Sanity's Journal: and in other news...

I have found myself being increasingly creative over the past few months, and have been working on a number of diverse projects - many of them a product of me setting a task for myself over a weekend and seeing how far I can get.

Unfortunately, my motivation seems to dissipate when it comes to tidying these things up and making them available to other people. Here's a quick list of a couple of these projects:

• Whisper
  This is basically an instant messaging application where all communication is encrypted, and an IRC server is used as the back end. The idea is to allow people to communicate secure in the knowledge that nobody's eavesdropping on their conversation. Users are authenticated using PGP-style fingerprints to prevent "man in the middle" attacks, and the communications channel is encrypted using AES. There is other software out there which does this, but typically it is unpolished, difficult to use, and require mucking around with NATs and firewalls as they require direct connections between clients. By using the IRC server network as the back end, Whisper can pretty much work out-of-the-box without any complex network configuration.
  Implementation language: C#
  State of completion: Crypto all works, UI is more or less there, some minor superficial bugs still need to be worked out.
• WebQuest
  This is an attempt to improve on existing Web search engines by allowing the user to give feedback on the accuracy of search results and then re-search on that basis. The user interface is very simple, it looks much like Google, except for each search results you can indicate whether it is good or bad. It isn't doing any kind of global collaborative filtering so it can't be spammed, all feedback is local to the user's search "session". WebQuest employs some clever statistical analysis to achieve this by adding and removing search terms from the search request that goes to Google.
  Implemetation language: PHP + Java
  State of completion: Working, UI needs to be prettier, core algorithm could benefit from some tweaking
  Try it out: You can sometimes find my development version online here, will upload to a proper web server soon.
• Kanzi
  This is a joint project I did with Scott Miller around October of last year. The idea was to allow a web developer to make a modification to one web page, and have the same modification automatically made to a bunch of other web pages. The core of this involved creating an XML diff and merge algorithm which I suspect is more sophisticated than any of the current commercial offerings (such as that provided by IBM).
  Implemetation language: Java
  State of completion: Done, we made it available as shareware last year but have agreed to Open Source it as soon as either of us have sufficient time.
  Try it out: You can get the shareware version here, will make it all available as open source as soon as I find the motivation
• Stickler
  This was a quick hack which Scott and I put together to crawl web pages and alert the authors of those pages to broken links.
  Implemetation language: Java
  State of completion: Done, gathering dust.
• Locutus
  This is perhaps the most significant project I've been working on, the concept is mine but most of the implementation has been done by my brother, Andrew, who lives in the Republic of Ireland. In essence it is a peer-to-peer search tool which allows users to search for documents on the hard disks of other people within their organization. Locutus incorporates a strong security model to allow you strict control over who can search what files on your computer. It also incorporates sophisticated spam detection capabilities.
  Implemetation language: C#
  State of completion: Beta, 1.0 release soon
  Try it out: here
• NGRouting
  This is a fundamental reworking of the core of Freenet's routing algorithm. In short, it allows Freenet nodes to much more effectively exploit the data available to them when making routing decisions. A Freenet node will calculate, based on past experience, which other Freenet node is most likely to retrieve the data that is being requested in the shortest amount of time. This is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the current technique which simply routes a message to whichever node is known to have data close to what is being requested. Further, since actual routing time is taken into account, the Freenet network should adapt to the real world network topology. I have yet to do a detailed writeup, but for the moment you can learn more here.
  State of completion: the core of the code for this is complete and tested but it will be several weeks before it is integrated into Freenet proper.

In addition to these projects we've also been working on something that I'm not at liberty to talk about right now, suffice to say that it's pretty exciting and it pays the rent ;-)

Phew - I am getting tired just thinking about it...

webquest

[rkz]

i just tired it out with the term "wet teens" and got a good set of results!! wow you are going to end up working for google soon I know it, you are god of search engines, you have succeded where others have failed!

Re:webquest

[HanzoSan]

your Whisper sounds exactly like Waste. Interesting, maybe you'll give more details on it and how it compares?