Masters project suggestion

I thought of a challenging undergraduate or masters research project this morning: an IRC logging bot or server add-on (aka plug-in) that intelligently transforms IRC content into threads. I may put up an example of what I mean if there's enough interest.

I also wanted to point you at my Mugar page again. It presents a new* multimedia gadget that integrates phone, mp3, radio, camera, PDA, web and email functions, along with (of course) voice recording and mp3/ogg/etc. encoding. There's an unbelievably funky user interface to go with it. Check it out!

* (actually, one and a half years old, but alas, the time was not ripe!)

Different communities: GNOME vs. KDE

It occurred to me today that there is a difference between the KDE and GNOME developer communities. Strong-minded, experienced hackers tend to prefer the code-cleanliness of the C-based GTK world, where they are relatively free to execute their own ideas about user interfaces. Newer hands and especially teenagers are more often happy to join an existing project, and KDE has the right climate to allow them to do this [1]. KDE has one CD burning program, k3b. It's the major selling point of KDE. GNOME, on the other hand, has almost countless different ones...
(I still prefer GNOME. The Mac-inspired panels are unbeatable... although admittedly, that's less to do with the toolkit used.)

[1] Compare with Gentoo Linux, which is being maintained by a young community, and uses KDE as its main desktop.