Network Nastiness

It's been very quiet on Elmo recently.
Despite my previous post it's still been difficult getting time to work on it. This hasn't been helped by long, hard days at work which make it more difficult to spend a few hours working on yet more computers in the evening.
However, when I have been able to spend time on Elmo, I've spent a lot of it rather stuck with some network problems. My problem manifested itself when I started to transfer larger amounts of data for m configuration management. It seemed that small numbers of characters were trouble free but anything over a few hundred would cause problems.
Eventually I traced the problem to packetisation - where the transport was splitting things into smaller packets - and so implemented some code to cope with this - rather poorly as it turned out. It took me a week to track down the problems in the packeting code, but once I did I had a reliable transport.
I can now transfer my configuration files from the Elmo server onto the iPhone app and have started to use my homegrown XML parser to pull the information out of these files. This is requiring a fair bit of refactoring of code but it's progressing quite well.
When I finish this part of the work, all the control layouts will be held on the server rather than the iPhone - which is a far more flexible solution.
Next step is to rework the view control render code to pull data from the configuration file.