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February wasn't the best time of my life, I was sick a few weeks, but the good side of this was that I finally had time to put my hands on Fraqtive. The engine is finished, the application already looks very impressive and I just have to bring the UI to a usable state. I will release the first version by the end of this month. Then I will continue adding new features and releasing new versions in 2-3 weeks periods.

Some work is also being done with WebIssues "behind the scenes", but don't expect new versions sooner than in a few months. Maybe I will work on both projects in turns once Fraqtive reaches a certain level of completeness, maybe I'll start doing something else, time will show.

The beginning of March looks much more promising, mainly because it's warmer and there's more sun, feels like spring, more energy and motivation. Recently I started playing an MMO game, something I thought I would never do, but I got sucked in :). I also started using an online dating service, also something I thought I'd never do, without any effects so far, but well, I've already waited so long that I can wait a bit longer. At least no one can say I'm not trying. Last but not least, last weekend I was at the Metalmania festival and I enjoyed it very much. So at least I'm not bored and that's not going to change in the nearest future.

A few days ago I made a new skin for the website and I must say for the first time I'm quite satisfied with it. I didn't plan to do it now, it was just an experiment, but the result was so encouraging that I decided to make a new skin from it. It lost its 'individual' style, but it's much cleaner, readable and visually appealing. I'm not much of a web designer so I just tried to imitate designs that I like (for example the KDE website) and make it as simple as possible.

I always thought that fixed width layout is a bad thing, but I finally changed my mind as the width of the screen grows and the lines of text become annoyingly long. Now it doesn't fit entirely on a 800x600 screen, but I had to make it wider so that the images fit well. It's not a problem these days (recent statistics show that for 'technical' sites only about 3% of visitors use a resolution lower than 1024x768).

What's coming next? It's time to upgrade the engine of this website. Soon I'm going to start playing with the upcoming Drupal 6.0 because the version I'm using now is rather ancient. But I like the way it works now with all customizations that I made. It won't be an easy task to keep it working the same way.

Also, now that the WebIssues Client reached stable version I can finally work on another project. As I mentioned some time ago, I'm not inventing anything new, just removing dust from an old project. I recently started rewriting Fraqtive, the fractal generator, planning to give it a completely new look and feel, an improved engine (with support for SSE2 and multi-core processors and possibility to customize fractal types) and obviously porting it to Qt4. It may not be such serious project as WebIssues, but sometimes it's good to make something just for fun. It's too early to say precisely when it will be available, but I'd say spring is realistic.

The mimec.org website was officially opened two years ago. Just like last year, it's a good opportunity to summarize the past 12 months. It's also a very good time to do that. Most of this year was just a long period of stagnation and struggling against everything. But it was worth it, because now the results are coming, sometimes in very unexpected ways, and it's the first time for a long time I can't really complain about anything :).

Looking back this year doesn't really look that bad. Two great holidays at the Polish see and in Turkey. A lot of new friends, surprisingly, both at work and in private life. Still not what I'd really want, but at least it's going in the right direction. Two concerts where I met interesting people. Quite a few music parties, and it looks like they're going to be continued even though everything indicated otherwise. Not only I got the driving license, but I also finally bought a car, which is a really huge improvement both in comfort and time saving.

At work I got quite a good raise and became a project manager, at least in theory. In practice that means I have to do everything from coding and testing to communicating with the clients in three different projects, but hey, at least I'm not bored anymore :). There have been some indications recently that I might be getting some profits from my open source activities, which is encouraging, but it's too distant to even mention it now. Anyway, I haven't lost my enthusiasm for doing it and I will certainly try to continue all my three projects as far as possible. Even my recent retreat from using Linux and switching almost completely to Windows didn't change my point of view for it.

And to finish this longish post, here come some numbers. The sites together had 60,000 visits in last 12 months, which is 2.4 times more than in the first year. Fraqtive had over 1000 downloads and WebIssues more than 2000. That may not sound impressive, but I think it's pretty fine for such niche programs. So my best regards to everyone who visited these sites and found something interesting or useful, and see you next year.

Two days ago I was at the concert of Tool which was part of the Metal Hammer Festival in Katowice. It was their second concert I've been to, so I knew what to expect, but it still made an incredible impression. Why am I mentioning it? Besides the fact that I'm a big fan of their music, it was the first opportunity for a very long time to forget about my work, to meet and talk to interesting people and to rediscover various areas of life that I've almost forgotten.

Even though many things have changed for better recently, especially concerning my work, I'm still far from being satisfied with my life. And it occurred to me that the main reason is that I'm simply bored with things that take most of my time. I got a new project and it was quite an adventure, but now that it's reached a usable state I'm mostly doing project management tasks. And it's been more than year and a half that I've been working on WebIssues, with no longer break than a week or two. So even though I still have a lot of ideas, I feel that I must take a break and start doing something different.

WebIssues was meant to be something that people would actually use, and even though it's not widely known and doesn't have a lot of users, I think that goal was reached just enough to let it live on its own for some time. But the main reason I'm doing this is simply training my mind, not allowing me to forget the raw power of C++ in the "managed" world that live in and forcing me to think creatively rather than just following the customer's requirements. So now I would like to switch to a more conceptual project, something that I could simply enjoy when playing with.

There's no need to invent the wheel, two such projects already exist - Fraqtive and Descend. The former needs rewriting to Qt4 and improving the usability of the UI and seems like a good stepping-stone for a short time. The latter is still more like a contour of the idea, but it keeps appearing in my mind from time and whispering deceptively to bring my attention, so who knows. Well, while finishing the next release of WebIssues I will have some time to make up my mind.

One of the greatest traditions in Poland is the two national holidays on 1st and 3rd of May. Lots of people take vacation for the entire week and go to the mountains or to the seaside. I also couldn't miss the opportunity to leave my laptop at home and go to the opposite side of the country. It was my first holidays at the Baltic Sea and despite that the weather was a bit cold, I had a really great time.

For this and a few other reasons, the release of WebIssues got delayed again. It's generally working already, but I want to finish a few more details and finally create at least a very basic user's manual. It's not one of my favorite tasks, but I've been already postponing it for too long. Anyways, no matter how much I will manage to do with it, the new version is coming this month for sure.