23 Sep 2002 mjcox   » (Master)

So I've been spending some time trying to work out what to do with the home automation components - they're a mess of C and Perl that have no real way of communicating with each other. I found this thing called xAP which is designed for home automation components to talk to each other, but it's based mainly on UDP broadcast datagrams - not something I'd trust to make sure things happened when my alarm was triggered. Plus some of the components already written are under a non-GPL, non-BSD license that prohibits commercial use, yuk.

Anyway the idea was to look for something that would use standard components, where frameworks existed in Perl and C for me to write simple code, and to work on the principle of messaging - the UPS for example would respond to status requests and give you things like the temperature and voltage; with a heartbeat notification with the status included every minute; but with urgent alarms to anyone who registers an interest in getting them. Whats the solution? Jabber! In about an hour I had a jabber server running and a test Perl client doing just that; this thing will rock :)

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!