Passing information to other processes/objects?

[Aaron J Reichow]

I'm writing a little script to control some christmas lights using X10,
with a CGI interface.  The script would be calling bottlerocket with
various parameters, using looping, to create, say, a fade in and out 
effect.

What I need is the CGI script to pass the parameters to the program which
control bottlerocket.  How could I go about doing this?  I thought about
implementing a simple server which would listen on some port for the
commands, but that seems like too much work.  Or, the CGI script would
kill the previous control script and run a new one with new parameters,
but that seems like it'd be quite awkward and maybe a bit slow. 

Anyone have any ideas?  Any way to pass variables to an already running
process?

Aaron