RWVHP - General Web

Serial is Dead, Long Live Serial

2008-02-25T08:31:00Z

While looking for the holy grail in home automation protocols, I made a little discovery, a bit of kit called a Connect ME made by Digi. What this bit of hardware does is give you an over-sized RJ45 plug (or wireless antenna) and built into it is an embedded OS with development kit, now your probably asking “And?”, well here’s the thing in home automation, most of it can be interfaced via serial/RS-232, which is one of the things the Connect ME has connectivity for (as well as GPOs), so that “Service Port” on the back of your TV/AV Amp may just have another use, X10 / DMX / 1-Wire are some of other protocols made accessible.

So what do you do once you’ve hacked up all of the hardware needed to control everything? Start writing the software to interface with it should be a good start, now you don’t really wanna mess this up as your going to be doing it for lots of different devices, but all with the same hardware constraints, so no nice flashy web interface for this little device, course there is, make the web front-end a back-end, make it a web service and provide an interface that uses it, across all of your home automation devices. Hook the devices up with Zeroconf and they can be auto-detected by your interface, plug and play automation, once you build it and code it.

Now I know you could setup something like this using SNMP but come on where’s the fun in that?

So I guess the title of this should have been “Serial has gone 2.0”?

Yet another private beta, this ones different form the rest I've been invited to

2008-01-29T15:12:00Z

This one is a Symbian S60 application that “pings” the web server with your location at a user-defined duration or not all (for people with horrible mobile providers that charge by the KB), it’s currently a closed beta as they’re only accepting people with GPS (internal eg. Nokia N95 or Bluetooth) until they’ve mapped more cell towers to make it useful for people without it.

Now you know what it is, heres the name Locatik and my profile (for the stalkers).

Oh the joys of ordering from UK high street shops online

2008-01-28T18:54:00Z

<rant>

I placed my order with Forbidden Planet for a Nabaztag/tag on 9/Dec/2007, the order confirmation e-mail they sent out said “Please allow 21 days from date of order before checking non arrivals.”, so on 23/Jan/2007 I e-mailed there sales team asking about the status of my order.

On the 18th of Jan I return home from work to find a DHL card on the mat, not knowing what was dispatched I log into my online banking to find that Forbidden Planet have debited my account.

Today I got an e-mail from my e-mail sent on the 23/Jan stating “I can confirm that your order is in the process of being despatched and should arrive within the next 10-14 days.”, I get the package picked up, open it and find a… Marvel 1/12th Scale Metal Statue – Wolverine clearly not what I ordered, box addressed in print to someone else, DHL sticker put on it delivering it to me.

So I’ve e-mailed them as no one answered the phone number in the sales e-mail and on the invoice asking them to sort the problem.

What I can’t understand is how a company like this can still be in business, first they don’t have stock listing on the website (something I hadn’t noticed when I placed the order), second there was no correspondence to say the order was being debited or dispatched, thirdly someone’s managed to read a woman’s name and address in the other end of the UK and affix my delivery sticker to it. Fourthly and worst of all is the fact that they don’t seem to think they’ve dispatched my order.

</rant>

OpenID for mobile use ponderings

2008-01-17T07:39:00Z

Consider this, your browsing the web on your phone with your unlimited data plan and a site requires you to register or login, whats easier to type on the phone? http://rwvhp.com or 07714110660 (my old mobile number), I know different people will prefer one over the other.

It is possible and heres how, VoIP uses ENUM and e.164 to work out the domain name from the phone number. This could also be used to work out the OpenID of the user with very little work and as far as I can tell is just as secure as OpenID as both can suffer from attacks via DNS.

I’m basically just throwing this out there to get some feedback and as a note to myself.

I almost missed it

2007-12-18T14:49:00Z

Mojo is now in a public beta, if your reading this there is a 99% probability that your in the Ruby world so if you want to get started wreaking havoc at work making all of the phones ring you can

gem install mojo

Congrats to the guys at Mojo for a great job.

The following is just to claim the blog on its new URL with Technorati by linking to my Technorati Profile