XTension Tales

Home Automation and Security for the Macintosh.

Big Al exposes more of the fun he's had :

I'm running system 8 on a 7200 with 32 megs, XTension and Lynx. I have not had to touch the system for 2 weeks now and I think I finally got it stabilized. Main problem I had was my own errors in scripting and once I got the scripts cleaned up XTension has not had a problem.

I had my questions as to whether I could go away for a week or two and leave the system running without some kind of backup but now I think its safe to do so.

The big problem I have is trying to do too many things in too short of a time frame and loading the buss down to the point were some of the events would collide and be missed by XTension.

My system is fairly complex, there are soil moisture sensors in the ground and I have a rain guage and between sampling the two I set my watering system.

There are PIRs throughout the house to sense room occupancy and if there is no activity for two hours they shut the house down to an unoccupied status which allows me to not worry about whether I left the coffee pot on or printers etc.

I have a xmitter in the mailbox to notify me when the mail arrives and have several scripts which cause XTension to speak things like the number of phone calls I received while I was out and any security or system problems which occurred in my absence.

The problem with speech is to have good understandable dialog you must have at least a 030 processor and the other downer is the buss time speech consumes, but it is nice to come home to " Oh your back! Whoopee! You had 3 calls and there is no mail today because its Sunday".

Well any way thats all I have to say about it, the reason I wrote this is that nobody ever puts anything in the list about how good everything does work when you finally get it right.