dispense library for a better console application, GUI applications, and countless other improved features. There is nothing quite like dispense anywhere else in the world, and the people who have worked on it have gone down as heroes in the UCC History. Besides enabling us to do even better things with dispense, version 2 will allow an entire new generation of hackers to become infamous for future generations of UCCans.