Spent most of the day today fixing the remaining problems from yesterday. I got the new discovery protocol working; now the board queries the server and the server responds by broadcasting its IP address for only 10 seconds. I integrated the working code into a new autorun module, "discovery.uwi" and tested it; it works. My board at home can now find my server at home and open the various connections to it. Now I won't have to recompile the Wi-Fi script every time my home router's DHCP server assigns my home-office PC a new IP address. Yeah I know, you're probably saying, couldn't I have just set a static IP? But for some reason, that hasn't been working at home, perhaps because of my funky network configuration (I'm using an old laptop to bridge from the Ethernet network in the back half of the house to the wireless router). Anyway, it's moot now since the discovery protocol is working beautifully. And setting a static IP would have been an uglier solution anyway.
Cool, I turned Windows Firewall back on (with an appropriate exception for the DISCO port), and the discovery protocol still works.
During the rest of the evening, I am just working on documentation. The autorun script has, over the years, morphed into a massive edifice that is a nightmare to modify; it's chock-full of various coding/commenting conventions that were adopted for a little while, but were never applied uniformly throughout the entire code base. A major (but low-priority) project would be to go systematically through the whole mess documenting all of the various conventions used, and applying them uniformly everywhere in the code. That might then make it easier for me, and other developers, to make changes to the code when needed. Also, it could eventually lead to code simplifications, which might speed up the script and/or reduce code size in a way that makes room for new functionality (in case such is needed later on).
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