And just to continue my rambling... In the longer term, I will probably write an Android app for the lights, burgalar alarm, etc. I did knock up a quick demo that uses the Android speech recognition API to respond to voice but that's as far as I got.

I've tried to open this web page up for a while. It may or may not work (need web sockets) but if it does, you should get a "real time" view of things swiching on/off, etc. at home. The "about page" gives some details.