Most of the traffic to my website appear to come from people interested in my Senior Design RFID Project that I finished back in 2008 to graduate from the University of Iowa Engineering Department.

They search fairly typical keywords: RFID, manchester, decoding, hid, hack, spoof,  125kHz or other basic parameters of RFID technology.

These key-word searches increase during the middle of the semester, when I surmise the students are scrambling to figure out how to make their OWN RFID Senior Design projects work.

It’s cool.

Recently, some guy going by sketchsk3tch on Instructables referenced my senior design project. It was VERY kind of him to add my project to his list of references, but wasn’t to happy with what he mentioned in reference to my project, stating, “School project, cool ideas, missing some details though.”

Missing some details? Like what? The entire schematic is up on that page! What more does this guy need?

Which brought me to another issue: Why didn’t he ask me for those missing details? Because, I would not have provided the REAL missing piece: The Arduino Code. Yeah, he would have “stolen” the Arduino code (the Java-like code that instructs the Atmega168 PIC we used for the project). Well, maybe he wouldn’t have “stolen” it, but I’m confident any bits he used would NOT have been attributed properly.

…and that is precisely the reason the entire RFID project is NOT up on my website. I hate leachers. Period.

As much attention my Senior Design Project seems to get from across the globe, I refrain from providing some of the critical pieces to make the entire project work. It’s self preservation.

So, to those seriously interested in my project, skim through my website and have fun. It’s for the community to enjoy. Ask me questions! I’ll answer, but don’t be surprised if I make you work at it. How else are you really going to learn?

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a chat-bot that acts much more than a simple echo server. With the plethora of Instant Message clients on the market (Yahoo, AIM, GTalk, Pidgin, Adium, etc.), it was difficult to determine which IM client suited my needs. First, the client needed to be available across several platforms (Windows, Windows Mobile 6, Linux, OS X). Second, their needed be an existing publicly available API in order to write the chat-bot code. Third, it was imperative that the API was actively being deployed and developed. Why mess around with an IM client that nobody was using?

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For my University of Iowa Intermedia I class, I have been determining exactly what my final project will be. After attending several lectures, I have decided that my final presentation will have SOMETHING to do with Processing 1.0 [Beta].

For those that don’t know much about programming languages or art, Processing 1.0 is a visual designers dream… especially if programming is not your bag. In a nut shell, Processing 1.0 is a Java overlay. Think of all the visual classes or objects you wanted to design, but simply didn’t have the time. You slugged your way through the incredibly difficult task of creating Java screensavers and GUI interfaces, all the while saying to yourself, “Man, there has to be a better way.”

Well, along come some brilliant people at MIT who loved Java’s object oriented programming style and write-once methodology, but were more interested in creating visually stunning objects and classes. But, like you, thought Java sucked in that regard.

I am currently reading Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists.

It’s a good read and wonderful tutorial for those interested in both graphic arts and computer science.

Check it out.

It must have been a freak of nature or a massive aligning of the planets that allowed my University of Iowa Spring Break to coincide with my kids school break. But nevertheless, it did happen and my kids and I were allowed a weeks worth of chilling around my parents house for seven days.

As usual, it was a fairly relaxed week in Van Horne. This was a particularly different Spring Break, as we were getting accustomed to the new life my Mom and step-father, Larry, are getting used to themselves following Mom’s release from the University of Iowa Hospitals.

Haley did what she does best: bake. Not only did she mix together a wonderful pan of brownies, but she slapped together a batch of chocolate chip cookies that barely made it through the night without being entirely consumed. I spent a considerable amount of time in front of my PowerBook G4 laptop; programming a Java-based peer-2-peer Chord network simulator. What? Yeah. I’m a geek. Ask me about it later.

The week ended with the kids and I hooking up with the gaming friends (including Brian and Danuuc) of mine at Gamerz in Cedar Rapids. As has been typical since last October, the night was spent fragging our beloved friends in an all-out competition of Battlefield 2. I’m not sure why we like this particular game so much. Perhaps, it’s the right mix of pace and patience. It’s not the ‘twitch’ game that Unreal Tournament is, and not as mind-numbing as multi-player Quake 3 can be.

Jared held his own, switching teams more often than I switch subjects in the middle of a sentence. Well, that’s an overstatement. As the night wore to a close, both Jared and Haley teamed up with me against a more experienced three-person team. We did just fine as far as I am concerned. Apparently, my daughter is a veteran of Gears of War, so her ‘Medic’ persona worked well with my ‘Support’ and Jared’s ‘Sniper’ perfection.

Now if I can only get a job that pays well enough to fortify a basement full of gaming PC consoles.

We can only hope.

Integrating mySQL with Java Servlets is tedious, but at least the GUI is easier to derive. Looks like it works OK, but there are still some java stuff I keep forgetting:

1. Converting String to an Int -> Integer.parseInt(str); OR new Integer(str).intValue(); OR Integer.valueOf(str).intValue();
2. String to byte[] -> str.getBytes();
3. byte[] to String -> str.getBytes();
4. int to String -> Integer.toStrin(n); OR “” + n;
5. Integer to int -> num.intValue();
6. String to char[] -> str.toCharArray();
7. char[] to String -> new String(ca,0,ca.length);

Ugh. Now, I’m calling it a day.

The current Web Programming project is integrating mySQL with a Java Servlet front-end. This is fine, especially since current Java GUI’s are difficult to create. Doing this through a web page makes MUCH more sense. However, I can’t use cookies to hold some of my session data because my data occasionally contains characters that cookies don’t want me to use. I suppose I could chuck data back and forth using hidden text fields, but I have yet to determine how to parse through more than one hidden field. I don’t want to use instance variables in my java code, because that means I’ll run into problems if MORE THAN ONE client attaches to mySQL (i.e. synchronization issues).

Well. It’s finally up and running. It did take some time with tossing hidden fields back and forth. Actually, the java language has some good hooks that I wasn’t aware of. Nice.