Mark J Cox

mark :: blog :: x10

27 Sep 2002: UPS

Had a cold today so didn't get anything done on my presentation this evening, instead did something that required little work and hacked more Perl for the home automation system. There are now four jabber bots online, a common thread is that you can message them and get some status information, or send information to them to do, also if you've got them listed in your roster they'll send you an update with their status every minute.

At the moment the UPS bot tells you interesting status reports and notifies you of emergency things. The adsl bot tells you about the cable modem link signal strength and so on. The tivo bot is rather cool, it tells you what it's currently watching and a few status indicators, and in return you can pop up a message on the screen or send a message to be viewed in the message centre. The final X10 bot lets you control X10 things in the house, just some lights at the moment. It doesn't yet report the status, that seems not to work.

I'm having problems getting Perl to deal with the parallel ports correctly so I can't get the alarm, SMS or heating controls to work yet. Also these bots are complete hacks and return the information in psuedo-xml (random made up DTD) and I've not thought about messages vs groupchats vs iq oob for the data. Anyway much fun being able to message the living room lights to turn to 30% brightness

30 Apr 2002: LW11G

Several hours later and I manage to find out the extended commands for the LW11G dimmer unit. Can't find these anywhere else mentioned on the web, so for future generations:

# Extended X10 control of LW11G dimmer
#
# Unlike other L*11* modules the LW11G
# seems to only respond to code 53.  Set the data to
#
# 0 = immediate off
# 255 = immediate on
# 1-254 = slowly dim or bright to that level, turns on if
not already

31 Aug 2001: Sheets of Style

Spent half a day debugging XSL stylesheets that worked fine with libxml/libxslt but didn't work at all in Microsoft IE. Turns out we had some errors in the XSL that libxslt didn't care about. The outcome is if you're using IE6 try this link:

http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/01-08-31.xml

It really will load the XML for the issue, load the stylesheets and the navigation bar, then parse them to create the HTML output. Do "view source" if you don't believe me!

Now that my builder has run CAT-5 through my new house (yeah, I have wireless but I want to run secure links and s- video over CAT-5) I wish I'd got them to run all the lighting cables separately too so I could X10 them without having to have the horrible UK X10 replacement lightswitches.

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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