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Open Source Weekend - Carleton University - March 27, 2004
                       www.osw.ca
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Title:

    "Hey, You!  Turn that light Off!"
                    - or -
    Using Linux to control Home Automation (X10) Devices

Speaker:

    Ian! D. Allen - www.idallen.com
    Teacher of Unix/Linux

Where and When:

    10h00-11h00 (10am to 11am) Saturday, March 27, 2004
    Carleton University, Tory Building, Room 360
    http://www.osw.ca/schedule.php

Summary:

    Using a serial port, an X10 command interface module, and some
    software from the net, your Linux machine can talk and listen to X10
    events in your house.  You can turn on and off lights and appliances
    from a shell prompt (or via the CRON).  Add a few motion sensors and
    you can sit up in your third floor office and know what activity
    is happening in the rooms below.  Catch your teenager coming in
    at 4am with an X10 system log.  Turn off the kitchen light every
    15 minutes after midnight.  Turn on the front porch light when the
    motion sensor detects someone there.  Pop up an xmessage window on
    your display when someone steps onto the front porch.  Turn off the
    living room stereo when nobody is moving in the room.

    I will bring sample X10 hardware, and, power lines willing, will
    demonstrate how these devices work.  I will also talk a bit about the
    X10 protocol and the issues that develop when you have 10 devices all
    talking at the same time on the same house wiring with no collision
    detection mechanism.

Speaker Biography:

    Ian! D. Allen (www.idallen.com) currently has a day job as professor
    of Computer Studies at the Algonquin College Woodroffe Campus and
    a night job doing Linux system administration.  In between marking
    IBM JCL and Bourne shell scripts, he writes little Perl and shell
    scripts to automate things on his Linux desktop and does volunteer
    system administration for the National Capital FreeNet.

    He has an Honours BA in Psychology and a MMath in Computer Science
    from the University of Waterloo, where he spent most of his time
    writing, directing, and acting in amateur theatre and rewriting
    Troff and the C Shell instead of working on his BA/MMath theses.

    His first computer course was WATFIV (FORTRAN) on punch cards in 1974.
    His first email account was "idallen" on a Waterloo Honeywell 6050
    GECOS system in 1976.  He has been programming on Unix since 1976
    (V7 on a PDP-11) and the Internet since about 1981.  His first home
    computer was a VAXstation 3100 running Ultrix.  He acquired his
    first Intel computer (P166 Windows 95) in 1996 and his first Linux
    distribution (SuSE 5.2) at an OCLUG meeting a few years later.

    He is teaching 50 students in his Algonquin Linux classes this term
    via remote login to a surplus P200 with 128 MB of memory located in
    his home basement.  (The Algonquin College IT department does not
    allow faculty to run Linux servers on campus; so, the server is on
    an ADSL line at his home.)  The server is paired with a twin in a
    High-Availability cluster with rsync updates and auto-failover.

    He is married to midwife Jan Teevan and has two favourite sayings:
    (1) Less code is better code; and (2) If this were easy, everyone
    would be doing it.