May was a beautiful, chaotic haze that began with the GSoC acceptance fallout…
- blog posting
- acceptance introductions
- last minute coordination to get a student for the EFF
- adding proposals, mirrors, and minor template additions for next year’s GSoC
- git repository and ldap discussions
… and somehow ended with me as the mentor (or co-mentor) for five students. Karsten, Norman, and I will be mentoring three students from Wesleyan college to work on a Django rewrite of the TorStatus site. I only have a little prior experience with Django so a good portion of this month was spent reading the Django book to get up to speed (only got to chapter ten – I’m a horribly slow reader).
Meanwhile Kamran Khan has been hacking on the arm codebase, finishing his first week with a functional menus prototype. The implementation details turned out to be trickier than I’d anticipated and will need more polish, but my hat’s off to him for being able to dive into a completely new codebase and develop such a substantial contribution in so little time (thanks, Kamran!). For more on this see Kamran’s blog.
The fifth student is ‘identity’ from irc. He’s doing his thesis on arm, writing both a paper on its future plans and implementing a minor feature (NEWNYM functionality). He, Kamran, and I will be having periodic sync-ups via Mumble to discuss their projects and issues they run into. If this is successful I’ll suggest it to the Wesleyan students too.
Besides all of this, I’m also keeping an interested eye on Julien’s Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit. I did a code review for an initial bit he implemented and might do more if I both have the time and he wants the help.
In terms of arm development, I finished a complete rewrite of the codebase that’s been almost a year in the works. Besides being a far saner implementation, this paves the way for the further performance enhancements and features discussed on its wiki. /me is still not quite done doing his happy dance about this
Other interesting developments include…
- arm’s now able to rename its process name (thanks to help from Jake)
- added unicode printing support (thanks to Robert for the idea)
- backported to Debian Squeeze by Dererk
- is almost backported for Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick thanks to Wendy, Kamran, and Evan Broder