Senior Seminar Study Journal
Chip Yeakey

Last updated: Monday, 09-Dec-2002 16:57:53 EST
09/02/02 Set meeting with Charlie for tuesday at 10am to discuss project.

09/03/02 Met with Charlie, will be working on reading and finding ideas that interest me.

09/08/02 Have been thinking about doing something with location aware computing. What projects can i think of for this area?

09/10/02 Met with Charlie again. Had some good ideas for places to look for info and some stuff to consider about what kind of project I could do. Could range from some to very little hardware. Possible ideas with the campus wireless stuff.

09/11/02 Work on making a project and personal web page. Not too sure what to put on project page since there is not much of a project to speak of yet.

09/16/02 More work on bibliography. Some questions: Do I only list readings I am going to use or do I list all that I am reading, even if it turns out to be not worth while? Is there a way to do a hanging indent in HTML?

09/19/02 Writing up questions for the article presentation. Computer Forensics: High-Tech Law enforcement.

09/22/02 Working with literature survey. Going pretty well and starting to narrow down ideas about a project. Need to find out what I can use as far as equipment.

09/27/02 Talk with charlie has come up with more tight ideas for a project, I need to look at a few more magazines for ideas and such.

09/30/02 Finishing up Literature survey and working on presentation. Also adding a couple more articles to my class reading set. Need to work more on some additional questions for wednesday.

10/08/02 Worked on questions for class reading set. Did more narrowing of my project with charlie. Have many ideas of how to get and use context aware data. Starting to find more ways to simply model more complex data gathering operations. Thinking of a touch pad to simulate a finger print reader.

10/15/02 Looked into keypad for use in project. I have decided on my project and am working on the project description.

10/22/02 Ordered keypad and am begining to get together the overall structure for my project. Keypad will be here tomorrow or thursday, see mary lou.

10/25/02 Keypad came in the mail today. I have started very briefly to work with getting it ready to use.

10/27/02 More work writing the project proposal. Also begining to get presentation ready.

10/30/02 Can not seem to get keypad to work on new acls, error is permission denied. The keypad will run in the e&i lab but gives me all 0s and 128s. The problem has been fixed, I talked with hassan and he made it possible for me to have access to the serial ports. The 0s and 128s are still and issue but ther is a pattern to what they show so it will jsut be a matter of findign the correct format. It may just be an int now that i think about it but i will have to check more to be totally sure.

11/01/02 I am experiencing the same loss of a reply from quark after using the sudo command. This seems like it may be a bit of a problem to talk to hassan about.

11/04/02 I am findign that I am only getting the debug printfs from teh lowest called function(get_serial_char) not from any of the calling functions like should be happening. This is an issue since it seems like I am not getting all the data I should be. I am getting an extra new line from somewhere but I can not figure out where.

11/05/02 Decided that the approach i was taking was not the correct one for getting the keyboard working since keyboards have more complex codes than I was thinking. I found some examples of how to do it that I think I can get going in the near future.

11/06/02 The code I have found has some issues in the compiler with the assembly I am trying to use in it. I am hoping to find a solution to this very soon. I am also inquiring about how teh number datatype works for the pidm in the webdb schema.

11/07/02 Got the code to compile and am trying to make sence of what i am doing at this point. It does not wait for a key stroke to take the info so I am hoping I can get it to work soon there. The Database schema is doing well and should be easy to update is neccessary but is at the moment done and online. The inserts from logins and keypad are yet to come.

11/12/02 Meeting and working with charlie to get an idea what is happening with the problems in the keypad code. For the timestamp from the last command I can just get Nov 11 00:00 and then place the year at the begining using strcat. How do I keep duplicates out?

11/13/02 Using a timestamp to keep track of when I last took the logins from a place will make it easy to not have duplicates. I need to be finding documentation on how to use SQL from other languages very soon. I have created two perl scripts that will be used to insert my data into the databse. One is insert.pl and it takes the args from the calling program and just does the insert. The other is login_get.pl and it will be getting the logins, parcing it out and getting the correct data to call insert.pl. insert.pl is done and working. Pay attention to the comments on how the values must be passed as a result of the command line using some "s up in interpreting the type of input. Work now needs to be done filling in login_get.pl

11/14/02 Try configureing the libkb stuff and installing it to find if it works. If it does, change dev/counsole to /dev/ttySo in the /src/_kblinux.h. Login_get.pl is now working well. I have gotten errors when attempting to make the libkb package. I am not sure why that is so I may need to look into the source more carefully.

11/18/02 The libkb stuff is working ok now with the kbtst program in the examples folder. I am going to now change to the serial port and see how it works. I am now waiting on hearing from the libkb guy. I am also trying to find a way to get the box name (ex. acl14) for my login gathering script.

11/19/02 login_get.pl has a problem when it calls insert.pl b/c just before the call in login the values of time are correct and just after they are not there. I am also having a problem that the program is not always performing the DELETE of the last_read record resulting in having two times for the same location.

11/21/02 login_get.pl works running under cron on acl14. I need to place it on the other machines in the near future. The keypad read is working fine reading in from the keyboard. I will have to see if the keypad will become an option or not at this point. I am now running the login_get.pl code from cron on acl1, acl4 and acl14. Many of the others will not let me in via ssh. They are all seeming to work well so all others can be setup as soon as the ssh problems are fixed. The admins showed me how to fix the ssh problem so now I am in the process of adding all machines acl0-7 and acl14. They are now up, working, and collecting data. 12/01/02 The login gathering has resulted in many error messages in email from cron. I need to find how to fix this.

12/02/02 I can use the rows variable returned from DBI to see which usernames do not return any pidm and then I can just not insert them. The rows variable may not be exactly what i am looking for since it is defince as the number of rows affected by the last change not the number of rows returned. I am beginging to write the paper and an doing fairly well, it will still take a significant portion of time at this point.

12/03/02 Using charlie's example from database class I beleve I have fixed the problem so that the number of rows will be correctly counted and the program will act accordingly. The problem seems to be fixed but it will take a few entries and testing to tell for sure. I have also gotten the keypad working on an old acl on the table in the acl lab.

12/05/02 The paper is coming along very nicely at this point. I hope to have the project mostly wraped up by next wednesday.

12/09/02 I have been working on cleaning up my directory and moving out the files that I have not ended up using or are no longer important. The presentation and paper will be my main concerns now.
All the work I have done on this project can be viewed in the srsem directory.
You can contact me at chip@cs.earlham.edu