It’s past 5 AM. Today I dedicated quite a bit of time to DSharingu (still old release). I finally got some interaction going. The screenshot shows the view that I have of the home server on the PC in my bedroom. I launched Firefox remotely and browsed around.
It took me some time to get to the right function.. SendInput(). Once I found out about it, it wasn’t too hard to use it. However there is still a problem: when interacting with the remote DSharingu window, the remote instance locks !
I think that it’s probably due to the fact that the main loop receives input event remote messages synchronously. So, I tried to relocate the network message input system from the synchronous main loop, into a separate thread. That should solve it, but I’m still not done. I really want to use multi-thread only for those messages that need it, the simulated input messages.
Compression needs more work. I have some interesting ideas, but right now, I want to focus on basic features… optimizations can wait.
I also modified my windowing system. I no longer simulate sub-windows (like the translucent shell frame form the previous version). Every sub-window is now an actual Windows’ child window. This saves me a lot of work… I like to do some basic wrapping, but it’s too easy to fall into the trap of wanting to write a whole sub-OS. Right now, I just need to get things done !
Thanks to my friends in Italy (Jag and Rasty !), my family is getting back to wireless Internet use. Now, more than ever, I need this remote administration thing. Once all features are up (no self-locking and keyboard input), and once things are optimized for the right bandwidth, I should be able to remotely show and fix things !
The program as it is now, will allow me to accept connections, because I have full access to network ports at home.. however, this may not work in the office, where I’ll be firewalled like my parents are.. both can call out, but neither can accept a call 8(
For cases like that one, I plan (hopefully with some help !) to convert DSharingu to work as a Skype plug-in. Skype is very flexible, making it easy to transfer data without having to worry about firewalls.
We’ll see !
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Posted by Davide Pasca in Image-processing, Programming