Toyota's Blackbox and OBD

I'm reading The Wall Street Journal yesterday and I see this article about an issue relating to reading the Blackbox in Toyota vehicles. Now it doesn't really say why people can't read the blackbox data but it most either be because there is no published literature on how to read the data or that the data is encrypted. I would assume the information in the blackbox is encrypted otherwise somebody would have hacked it by now. Of course there is always that privacy issue about giving out automotive data without the owners consent.

Anyway I always assumed that the data in the black box was as easy to obtain as the data on the OBD interface. Well maybe not that easy but along the same lines as reading any OBD codes as long as the user had the correct scanner, the right software and knew what the data represented. OBD supplies trouble codes from the engine indicating emission problems and other faults. [OBD Description].

So the OnBoard Diagnostics [OBD] interface has been required on US cars since 1996, or if your lived in California since 1988 ~ here's a little OBD History.While I gather the blackbox [Event Data Recorder] is that part of the system that records things like over-revving the engine, or things people would rather not tell a car dealer. Even worse that the Data Recorder could indicate that the driver was speeding just before an accident. I would still think the info is retrievable, or why record it.

In some way the blackbox data must be separate from the vehicle trouble codes that are readable as required by law. Is there one uC to handle the blackbox and another computer for the OBD interface? It was also my impression that the government was in the process of standardizing the data from the blackbox, which implies that it is retrievable.

I'm certainly no automotive expert, just an engineer that tracks the electrical requirements of different interfaces. Ok, the last time I worked on a car was in the seventies which is long before cars had computers.

Is this data available on the OBD connector, on the CANbus portion of the interface or is this a completely different interface on another connector and does it vary by manufacturer. At any rate I was just a little suppressed by the fact that it's so hard to get at the data.

The correct term for the Blackbox is Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorder [MVEDR].

New Features in Google Analytics

Following last November's post concerning new reports in Google Analytics [Google Analytics Recommended]. I just noticed another new report as a sub-heading under Visitors, for Mobile Devices and Mobile Carriers. I'm not really sure how long the reports have been available; however I did find some one's blog posting that the report came out in December. But the blog post also indicates that the 'Intelligence' reports also came out in Dec, except I found mine in Nov, so maybe it was a slow roll-out to users.

At any rate I found the report on Mobile Device users interesting because it shows the [Engineering] site getting more visits than I would have guessed coming in on cell phones. There have been 1,679 visits so far this year, say around 40 visits per day. I always figured most engineers would be sitting next to a computer no matter what they were doing. Maybe in the field there is no internet access so that leaves a wireless cell phone.

Now this number is still to low to force me to re-code for mobile users, 40 visits only amount to about 7 minutes of site usage over a 24 hour period. These days the page may be expanded or reduced on the screen, unlike a few years ago when a page had to be coded correctly to be seen on a small screen.

The sampled data from Analytics only goes back to November of 2009, but there has been an increase in phone usage over that time. Around 200 visits per week back in Nov. and around 280 per week for last month. So the trend is increasing.....

~ On a side note Internet Explorer is down another 3% this year [to date], with Google Chrome increasing by 3%.

Graphic: Google Analytics; Mobile Devices Report, by Operating Systems.

Google Buzz for Gmail

So I signed into Gmail Buzz today, looks the same to me.
But I really use Gmail for my website business so I don't do a lot of chatting.
Most of my incoming mail is from companies wanting to be listed on the web site [Buses], of course the rest are just personal emails.

Any way I didn't see a lot of new options to select from, other than to share Picasa photos or blogs...
I guess I'll have to wait till I get into a chat with someone before I can see the real changes. However the odds of me chatting with anyone are pretty slim.

I just checked my other Gmail account and that mail account is not offering me a chance to upgrade to Buzz ~ I assume this is an up-grade.

I see, Google Buzz opens up the 'social web' to Gmail, at least that's what the Google Blog says. Unfortunately I don't really use Gmail to socialize I use it as a tool to get my work done on the internet.

Note that I used the term 'Buses' to link to my web-site because [Google] Webmaster Tools indicated that this particular key word was rated a bit low in significance in key words found on my site.

Credit Card Problems

So what else is new.

I got a letter in the mail yesterday, ... your credit card information has been compromised ~ by a third party .....
Your account has been closed and we will issue you a new account number.

Well not really, I can still use the card for two weeks, but when I called the 'phone computer' it didn't recognize me as a valid account [canceled ?]. When the card company did answer the phone they gave me an account number I don't have [which would be the new one?].  I had to explain that I wanted to talk about a particular account number, which I assume was not the top message on his computer.

So we went around a bit, I wanted to know who compromised my account, and he kept telling me he was protecting me by giving me a new account number.
Ok, who compromised my account?
Well we can't give out that information, have I answered all of your questions?
No! who compromised my account? You just started a new account which will lower my credit rating, who caused that?
Well we do that for a number of reasons; fraud, mis-charging  ...... [who cares].
What ever, every time I stopped talking I got the canned speak about 'suspicious transactions' [or what ever he said].

