Firewall Died

My circa 1999 SonicWall SOHO firewall bit the dust this week. Everything worked fine, but for whatever reason, the throughput through the device slowed to a crawl. I replaced it with a spare firewall I had lying around, but this was a great little device offering tons of control that home firewalls can't give you out of the box. (Nowadays, I'm running Tomato). I got the SOHO when I worked at CacheFlow, one of the darlings of Internet bubble. Those were the days...

Bluetracker Progress

I worked on my bluetooth tracking app a little more last night adding the capability to receive device updates from other BlueTrackers. I did this by adding xPL so that the app will generate xPL messages when it detects a phone or when that phone times out. Other BlueTrackers on the network, which may not be close enough to the phone to detect it, receive those xPL messages and can then update its list of present phones. My HA software can now key off phone detected messages from all BlueTrackers to establish that a phone is home. When a phone leaves the house, eventually all BlueTrackers will issue timed out messages, but only one BlueTracker will serve as a master - and only messages from that BlueTracker will be used to determine if a phone is no longer home. The app has been running on two machines overnight and is pretty much done.

New Bluetooth Project

I have been using xPL Bluetooth but it hasn't worked quite right for me so I've decided to write my own Bluetooth app to track our cellphones coming & going. I am using In The Hand's 32 Feet.NET PAN SDK. The example code had everything I needed to get a quick start writing my app. After a couple hours of playing around, I've got it up & running detecting some bluetooth devices. I've added code for tracking and timing out devices along with a debug window. Now, I need to decide if I'm going to add a configuration file and also how I will interface it back to my HA system. I originally wanted to add it to my xPL sCU application, which interfaces starCOMUltra, xPL, xAP, IM & UPB. Instead, I've decided on a standalone app as I'm not getting anywhere near the advertised bluetooth range - so I could end up with devices timing out if they get moved from the family room to the living room, etc. My plan is to put the app and bluetooth interfaces on all the servers around the house.

Official Google Calendar & Contacts Sync

Finally, you can sync your Gmail contacts and GCal to your mobile phone without having to use third party tools. Read about it here.

HDHomerun Update

I found from the HDHomerun forums that I should update the firmware. I downloaded the latest and updated, and now I'm seeing about 14 Mbps, which is perfect. If I decide on another HDHR, I'm figuring about 56-80 Mbps of bandwidth. Since our house was wired back in 1999 with Cat-5 (not 5e), 100 Mbps is as fast as the network can run. Also, each SageTV HD extender can use up to 20 Mbps so in worst case, the network will be overloaded - for 1 NIC. Furthermore, where I want the PC located there is no cable jack so I can't create a local GigE network with the HDHRs and the PC. I do, however, have a Cat-5 run from the HDHR location to the PC location, so I can create a small 100 Mbps network with 1 NIC and the HDHRs. I can then add a 2nd NIC connected to the main LAN to handle regular network access and streaming to the HD extenders. One thing is the HDHR is a DHCP only device, but will default to a 169.254.x.x address if no IP address is handed out to it. I just need to set the HDHR connected NIC to 169.254.y.y with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 and the PC should see the HDHRs.

Edit: Turns out, the reduced bandwidth I was seeing was due to using VLC to view the streams. Using Sage, the bandwidth was still 30 Mbps. I have since installed the SageTV 6.5.8 release candidate and the bandwidth is now down in the 10 Mbps range.

Looking into SageTV

I've taken a break from automation stuff and I'm looking at media now. I've downloaded a trial of SageTV and I got an HDHomerun. I have things set up on an old Sempron 2800+ machine, which is adequate for recording and serving video (not at all for watching live HD though). The dual tuners on the HDHomerun use up 80 Mbps when bother are tuned to HD channels. This is clearly not usable unless I upgrade some parts of my network from 100 Mbps to gigabit. I have a few other issues to work out as well, but the Sage software and the HDHomerun seem to work well.

HAL is a Piece of Crap

I just did a long needed Windows update of my HA server and the only app on my machine that craps out? HAL Deluxe. After someone calls and leaves a message, the HAL System Server fatals. I restored my old db files. I re-installed HAL. I did a clean re-install of HAL. No luck. I had a similar problem with 2.066 (I'm using 3.7.3 now). I'm just about ready to go back to an answering machine...again.

Finished up HAL Client-Server App

It's been a while since I wrote my app to link multiple HAL installations. I finally finished it up last night. I've linked the MacroPhrases from the master to the client so all voice commands are accessible from the client. It only does this at startup, so it will not update if the server phrases get updated.

AMEX Wishlist Goodies

I scored a few goodies from the AMEX wishlist promotion that was running. One of them was a $150 statement credit for a purchase from BestBuy. That went to buying a new HDTV. I also got a 25% off Amazon coupon - apparently it's good until 1/15/09 and can be used until the maximum discount is reached. Among things I got is the Antenna Direct DB4 antenna. It works great indoors bringing in HD signals that are over 40 miles from our house. I am contemplating other purchases to take advantage of this - possibly the HDHomerun and some Sage stuff (software & extender). Finally, a friend of mine snagged the Squeezebox Boom for me. It's very cool.

Shelved xlobby Plugin

I stopped worked on my xlobby plugin. I was hoping I could just drop msscriptcontrol into it to create a scripting engine for my plugin, but it xlobby doesn't seem to like it. After a couple days of getting nowhere, I put it on the backburner...

Jabber Re-Integration

I've finally completed integration of Jabber functionality into my xPL sCU app. I had coded it up months ago, but was too lazy to fully integrate it since I've been using xAP Jabber. Last night, I finally cleaned up the code and added response handlers in the xPL sCU hosted script. It's up & running so I've turned off xAP Jabber. I used jabber-net to build in the Jabber functionality.

Plugin for xlobby

I've been playing around writing a plugin for xlobby. I've used it before with the xAP plugin, but it wasn't very stable. I've since removed a lot of my xAP stuff. I do like xlobby's lightweight client for touchscreen applications, so I started toying with a plugin. I've been able to integrate xPL and access to mySQL into a plugin. This allows me to create xlobby events to issue xPL commands, and I can grab the status of everything in my system as its all stored in mySQL. However, the more I think about it, the more I'm going to want to script the responses from the plugin as some of the database contents need to be interpreted. I'll need to add a scripting engine at some point.