Week 8

This week, I continued on the tasks I had been working on last week. Fist, I've never really learned how to correctly write shell scripts, and since I've been writing so many lately, I took some time to do a shell scripting tutorial at linuxcommand.org. This really helped, and I edited some of the scripts I've written in past weeks for better functionality. I then wrote a script to periodically log the process statistics of the running machine. This writes all the data resulting from the top command to a file at a user defined interval.

I then spent some time digging deeper into the Linux kernel to track down the event codes. I found some relatively detailed documentation about their usage, and determined that for the most part, we were correct about their usage. There are two potential problems though:

1. The EV_KEY event code is used for any key or button press. This is exactly what we want for the keyboard, but it means that this will also encode any mouse button press.

2. The EV_ABS event code records the absolute position of the mouse. This might be what we want, but there is also an event code EV_REL which encodes the relative movement of the mouse. It seems to me that EV_ABS would be a better random source for a touchscreen environment, whereas EV_REL would be better for a system with a typical mouse.

I will speak to Amir about this and determine if we should change the current version of the code.

I also spent some time trying to determine the prevalence of different hardware sensors in different machines. I am having a very difficult time finding this information though. My current thinking is that anything more than CPU temperature would be a bad source due to lack of hardware support across multiple platforms.