Can’t Someone Else Do It (CSEDI)

CSEDI is a remote download engine. The aim of this software is primarily to control the download activity of a remote computer. This would give the user the ability to surf the net just about anywhere but have all files they download done remotely on their computer at home. There are two major motivations behind this project; the first is my absolute hatred for having to leave my computer on overnight while it’s download files, when I could easily have my flatmates computer doing it in another room. The second is surfing the web at uni costs money where as my Internet connection at home is free, it would be nice if I could choose to download files at uni or at home depending on the situation at hand, not on my current location. As well as being a remote download agent the application should either provide scheduling and connection management to increase efficiency of bandwidth usage or allow interfacing with a third party product to provide this.

One of the major issues I have with a lot of software today is it almost never allows for the possibility that you may be operating on more than one computer at a time. This is a concept that is often overlooked, although physically you may only be in one place at a time, there is no good reason why this should apply to computer systems. This project is my first step into a suite of middle ware s tyle programs to allow a user to truly harness the resources available to them (if you have access to 5 different computer systems wouldn’t it be nice if you could utilize all of them at once in a sensible and efficient manner regardless of physical location).

Areas of Future Development

• Integrated Server/client package
• Web access to server through inbuilt web server or java applications
• Transparency to user
• Selectable transfer of file to client computer when download is complete (LAN only)
• Auto monitoring of clipboard and applications
• Possible low-level network integration and TCP/IP monitoring
• Support for operation through firewalls and proxies
• Client access and control of file que
• User authentication, security levels

Current Status

Simple client and server prototypes have been created to test the major concepts behind this idea. The tests have been very successful and now focus is on developing the underlying protocol to be used. This project is likely to be developed to run on as many systems as possible i.e. Linux, Mac and Windows. A lot of the work being done in developing Autopilot, Assimilator and Check Mail will come in handy here.