Two minutes into the conversation I could tell that the guy was 20, but I gave him a few chances to answer my question. Of course he doesn't care if he answers my question or not as long as I answer yes to his question ~ that he answered all my questions [he asked me three times].

After a couple of minutes I gave up and told him I'd call back. I'll bet they have to tell me who accessed my account information, but I have not yet looked it up on the internet. Somebody just dinged my credit score by 30 points [guess] by making the credit card company open a new account.

At least I have a topic to blog about! It's been a week with out a posting.

Ya know they could cancel and reissue me a new account every week if no one is watching this type of activity by the card companies.

SEO Techniques that work

I must be doing something right, as last month had the highest numbers of both Unique Visitors and Visits [same person with more than one visit].

In addition to adding content and a few dozen new pages over the last few months, I have also been doing Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

As I've indicated in previous posts the SEO techniques primarily include adding 'alt' tags to pic files and 'title' tags to internal links. Many pages already had the html tags, but many pages did not have the enhancement, with some pages only having part of them. I've been making these enhancements over the last six months.

So my advice is to insure that every pic file has an 'alt' tag that describes what the picture is. In many cases a pic file also has a 'title' tag which describes the picture in greater detail. At the same time any page-to-page link also gets a 'title' tag, if it didn't already have one.

Now you could say that the increase in visits is due to content additions, or from adding new pages. However I would disagree, because although I have been adding a lot of new content, the per page content added is small. Or, much of the content added over the last six months is spread out over several hundred pages.

Secondly, the amount of new pages added over that time frame is also small, say around 61 pages in six months. Now you could say that was a great many additions to the site, but I'll try to indicate why it's not.

First off , any new page added last month [and December too] are still in the Google sand box and is irrelevant [Trimmer Resistor; random example]. Also any page added last month may not have even been completely spider-ed. So we'll forget about the 22 most recent page additions. November saw a lot of Component Package additions, pages holding gif files with little or no text ~ another 17 pages. October had a few 'How-To' additions which receive no hits to speak of ~ 8 pages. Same thing with September, just a few BJT Outline drawings which will receive zero visits ~ 4 pages. Now we're back to August, which is about the time frame that should start to matter, but again a few 'How-To' additions ~ 3 pages.

So I would discount 54 of the last 61 new pages as not adding anything to the site yet [really all of them]. I always assume 15 to 30 days before Google spiders a page. Than another 30 days before Google reads the page completely, still another 3 months after that before a page gets a Page Rank [if at all]. I'm not saying these pages aren't getting any page views just that the few dozen page views they are getting wouldn't show up as a change on the graph.

I contend that the increase in visits is due almost entirely from optimizing the pages for the search engines. Really, I've been adding pages to the site for years and I don't see any sustained increase in visits ~ but I do now. Search Engine Optimization has been the biggest change I've been making to the greatest number of pages over the last few months. The last few months are the highest for the site ever, not counting December [always a low month].

Now these 'alt' or 'title' tags also help site visitors, either by showing text if the gif doesn't come in or by providing detail if they hover over a link ~ it's win-win.

Now there is always one more point some would could make about the increase in page visits. That is the Google computer pushed this site up near the top of the search listing while another site moved to the second page. That argument could work for one month, but not for the last four months. As Google re-orders their listing every month. More importantly, we're talking about 1,600 individual pages, Google didn't push all of them to the first page!

Finally my page on Google Sites [Thermal Impedance ~ random page] is bringing in about 60 people/month, 73% of which are new to the site, word of mouth traffic? Googl Knol is bringing in yet another 60 visits per month at 57% new visitors [Component Derating ~ just a random page]. However neither of those referrals would seem to add up to the 10,000 additional visits which occurred last month, but it doesn't hurt either.

Right, we're trying to explain 20,000 new visitors, and the only thing I can say other then it is due to the SEO changes is that some how the few hundred visitors due to page additions or referrals adds into the thousands ~ I don't think so. Add the html TAGs.....

Why was my Page De-Listed

I pulled up one of my To-Do lists, sort of; add these companies to these pages [last accessed 2006].
I don't make To-Do lists any more, a few years ago I just started putting the data in an email and saving it as a draft. But I'm not blogging about the amount of data I have sitting around waiting to be added.

I checked one of the companies listed to see if it had already been added to the web site, on-site Google search indicated it had not. So I navigated to the 'manufacturers listing' to add the new company. Well guess what, the listing was there [Component Manufacturers]. So I see that the page has no Page Rank, but I can also conclude that the page will not show in Google search results [which is worse]. Although the page does exist and provides site visitors with data about the companies residing on that page, off-site users will never find the information because it will not come up in a search.
As with all pages in the Manufacturers Listing, the page has been on the web for many years. I don't understand why I can't get them listed. I do have pages pointing to them and they do get updated every now and then. I even have those pages listed in the Engineering Site-Map, but because Google uses 'no-follow' on Google Sites the link does me no good.

Although it might defeat the purpose of the page, I guess I could find some kind of text to add to the pages.
Other wise I have no way to protect the page from the computer algorithm deciding to list it or not.