Journal - Week 6

::: Day 1 - Monday 07/11/05 :::

 Today has been one of the hardest, busiest, and most rewarding days of this internship. I went at 9am sharp, left a 5am, had 30min break. All I did was read documentation on RFIDs which is radio frequency identifiers. They are like barcodes that can be scanned wirelessly from a distance; they can be programmed to contain certain data.

Basically, I was handed a CD with docs, a tech report of 72 pages, including over 50 pages of code. I read and read, looked a code, numbers, commands...it was hard. At the beginning I had no idea what was going on, it was not only different 'language' but also a completely different way of programming. After all I was not writing for computers but for tiny RFID tag.

It was great learning experience and at the end of the day I knew more about this technology than Vinod and it really made me feel good; my time was worth every minute.

Tonight I am tired but very happy.

::: Day 2 - Tuesday 07/12/05 :::

This morning a spent an hour working on my mid-internship report for Mt. Holyoke College. I had to fill out some forms and to type up a summary of the interviews with Vinod and Prof. Gao. I wrote down some thoughts I had and talked about the info I have received up until now about grad school and so on.

For the rest of the day I worked on the JAVA code for the Radio Frequency Identifiers. I plugged in the reader through a serial port to my PC and was able to scan some tags. Unfortunately I didn't have so much success with the code. I am still looking at some preexisting code and trying to modify it so it fits my purpose. And what is my purpose, you may ask. It is to be able to scan a tag (like a barcode) and get back its manufacturer number. 

Vinod and I felt we made some good progress today because it was only day two of our RFID adventure and we saw some results.

I had lunch with Natalie; at night I prepared dinner in my dorm and watched some TV. 

Everything is going well with the internship and I am very happy with what I have learned so far.

I wish I could get paid soon because my credit card has it's limit and I already have a negative balance on my checking account. Blah!

::: Day 3 - Wednesday - 07/13/05  :::

I went to work at 9:15am, glanced over the news (including Bulgarian new which have been pretty interesting recently) and started work. The plan for today was to work with the Java code for the RFID tags. I played a little with my code which unfortunately was not working; then I went back to the existing code and manipulated it. Next: success!!! I was able to run a program that goes in a loop and endlessly checks for tags. If a tag is detected, its tag ID is displayed. 

Even though the initial step was completed and working I still had some questions about the way the commands to the tag reader are formed. I looked some more into the documentation and was finally able to understand the meaning of every byte sent to the reader.

Vinod suggested that I write a short document about the format of a reader request. I worked on this for a little over an hour; it turned pretty nice - I included graphs and so on.

Next I had to work on creating a request that writes data to the tag. Vinod and I have discussed already that it is important to be able to read from and write to tags because this is what distinguishes them from barcodes - RFID tags can be programmed with user data.

I work on the writeTag function the rest of the day. There were some problems and Vinod and I sat together looking into different code, documentation, and utilities, but finally at 4:45pm we were able to write data to one tag. 1337 1337 - that's what block no.1 of the tags memory had!

It was a hard day - very tiring, but rewarding at the end. Before I left work I wrote down what things I have to accomplish tomorrow.

After work I talked to my mom and Matt. Now I am headed to dinner (I skipped lunch today). 

Oh, how could I forget... I got a word from DMP and they are going to mail my paycheck tomorrow, which means I will get them next Thu when Matt comes to see me. I am ecstatic about it though. It was finally time I get my pay!!!!

::: Day 4 - Thursday - 07/14/05 :::

Instead of working directly with the RFID system, today I concentrated on some programming. Vinod and I decided that it will be good if we have out own custom code that would create the commands that are send to the RF reader.

The code that I worked on all day had to include possibilities to set the different flags, choose the command, enter the tagID, and so on. In addition I will have to implement my own method that calculates a CRC (cyclic redundancy check).

So I spent my entire day working on this coding assignment. I couldn't shake off the feeling that things will go very wrong at some point. The code was getting messier and just in general, I didn't trust it. Funny thing to say, seeing that it was my own code.

I didn't even get to work on the CRC part because I was too busy manipulating string and converting them to binary and then to hex and then to bytes and .... it was all a big mess.

At night I went to Amherst to meet Matt at the bus stop. We went to Bertucci's for the best pizza in town.

::: Day 5 - Friday 07/15/05 :::

I spent most of the morning researching the whole CRC issue and looking for a way to implement my code. I tried couple different ways but none of them worked. I also ran into other problems in the code. As I had said yesterday, this code was turning into a disaster. I talked to Vinod and he said if I can't figure it all out by 5 he will look over the code during the weekend.

In the afternoon I worked more on the code and seemed to have some progress; if not with the code, at least with understanding of what is it that's going wrong. I will be continuing work on this on Monday.

At night Matt and I headed to the mall. We say the Wedding Crashers, which was a good AND R-rated movie. It's just so rare to see a R movie that doesn't have dead bodies, monsters, etc. 

::: Day 6 - Saturday 07/16/05 :::

Matt and I went to downtown Amherst for lunch and then walked around a little. On our way back we stopped by the lake at UMASS to see out friends the ducks. There are a couple of new baby ducks so we really enjoyed watching them play and jump around in the water.

It turned out there was some photo conference at UMASS so there were a lot of people with they cameras and flashes taking pictures around the lake. To our dismay they were NOT taking pictures of any part of the beautiful nature surrounding us. They were too busy taking pictures of 20-year-old blondes in bathing suites. At the time I was very enraged, but now I only have a couple of words to say: no surprise, this is only proof of  how pathetic, miserable, and truly ugly humans have turned to be; if I were one of those photographers I would be ashamed to come to a beautiful place like the lake area and take pictures of naked brainless bimbos; but then again, you can't expect much from a bunch of phonies and materialistic idiots; I guess nature is left to a few who can still appreciate real beauty.

::: Day 7 - Sunday 07/17/05 :::

Today I did almost nothing. I took the time to myself to sleep in, rest, read the news, watch a movie, etc. I did read a research paper (Turduken, for more info go to Sami's page in the links section). 

At night I had some Family Guy fun and a good dinner.

::: Week 1 ::: Week 2 ::: Week 3 ::: Week 4 ::: Week 5 ::: 

::: Week 6 ::: Week 7 ::: Week 8 ::: Week 9 ::: Week 10 :::

::: home ::: about me ::: mentors ::: journal ::: report ::: links :::

Maria Kazandjieva - makazand@mtholyoke.edu - last update: 07/18/05