Status

It appears that Matt is going to try to pull a few strings to see if he can get us the access we wanted for the card. In the mean time, we have apparently received copies of the databases to begin working on the coding end of the project. This week I hope that we can get started on it. Carlos suggested dividing up the work at this point, and I think that is probably a good idea to explore. We are going to find out that we all have our strong points and weak points, and we will need to work as a team to complete the project.

Abandon ID Idea

Recently, Mike and I agreed on giving up in student ID idea on Friday after our class. We considered that focusing in the fingerprint idea would be better. There are several statements as to why we decided this. First of all, it seems that we are not progressing. We have to wait to get permission, knock on doors, get shut down, and open new doors. It seems like a never ending cycle. We all want to get hands on design and actually start building something or at least get the basic principles of our project. We still are not able to do this because we didn’t know if we were going to be able to use the student IDs or not. Hopefully, as we change route to the fingerprint idea, everything is going to fall in its right place, and we will be able to start the actual design and implementation of the software and hardware we are going to use such as: the fingerprint scanner, database, which Eric is in the process of giving it to us, and the actual requirements of our project.

Progression

Things seem to be progressing steadily. However, I have been a little concerned that they were not progressing quickly enough. I now believe they are. I have a tendency sometimes to worry to much. We are likely going to abandon the campus id card plan, and use another more accomodating technology; biometric fingerprint id.

Our timeline is beginning to take shape, and once it is done, we will have completed the planning phase for the most part. At this point, we will be able to move completely and confidently toward an execution phase.

I am excited to see how things shake out in the next few weeks.

Michael Link

So far it seems like we are making progress on the first phase of our project. The bookstore scanner is a fully formed idea but some security and privacy concerns stand in our way. Our main goal is automation.
Eric Lorenz is the IUB Bookstore manager and he agreed with us that keeping the process easily transparent and quick is a must. He has in his possession two tables. The first table has a list of student's University ID's as the primary key. The other attribute of interest is a the list of classes each UID is registered in. The second table has class sections as the primary key and the corresponding books required for that section. So to visualize things easily:

Table 1: UID | CLASSES

Table 2: CLASS SECTION | REQUIRED TEXTS

The main problem is that the student ID cards do not contain the UID anywhere including the barcode and the magnetic strip. To combat this we're probably going to implement an opt-in system, either immediately at the kiosk itself or through oncourse/onestart. Once students register they are set for the life of their student ID card or until their fingers fall off...
Tomorrow Carlos and I are meeting with Steven Gooley, an associate at Campus Card Services to determine our options without violating any terms and agreements the card imposes.