August Updates

Hand Scanners in the News

Recently the local newspaper for Gainesville, the Alligator, printed a paper with a bunch of news about the hand scanners that are going to be implemented on campus. The main article was neutral in its depiction of the hand scanners there were 2 others stories in the paper that described the scanners in a negative light. The scanners were featured in a satiric comic showing the scanners as unnecessary invasion of privacy and also received a dart from Darts and Laurels for the same reason. Although I am flattered by the Alligator coverage of my project, they also had some errors in their perspective of the scanners. The argument that was posed was that the scanners are an unnecessary invasion of privacy. This argument is flawed because it wont be an invasion of privacy at all. What the scanners will store to make the scanners work isn't valuable personal information. The information that will be are templates of users' hands. This template is not a picture of a hand, fingerprints, or measurements; the template is a 9-byte digest derived from an image of the back of one's hand. What this means is that this template can't be reversed to obtain the image of the original hand. So in other words. it's just an arbitrary number that when paired with an id(like a ufid), can be used to make sure a person is who they say they are. To further my point, UF already keeps information more sensitive than what will be stored for the hand scanners. They have addresses, phone numbers, and pictures of all its students which is much more sensitive than a arbitrary number derived from the back of one's hand.

Hand Scanner Project Progress

The Hand Scanner project is slowly progressing and getting closer to production quality code. Hibernate is now used to persist data to the DB2 database, Maven is used to manage dependencies, and Log4J is being used to log information about the status of the Web Application. For Ajax functions the program now uses JSON instead of raw html allowing for much more control in the defining how the information for the the server is used and viewed. In addition, it allows for more separation between view and the control. So basically it makes the code a lot cleaner. One thing I want to change though is how the pages are setup at the moment. Anytime I need information from the server without using ajax it is a pain. Since everything gets redirect to one page the normal way struts2 handles the value stack is broken because the value stack is cleared on redirect so I have to use a very hackish way to get these results by placing them in the session. Also since all info is directed to one page using the back button or bookmark functionality is no longer an option. So I want to get Tiles working with the project and hopefully this solves my problems with these issues.

Course Planner and other Project Updates
CoursePlanner is about the same as it was before but I just modified it so that it works like people expect. It was also shown to the people in charge of ISIS to see if they what I did with it. I might make it a facebook app but that unlikely. As for the other projects I haven't really started on them and the djmark is looking more an more unlikely. However the airsoft turret I definitely want to create for my senior project.

Interesting Grade News
It turns out that graduation with Cum Laude will be easier than expected and I have a long shot chance of getting Magna Cum Laude. How wicked is that?