Slow Development

Things have been slow in the last two months.

What’s going on? A lot.

Well, lots of things happened. Let’s go in order.

During November I was organizing the Open Source Day in Udine (IT), an event with more than a thousand people – And when I say that I was organizing it, it really close to the truth as I only had two other people to rely on. Lots of people helped, although mostly only during the last day.

Things got stressful, but the day went well (except for the camera guys: we couldn’t record anything as they had some problems, but they tried their best). Not much time for Fenrir tough.

Then December came, and I had to prepare for the 31C3. It was awesome, I was in a self-organized session with the “WeFixTheNet” guys. Maybe less people than the previous year partecipated to the session, but it was interesting nonetheless.

Man, I think I’ll go there every year, the ball pit was awesome :P

Anyway, I only had to prepare a 1h talk, but I was so stressed out I could not work more than a couple of hours a day, although I slept almost 11 hours a night… Stress can do funny things to you.

I got better, and now I’m working to implement and then integrate something nice for Fenrir: RaptorQ.

I had to choose a project for an exam, and I’m trying to implement this Forward Error Correcting mechanism, so that Fenrir might be able to rebuild whole lost packets without much overhead.

The implementation will be LGPL3, I’m reading different documents and the RFC6330 (a seriously badly written RFC) to implement it (always in C++ of course). It doesn’t look very easy, so it might take me a couple of weeks (I hope).

There already is a Java implementation, But java is slow, doesn’t play nicely with C++, and I really dislike a lot of their choices, like the “NotInventedHere” syndrome, and the enormous amount of code (~33k in /src/main?), which comes also from having a (old, unmaintained) fork of the la4j project in the source tree. Really, I couldn’t use the project even if I tried. A pity.

Anyway, I’m working on this project, Fenrir will benefit from it, so stay tuned.

Last good news – I might have convinced an other developer to join me, but he has an other job for a couple of more months. But I’m optimistic :)

–Luker