Some random ideas of things to do
I was sitting here and I just got some random idea to make a random idea page.. Lots of ideas of projects to do for linux.. In the end, some suck (and might be completely wrong), but some seem like good ideas:
Gaim Plugin website/Registry: Lets be honest, its a decent program, and its supported plugins since the beginning of time. At the moment the official Gaim Plugins page has only 3 things on it, and we could really do way better couldn't we... Maybe if users could submit their plugins to it like the Xchat plugins page there would be some more action. Would also be nice if someone got more of the pretty things that MSN messenger does working as a jabber plugin (maybe for MSN messenger too).
Make Gaim skinning more generic: Instead of only offering coders with a way of skinning the backgrounds and stuff.. Allow the window to be completely reshaped and stuff (maybe even work on adding that to GTK). Stuff like that would make linux look a lot better (might wanna mix it a bit with Cairo too).
Fully Programmable network cards (and mostly programmable Wireless ones): Not as dumb as it sounds.. We already have fully programmable graphics cards, and languages to program for them.. Imagine the applications of this.. Having a language to define how the network card works.. An example of use could be zeroconfiguration.. The OS sends the network card a program for it to DHCP itself, find all the other DNS servers and other things automatically, or sticking a simple IDS system on the network card that alerts the normal CPU when a bad packet is found. Imagine if Jabber (its a chat program), could just tell the network card to find all the people on jabber around you easily and send back the results, instead of having to program a loop which pings every computer around you, in a unreliable manner trying to find one. While you would have to program a similar loop on card, the network card could just send back a list of matching results. The greatest thing is that network cards could just tell other ones what the others can do easily.
Perhaps the most obvious thing it can do is offloading TCP/IP processing, and automatically handling the packets on the card freeing the CPU for other tasks. Programmable network cards would also allow an operating system to have all the TCP/IP functions on card (and IPv6), which, providing the other cards around it also have support, would allow them all to support fast TCP for every port, and it would also be much easier for programmers to develop drivers for the cards because they would be more generic.
Or it might just be a dumb idea too.. but I think it would have its uses (would probably require creating a more versatile internet protocol though). But yeah.. now I look at it, I dunno.. but at least it saves CPU :)
More use of jabber: It can be integrated with everything, so do it that way.. Work on a Mazilla plugin for jabber which allows easy authentication into sites using jabber (and work on a easy way for sites to do so).. Theres already a specification on how to do that, all it needs is implementing now.