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99 Bottles of beer on the wall, postscript, and webservers

I was sharing the links which were the consequence of the following story with people, when Max suggested that I put it up here, so here it is. :-)

You probably know the song:

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer,
Take one down and pass it around.
98 bottles of beer on the wall.

Well, I was searching for a program to generate the entire song, when I
happened to stumble upon a page which contains (at last count)
programs in 621 different languages to generate the beer song!

Exploring the site found entries written in standard languages like BASIC (of course), Pascal, C, C++, etc., and also entries using PostScript, bash, sed, etc! I knew PostScript was a full-featured programming language, but had never really read up much on this capability. Having got the initial prod from the Beer entry, did some more exploring and found a page called the
First Guide to PostScript. And from there, onwards to
PS-HTTPD - a webserver written in PostScript!

So, armed with this knowledge, I think it’s finally possible to achieve a task we were investigating a few years before at the company I used to work for: install a version of SETI@Home to run on the HP Colour Laserprinter! It’d be a PostScript program. Send it to the printer, and a few hours later, the printer would finally print out a sheet of paper - a printout of the analysis of the data packet that it examined. :-)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004 at 15:47 and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “99 Bottles of beer on the wall, postscript, and webservers”

  1. PITRP Says:
    August 25th, 2004 at 21:31

    LOL - spitzen bericht

    Is the program installed jet? ;)

  2. Nedorus Says:
    September 2nd, 2004 at 10:43

    Hi Roshan,
    seti@home on the laserprinter is a nice idea, but what about a mailserver? Or the famous hole in wall we biuld from the big S? Are the IP capabilities of the printer accessable with ps? We would no longer need a linux box to drill the hole ;-)
    Greetz from the fast and asymetrical
    Nedorus

  3. Roshan Says:
    September 2nd, 2004 at 11:33

    Hi Marko,

    Unfortunately, postscript doesn’t have socket capabilities (the web-server runs through inetd, and takes input from stdin), so we are left to find other ways to do I/O.

    BTW - you’re only as assymetric as you think you are. :-)
    Roshan

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