[tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - May 2015

[Damian Johnson]

Squirrels! Five newborn squirrels are in our tree! And they... oh right, code.
Talk about code, Damian, like a professional.

... awww, but damn they're cute.

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Stem Release 1.4.1
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Though not as adorable as baby squirrels the new release of Stem is still
pretty sweet. Ephemeral hidden services, substantially faster descriptor
parsing, and a host of other improvements can all be yours with a simple
upgrade!

  https://blog.torproject.org/blog/stem-release-14

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Nyx Log Panel Rewrite
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No, Nyx isn't done but its log panel is! This is the third major curses
component to be rewritten, and I'm delighted to say it now sucks less!

How did it suck, you ask? Though casual users may not have noticed arm had
a laughably inefficient O(n^3) approach to log deduplication. This was in
fact so terrible arm simply turned off deduplication when it started
bogging down the system too much.

This is just one of they myriad of improvements, but in Nyx deduplication
is O(n^2) and can easily be made linear (... though fuzzy matching makes
this grosser than I'd like so first seeing if further improvement is
warranted).

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Few other noteworthy things were...

* Thanks to DonnchaC Stem's tor message parsing is now a dramatic 300x faster
  when using python3!

  https://github.com/DonnchaC/stem/pull/1

* Wrote a simple bandwidth scanner to exemplify manual circuit construction
  for our tutorials...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/to_russia_with_love.html#custom-path-selection

* Sambuddha both made our tutorial examples downloadable (#10411) and more
  easily testable (#16191)!

Cheers! -Damian