Month: September 2007

a few site stats

Since May 2006 I switched to Google Analytics for site stats. Tonight I thought I’d take a look at the progress of last 8 months (timeframe TF2) in comparison to the 8 months before that (TF1). It was to be expected to have more traffic in TF2 than in TF1. Generally, this was also the case, although I was kind of surprised that TF1 did better during the 3rd and 4th month… No apparent explanation for that (both TF’s had a comparable number of posts during that period, although I can imagine the general public finds an ipod a more interesting subject than programming Qt ;)).

In general there were 30% more pageviews in TF2 (3000 in 8 months, peanuts, I know ;))
Now for the fun stuff:

  • visitors: came from 85 countries. 1. USA 2. Belgium 3. Germany
  • OS: Windows -10% in favor of Mac users. Linux stays the same.
  • browser: I’m happy that the vast majority of visitors does not use Internut Exploiter. Firefox is the big winner here. Opera third..
  • screen resolution: 47 different ones!! It seems still a lot of people use 1024×768 (25%). An equal amount uses 1280×1024. Some guy browses on a 800×5000 screen res!!

Ok, that’s it for today. Signing off..

oh btw, Frets on Fire turns out to be pretty addictive. The world chart really gives an incentive to keep practicing 😉

open source guitar hero

you(‘d) like to rock, preferably in an open source way? 🙂 Then Frets on Fire is definitely something for you!
I was amazed by the polish-factor of this project! It all looks (and sounds!) quite nice, the tutorial is simply hilarious. 🙂

The inverted keyboard approach as a surrogate guitar works surprisingly well. I think in the 9 years that I own my trusty Mitsumi keyboard, I never jammed the keys as hard as today. 😉

Tip: FoF comes with only 3 songs, but you can import songs both from Guitar Hero I & II. Also check out this community site for some extra songs.

Frets on Fire guy

Pingus

In case you didn’t know, Pingus, the open source Lemmings clone, has with its 0.7 release its first SDL port binary. Meaning, you can play it on windows too now. 🙂 I’m lame, I know 😉

As I were going to sleep, I thought I’d try out those tutorial island levels. After finishing the island I come to realise this is as far as the game is finished right now. =) That doesn’t mean the game has limited gameplay (how can an open source game have limited gameplay anyway? 😉 ). After all,

  1. there were already 22 nicely polished levels, introducing the several types of pingi (?, lol).
  2. There is a level editor. Temporarily not included, due to the SDL porting process, I guess.
  3. There are loads of ‘unofficial‘ levels which you can load manually.
  4. It took me more time than anticipated, take a look at the clock. 😉

I really love this project and I hope they keep on developing it!

P.S.: they even created a little storyline, very cute 😉

Pingus on Tutorial Island

P.P.S: I just read this interesting interview with the Pingus developer. This guy has dipped his toes in all kinds of open source games! 🙂

DIY gadgets

I was quite astonished to read about this BUG platform: “an open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform”. This kinda says it all. 🙂 It’s still in beta, but they are targeting Q4 2007 right now to release their BUG-base, the core product, featuring an ARM microprocessor and all kind of interfaces you might desire (notice the MPEG4 HW encoding/decoding support!). Like this featurefest is not enough yet, you can extend the base station with all kind of modules: “GPS, Digital Camera / Videocam, Touch-sensitive Color LCD Screen, Accelerometer, Motion Sensor”, you name it! Before you stop drooling over the hardware specs, save some drool to drool on the software specs. 🙂 They have it nicely running on an OSGi framework! Extension galore. Judging by the screenshots, I have the impression they are running it on the eclipse framework which is an extension of OSGi (Paul, correct me if I’m wrong ;)).

This really seems the ultimate “toy for boys” or “Lego Mindstorms for adults” 🙂 at least in a geeky world 😉

Reminds me of this site/magazine where creating DIY gadgets is just daily routine.. 🙂