As a reply to the blog post, I am willing to help with any optimizations, but of course I do not want to do any work that has already been done. Since the last post in this thread is more than a month old, I was wondering what tasks are still available for a starting developer. As an alternative, maybe it'd be a good idea for me to find performance critical functions using profiling/callgrind and find something that is relatively easy to fix just to get started.