Apologies for being the absolute last wrap-up! This year went really well, we had 5 students, and they all (more or less) deserved their passes. We had a much stronger selection process than in the first 2 years, requiring some demonstration in the form of code: a new feature or a bugfix. So even though most of the students were completely new to us, mostly they did pretty well. One of our students had a work conflict, but this was resolved satisfactorily.
For the Googlers reading this, Freenet is an anonymous peer to peer system with support for forums, browsing the internal web, filesharing etc, with a focus on security and the option of running in "darknet" or friend-to-friend mode. It is intended (at least by me) for people in hostile environments (China, Iran etc) to express themselves freely, but it is currently mostly used in the West by geeks, filesharers, etc. infinity0 and mikeb worked together on a new searching plugin, which we have now deployed. infinity0's work was primarily on a new index format (which works, but the spider needs more work), and on distributed indexing (which doesn't yet), and mikeb mainly worked on improving the user interface and adding essential features (simple non-infringing page ranking algorithm, booleans, phrase matches etc). kurmi worked on new filtering code for various formats, particularly a vastly improved CSS filter, which needed considerable work to sort out all the parsing perversities but is now merged (Freenet has to be very careful not to send anything to the browser that might give the user's IP away via a web-bug). ljb worked on more friend-to-friend functionality, his work is included in current builds. sashee worked on making the web interface more dynamic, including solving a long-running problem with image loading blocking the browser (freenet has quite high latency!), using Google Web Toolkit; this branch has not yet been merged, but hopefully will be inside the next 6 months or so, it needs some tuning and debugging for slow browsers. Some of our students achieved less than expected IMHO but in more cases there was a lot more work involved in the project than I expected, and the students did really well. I have talked to most of them in the last month, well after the programme was finished, and hopefully some of them will continue to contribute at least occasionally. Best year yet, many thanks to Google! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20091031/588c94e5/attachment.pgp>
