[tor-reports] What Nick did in November

[Nick Mathewson]

 - Griffin visited for a few days, and we talked about hidden service
   improvements.

 - I gave a lecture for 6.858 at MIT.

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIf_VZQr-dw

 - David Goulet visitd for a week. We hacked together, went over some
   code, talked about programming, and helped each other do some
   planning for sponsor R and S.

 - I wrote up a testing plan for extending the network tests we do
   with Chutney.
       [Sent to tor-dev on 30 Nov; waiting for it to show up on the archives.
        Will investigate and re-send if necessary.)

 - At long last, after lots of review and back-and-forth, I merged
   Andrea's global circuit scheduler work, which should form the basis
   of more performance network scheduling with KIST or somethign like
   it.

 - I merged a lot of fixes and investigated a lot of issues related to
   test networks and hidden services.  See the changes/* directory in
   the Tor git repository for a breakdown of these and other bugfixes.

 - Wrote a few more patches to improve Tor's performance under memory
   pressure.

 - I merged a bunch of accuracy improvements for tracking microdescriptors
   by their 256-bit digest.

 - I removed a broken fallback function that we used to use for path
   selection before we had banwidth measurements.

 - I did more hacking on my branch related to Ed25519 keys for #12498,
   proposal 220, and proposal 224.  This took me into a major
   digression involving the voting algorithm, so that authorities will
   be able to vote based on ed25519 keys.  The end result has made the
   voting algoritm more testable and flexible.

MANAGEMENT/PLANNING:

 - I accumulated a truly dazzling amount of unanswered email.

 - I started chatting with folks about fundraising ideas, HR ideas,
   project management ideas, PR ideas, etc.

 - I've tried to keep the execcom team talking at least once a week.

 - I started writing up a job description and personal/project goals
   for myself, in the theory that we should eat our own dogfood.

 - I ran a triage exercise where a bunch of us guessed at priorities for all
   the tickets, to see what we might be able to get done in 0.2.6.

FUN/PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT/OTHER:

 - I flipped out for a few days due to internet drama.

 - I started learning Rust.

 - I used some of my free time over Thanksgiving to revamp my little
   PRNG project.  The new "Libottery-lite" tries to have all the
   useful features of the original Libottery, while aiming for
   maintainability and embeddability over strict speed.

      https://github.com/nmathewson/libottery-lite

IN DECEMBER:

  - I'm meeting with the execcom team this first week, and maybe using
    extra free time to do some kind of thinking/hacking with Roger or
    Mike.

  - I hope to be meeting with Rob and Aaron.

  - I'm going to try to answer that important email you sent me.  Sorry about
    not having get to it yet.

  - I'm putting another libevent release out.

  - I'm putting a Tor alpha out.