Controlled Crashes…
… are something nice. There was an interesting problem with Nitro when connecting to a Windows 2000 machine, causing an immediate crash. This was easy to reproduce and catch with Hammer. The problem was an IAP query frame sent to the Newton after successful connection. It seems that the lower levels of the Newton’s IrDA stack can’t handle this. The IAP frame was sent because the IrDA stack on Windows 2000 constantly sends out active connection requests which of course contain these frames. If the Newton also initiates a connection, then there is a chance that these frames get received at the wrong time in the protocol.
The solution is to defuse the stray IAP frame and turn it into a innocent IAP acknowledgement frame. I’ve still got to test this further but it doesn’t seem to cause any damage. The result is uploaded as version 0.1.2. It would be nice if people who encountered crashes upon connection could try if it helps.
Version 0.1.2 also contains code to connect to other peer classes such as OBEX or IrLPT. This is based on the connection options passed to the NewtonScript endpoint. Nitro Test demonstrates this feature.