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You can view the weekly and overall statistics for this page here (or here if your browser is not tables-capable).![[CD Control Panel Image]](http://www.orl.co.uk/~jbpn/cdpanel.gif)
My PC is running a server written using omniORB2, a fast, free CORBA compliant Object Request Broker (ORB) which provides a simple way to write cross-platform client-server applications using distributed object technology. This server exports an interface which allows clients to control the CD-ROM drive in the PC when it contains an audio CD. By connecting the output from the CD-ROM drive to an Audio SAM we have a networked CD player which can accept commands to play, stop et cetera from any other networked computer and can deliver full-quality audio output from the CD player to any point on our ATM network. Alternatively, by compressing the audio, it can be sent over the Internet to any audio-enabled web browser. Using information from Active Badges, the system can tell which room a person is in, and thus their personal audio environment can be made to follow them around the building. One day all consumer electronic appliances will be built this way.
The picture above shows the panel which can be used to control the CD player. This application was written in Tcl/Tk using some tools developed in-house to integrate Tcl and our own locally written ORB. Together these provide a very powerful development environment, the testing of which was the real motivation behind this little application.
The CD player is controllable via the Web (and also via SMS messages sent from a GSM phone, rather usefully) but it's, like, really stressful when random surfers mess with my vibes, so instead I have decided just to let you see which disc is currently loaded. If the title and artist are both "Unknown" then either there is no disc loaded, it is a data disc, or it is not in the xmcd database (which is used to look up disc titles). Other strange messages probably indicate that the server is not running. You can reload this page to update the text below.
You can look here to see if anyone is in this office (R209), using the Active Badge system.
You can view the weekly and overall statistics for this page here (or here if your browser is not tables-capable).
The source code is here.
You can go back to my home page or look at another interesting service provided using CORBA technology.
Page generated on Sun Feb 22 08:17:46 GMT 1998 (local time).