50K

Sometime in the next 12 hours this blog should breach the 50K pageview tally. So 'yay' for me. Anyway, I keep an eye on the stats just to see what's hot and what's not, and i'll review the recent trends.

So last time I did this the main posts hit were to do with performing an FFT in Java. The new king is 'Kobo Hacking'. I'm pretty sure this is mostly people just trying to hack the DRM or the adverts out, but there does seem to be a few individuals coding for the machine as well. And what little organisation there is seems to be centred on the mobileread forums, although it seems like me it's mostly individuals working on their own for personal education and entertainment.

Another big source of pageviews is the JavaFX stuff (actually it's the biggest combined) - and this is only because they were added to the JavaFX home page (it wasn't something I asked for btw). I must admit i've done a couple of 'page hit' posts under the tag, but it's always just been stuff i've been playing with anyway.

The post about the Mele A2000 gets quite a few hits although i'm not sure what people are still looking up (probably wrt the allwinner A10 for hacking). The ARM android tv boxes keep leaping ahead in performance and specifications and it's already quite dated. I still use mine mainly for playing internet radio, and sometimes watching stuff recorded with MythTV (I normally use the original PS3, but I try to save some power when I remember to).

The Android programming posts get regular visits - although I think it's mostly people looking up stuff they should be able to find in the SDK. Last time I had to do some android code I didn't like it at all - the added api to work around earlier poor api design choices, the lack of documentation, and the frustration with the shitty lifecycle model more than made up for any 'cool' factor. I'd rather be coding JavaFX with real Java - actually the fact that Oracle have an android version internally but are trying to monetise it ... puts me off that idea a bit too. You can't really monetise languages and toolkits anymore, there's too much good free stuff (e.g. Rebol finally went free software, least it wallow in obscurity forever).

jjmpeg also contributes a steady stream. Given how many downloads there have been i'm a bit, i dunno, bummed i guess, about how little correspondence has been entered into regarding the work. Free Software for most just seems to mean 'free to take'. Still, I made some progress with the Android player yesterday so it might actually become useful enough to me at some point to be worth working on.

The image processing and computer vision posts have picked up a bit in the last few months, although i'm sure most of the hits are people just looking for working solutions or finished homework, or how to use OpenCV. I hate OpenCV so don't ask me!

I get a good response to any NEON posts containing code - although I haven't put too many up at this point. That's always fun to work on because one only ever considers fairly small problems that can be solved in a few days, keeping it fresh.

I even get a few hits on the cooking posts although I wish the hot sauces had more interest - because I think they're pretty unique and very nice.

The future

So I mentioned earlier how Free Software just seems to mean "free to take" - i certainly have no idea who is using any of the code I put out apart from the Kobo touch software using the toolkit/backend from ReaderZ - which I only found out by accident. Although the code is out there for this very reason, it's a bit disappointing that there is almost zero feedback or any indication where the code is being used - and i'm sure for example that jjmpeg is being used somewhere.

Once you hit a certain point in developing something I find the fun goes out of it - problems get too big to handle casually, earlier design mistakes require big rewrites, and unless you're using the software in anger there's no real reason to work on it at all after the initial fun phase. A lot of the stuff I have sitting in public has hit that point for me and it's not like i'm using most of the applications I come up with (or would even if I finished them).

For me it's about the journey and not the destination. And particularly for anything I work on in my spare time it has to be fun or what's the point? I already get paid to work on software, I don't want to "work" on it for free as well.

It's just for fun

Not sure where i'm going here ... I guess I will amble along and keep doing what i'm doing, mucking about with whatever takes my fancy or is interesting at the time.

So probably not much will change then.