Ha, that's most people's response when I ask them to work on linear algebra stuff
Actually, though, the algorithms aren't too hard. It's basically manipulating the nxn matrix as if it were a large 2D array. But yeah, feel free to pick something else to work on. If you want to play around with GUI stuff, there are some custom widgets I'd like built. Basically I ended up building them at my last work. The one I'm thinking of at the moment is basically a slider and a text box combined. You can use the slider to move inside a "suggested" range of values. If you enter in a number in the text box that's too large for the slider, the slider gets disabled and the value in the textbox stays. If you right click on the slider, it reenables it (or maybe pops up a context window, depending on what makes more sense). The textbox should be built from another custom widget which is basically a regular textbox but with a regex filter on it so it only accepts inputs of a valid type (ie: if it's a floating point slider, it only accepts key presses that create a valid floating point number. So -556.235 would work, -556.23-5 would not.)
You'd probably add it to the UI.Controls project. And you should also set up a unit testing sub project for it (I can help with that, it involves a bit of project file magic to get all the stuff going in the right places). You want to make sure it's thoroughly tested because there are literally dozens of gotchas that can ruin user experience (things like the cursor in the text box jumping to the beginning of the text if you enter a wrong digit, etc.) It's not a very glamorous job, though, so if that's not your cup of tea either I can poke around for some other tasks, too
I'm not quite ready to play with networking just yet, but the other thing you might be interested in is graphics. I still need to flesh out how the XNA graphics module will work, which will drive the interface for the GDI module (the two'll be interchangable at run time), so I'd either need to get off my butt and finish that or if you have some graphics card knowledge of how things work under the hood you could take a stab at it (it's easier to bang on GDI to make it work like XNA than the other way around). It's quite different from how GDI works, I must warn. Plus there are some shaders involved, so it's not for the faint of heart. Or Hell, you could take a look at what I have so far and take a stab at it on the interface side at least. At first it was going to be a pretty flimsy wrapper, but it's sort of becoming a full featured graphics library just minus rendering stuff. So basically it handles things like hierarchies of shapes (for things like organs) and scene graphs (so you only render what's visible). I'm literally walking in the dark as far as interface, so another set of eyes would be useful.
If you go to
chat.darwinbots.com, it's a HTML chat room I set up for developers. It's pretty dead at the moment but I'll make a point of staying online. That way I can give you timely help if you get any problems setting things up.
