Status Report for Date 11/16/2006 to Date 11/29/2006

I have done several tasks in these two weeks:

1. I got Maze run successfully. All its functions can be used now.
2. For future maintaining, I wrote down all logs which recorded procedure of setting up system in detail. http://zhenhua-guo.blogspot.com/2006/11/memorandum-for-maze.html http://zhenhua-guo.blogspot.com/2006/11/search-engine-in-maze.html Some discussions are included in articles above as well.
3. Refine my documents and get deeper understanding on Maze.
4. Do some test to verify the functions of simultaneous downloading, searching and chatting.

There are several points in Maze that may be improved.

1. The search engine can work better. The problem is described in my previous article(http://zhenhua-guo.blogspot.com/2006/11/search-engine-in-maze.html). I think the reason is text segment and handle for file name. When program does text segment, this kind of search string--"a.b.c" is segmented into string 'a', string 'b', and string 'c'.
2. Most of work needed by setting up Maze system has to be done manually and this is not friendly to administrators. I must manually create corresponding directories, etc. A package can be built to make this procedure short and easy.
3. There are some bugs in Maze Client, such as abnormally high CPU utilization ratio. Maze client is built by Borland C++ Builder.
4. There are no setting up documents. In other words, there is no description to tell administrator how to install maze.
5. There are no detailedly and systematically technical description of Maze system in English. There is one master degree thesis(written in Chinese) concentrating on the details which was written by one of the original developers of Maze.
6. Unit of sharing in Maze is file. Its transfer speed is slower than that of some other P2P protocols, such as BitTorrent because BitTorrent splits a file into data blocks and these blocks can be accessed simultaneously.