It was brought to my attention yesterday that the continued mail-server downtime (over which I don't have any control, unfortunately) also affected forum registrations - apparently, they haven't worked for over three weeks already. I manually activated about 10 accounts that were registered during past 3-4 weeks, and removed the email-based activation for now. While the forum software still complains that "you cannot log in w/o activation", actually you can now.

Anyway, I did some math here, and realized that it'll take another 18 months at this pace to complete Hydranode project. Put it this way - 1 month more for BT, then 4 months for cgcomm + GUI, 4 months for Gnutalla (or G2, if we choose that one), 4+2+2 months for emule_kad, azureus_dht and mainline_dht (the latter two reuse code from the first, so take less time). Add 2 months for miscellaneus unexpected delays or features (FTP for example), and we have total 18 months to finish the project.

It sounds like a lot of time, and few months back, I would'v come up with considerably smaller numbers, but practice and experience has shown and teached me how long things take time in reality. Hell, 1.5 years ago when I started all this, I actually thought I could get the core + ed2k finished in under two months, but it actually took 12 months. So another 18 months to complete the afore-mentioned things is pretty realistic assessment, considering the current rate of 4 months per fully-featured module. Things might speed up as other components mature, or external contributions / developers join, but those factors cannot be relied upon - only thing that such calculations can be based on is me working alone on things, and 18 months is what is realistic.

Developing Hydranode costs money, I also live in the real world where power, net access and food cost money, also hardware upgrades are sometimes neccesery, which in short means I'll have to find a way to finance this project for longer term than originally planned. Currently, it seems my financial situation will improve starting from January/February, but until then... anyway, the current target is 0.2 release, with BT support, before xmas. The complex things are finished, things that need attention is performance and usability (the latter is the weakest right now, but performance also needs tweaking). After 0.2 release I'll most likely take a 2-3-week vacation, to rest and possibly earn some money with other things.

Madcat, ZzZz