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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 03:45:35 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Rafael's weekly report #13

Rafael,

I haven't heard from you since your message below.  It's been 4+ days.
You were supposed to post daily updates.  What's going on?  (Nothing?)

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:40:08PM +0200, Rafael Waldo Delgado Doblas wrote:
> 2013/9/10 Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
> > As described above, these two tasks shouldn't take you more than two
> > days, combined.  Surely good asm code may take many days to polish, but
> > in a day or two you ought to be able to bring it to a state that at
> > least looks similar (in terms of approach taken) to Katja's bcrypt code.
> > So please try, and please report on that on Wednesday or Thursday, so
> > that we can move forward with further aspects of the task.
> 
> Ok, this should be finished by tomorrow. At least ASM with macros and rest
> of stuff.

Was this done?

Your latest commit is a minor change to run.sh on September 9.  As far
as I can tell, you did not work on the project at all for 4-5 days, even
though we had agreed on you trying to make progress daily.

> > Also, what has happened to my request to keep the pure C version of the
> > code in there and usable (as a compile-time option)?  Did you read that
> > message at all?  (This is a reason why I prefer that you do inline
> > quoting - that way, I am more confident that you have read the message
> > that you reply to.)
> 
> Sorry, I forget add it to the report, but yes it's in my todo list.

Great.  Can you do it today (if it's not done yet)?

> > BTW, you still have that byte-by-byte blkcpy() - and no plans on fixing
> > that?  It's a trivial and quick task (one hour?), yet something you
> > could do as well.  Luckily, in your current code blkcpy() is only used
> > in SHA-256 and PBKDF2, not in SMix, yet you could make this trivial
> > optimization to it.
> 
> Sure I'l do that.

Great.  Has this been done?  If not yet, can you do it today?

> > I understand that you might be frustrated by how we've been using your
> > time this summer for not-so-important tasks only, yet this is largely a
> > result of my unhappiness with the slow progress and not so great quality
> > of your work.  I simply do not dare to throw more tasks at you yet, and
> > GSoC is already almost over.
> 
> Well, about this, I'm frustrated because I didn't have a roadmap with
> deadlines and milestones. Mostly of the weeks I was lost about what I
> should do.

Does this apply to a portion of the first half of the summer only, or to
the second half as well?  Do you prefer to work when someone (a mentor)
micro-manages you, requiring specific sub-tasks (even trivial ones like
those mentioned above) to be completed on specific days (like "today")?

I understand that it varies from person to person.  Some people prefer
working mostly on their own (given only some goals and not much else),
some need to be told what to do and when.

> Any way even if I feel that my work is useless, at least I have
> learned new stuff then I still thinking that this has been positive and I
> will try to do my best up to the end.

Sounds good.

We may also revisit your addition of cgminer integration to JtR, so that
this portion of work actually finds some end-users.

> > For example, there's an easy optimization task for JtR jumbo code that
> > runs on all platforms (so not Parallella specific).  It'd be a one
> > evening task for me.  If you feel bored with the current stuff and need
> > to do something immediately useful, to boost your confidence and thus
> > further work (including this Litecoin mining on Parallella stuff), let
> > me know and I can describe this task to you.  It might not be a one
> > evening task for you, but it shouldn't take you more than a couple of
> > days either.
> 
> Yes, it would be nice, I will try to finish the task listed above between
> today and tomorrow, then I will have time between Thursday and Monday.

OK, I'll describe this task to you separately.

Alexander

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