Moving out of the slow lane

Finally, the home computer is reborn. The failure of the main household computer has meant my free time has been spent building and commissioning it's replacement. At a time when free time itself has been hard to come by, this has meant very slow progress on Elmo.

I have managed to do some work on the configuration transport. This is all XML based and so I've written a lightweight, cross-platform XML parser which helps with passing the information around. I have incorporated this into my test server and test client applications which are both hosted on Windows and that is working well.

The next step is taking rather longer because I need to port my configuration classes across to iOS. I knew this was technically possible, but I've had to research the specific details and hash up some test code to try it all out. In the event, it turned out to be very easy to do in the end but some wrong turns and mistakes meant it took a few evenings to get the details of the solution worked out.

I am now at the stage where I am ready to start porting the configuration transport code across to the iPhone. This will need to be wrapped in an objective C++ class so that the rest of the app can talk to it. I then intend to expand on the current configuration capabilities and then start to work on the other aspects of configuration, eventually getting to the point where I can define functions based on activities rather than individual device commands. Still a way to go yet.