[tor-reports] Karsten's June 2014

[Karsten Loesing]

[Adapting Nick's idea of sending this report a few days early.  There
won't be much to report from this weekend or the first day of the dev
meeting anyway.]

Spun off the directory-archive part from the metrics website.
Descriptor tarballs and recently publish descriptors are now available
on a new website [0] as announced on tor-dev@ [1].

Held weekly meetings with Kelley and Colin to discuss the Sponsor O
documentation deliverable.  Also talked to Arlo about Tor Messenger and
to Griffin about point-click-publish hidden services, both of which
being Sponsor O deliverables.

Fixed a bug in Onionoo where it didn't include bridge pool assignments
(#12203).

Improved the script [2] that provides statistics for EFF's Tor Relay
Challenge [3].

Started adding two new graphs to Onionoo, namely advertised bandwidth
and consensus weight (#11388).  These graphs will contain absolute
numbers, not fractions of network totals.  Providing these graphs
requires re-processing the whole descriptor archive since 2007, which is
currently running on EC2 in its third week.  After a week of processing,
found and fixed a bug in compressing older graph histories.  The new
graphs should be available in two weeks from now.

Visualized Kelley's and Colin's documentation overview to better
understand what might be missing or redundant.  Added to the wiki page
[4] only yesterday, after discussing internally.

Shut down the relay-search service and cleaned up the metrics-website
database schema [5].  The result is that the database now has a size of
3 GiB, after 95 GiB before, and the cronjobs to update graph data are
now running within minutes rather than hours.

Tweaked the descriptor-parsing library metrics-lib to use less memory
with the help of jvisualvm.

Held a few weekly Tor Weather meetings [6], attended a few run by
meejah, missed a few.

Drafted guidelines for developing services to be run on Tor machines [7].

Wrote a few entries for the Tor Weekly News section "Easy development
tasks to get involved with" [8], and recently got feedback from two
volunteers actually submitting patches based on tasks highlighted there.

Restructured navigation on the metrics website and rewrote its
index.html [9].  I'm applying Bootstrap CSS [10] and Font Awesome [11]
in parallel to this rewrite, but I want to have the content done before
committing anything design-related.  I'm also secretly hoping to discuss
the design with a nice web developer at the Paris meeting next week.

[0] https://collector.torproject.org/
[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-June/006942.html
[2] https://github.com/kloesing/challenger
[3] https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/
[4]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/DocumentationList#TorDocumentationMap
[5] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-June/007007.html
[6]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/weather-in-2014#Meetings
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/operations/Guidelines
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews/BugsToPlug
[9] https://metrics.torproject.org/
[10] http://getbootstrap.com/css/
[11] http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/