Reading Week
Reading week is mostly over, unfortunately. As always, it feels as though much less was accomplished than should have been. I've done a fair deal of school work, and I've made some progress on the car project, but it seems rather insignificant with all that is left. Most of the week was actually spent moving 8mm tapes to DVD, with proper editing and chapter setting. I have to say, the picture quality of the old Sony 8mm is quite superior to the new JVC DV, though the DV-cam does allow for very good live transcoding to a computer. Using the 8mm via S-Video to DV-cam to PC via FireWire, the results are far superior to all the capture cards I've seen.

I normally don't post Windows screenshots, but this one is pretty good. I normally consider it quite crucial that the operating system knows how much of a basic resource it has access to.

Today's Air Farce had a good quote: "An Amsterdam university has discovered that yawning can be considered an invitation to having sex. Now, that's pretty good. But it's even easier to wait until they're asleep."

I'm starting to get a little worried about where the car project is going, whether I have enough material to write a report about, whether what I consider project material actually is, etcetera. What worries me more is that it doesn't feel like the usual procrastination.

Project Progress and Setbacks
This reading week was to be used for completing several key phases in the Dashbox project.

An initial goal of the project was to produce a plugin or some sort of application that could communicate over OBD-II to the vehicle's CPU and extract meaningful statistics about its usage. While this is an attainable goal, my vehicle is a year too old and only contains a non-standardized OBD-I interface. This means that custom hardware would have to be built to communicate over the interface, and it would be useless to others. Therefore, this component of the project report will be more of a research area. In searching for relevant information, I came across a professor at NMSU.edu who is currently doing a project with his students whereby a USB OBD-II interface communicated via a kernel module. Also, freediag.sf.net has OBD-II tools, without a GUI. These tools would be a good candidate for existing serial port hardware.

Progress has been made on another component of the project, the relay-mouse status sensor. This plan has been modified to use a USB mouse, as it makes more sense then using a serial-USB dongle. The daemon is nearing completion, with the ability to execute and terminate programs based on button status. There is no fancy IPC, though such a facility could be implemented to communicate with the DashUI element. I cannot see any use for this, however. The software and hardware should be completed shortly.

Two software elements that should be examined over the next week or so are the high-contrast/visibility GTK theme, and the project web page. As more and more content is added, it would be good to house it somewhere. A web page could also focus the work in these final stages. There is little over a month left to complete the whole project!