September 30, 2005 7:57 PM
FrndNet now supports textual whiteboard and group chat. But it has not
been heavily tested. Especially the windows version. In July, we tried
out a test version of FrndNet on our college lab. 3 PCs running Fedora
Core 3 and another running Windows 2000 was used and everything worked
satisfactorily.
FrndNet can help build a darknet based on I.P addresses, but information transferred is not encrypted (yet). But there are some aspects of FrndNet that Jijith and I want to work on. Textual difference calculation still needs work. But I must say that working on this has been and still is a lot of fun. We've met some weird bugs along the way.
Needless to say, the textual whiteboard feature in FrndNet is lacking in many things necessary for a collaborative editor. But, there are plenty of excellent collaborative editors like gobby out there. I'd rather have FrndNet aim more towards building an F2F network1.
For those interested to see how far development has progressed, check out a development snapshot (Warning: This is still in the alpha stage and contains bugs) and let me know what you think.
FrndNet 0.3 Alpha Version - Linux RPM Download i386
FrndNet 0.3 Alpha Version - Windows Download
My commenting system was being heavily abused by spammers who're
probably searching google for words like comment.php. I do know that
all spamming comments were posted by a .NET program. So, I've
updated my robots.txt file to disallow access to comment.php and
made checking of the user agent string stricter.
[1] What is popularly now known as a darknet.