olethrosdc's Journal: Everyone's little pet project

The last few months had been ... strange. Floundering through masses of partially-comrehensible scientific papers, spending long hours chatting on IRC, reading news, trying to get involved into little projects, writing music.. etc....

The thing is, what I have noticed about myself and about the 'scene' in general, is that one tends to work on a particular little 'pet' project for a significant amount of time (2-3 weeks) - and then abandon it. Occassionally some efforts are made to invite other people to join in, but the work so far is so insubstantial, poorly designed, etc, that it is impossible for anyone to take tabs at it.

A good example is my own work here at IDIAP, where I am pretty much free to do whatever I want - well, so far I've started half a dozen different projects in the last 6 months, and none of them is bearing any fruit - Either that, or I lack the patience to develop my systems far enough..

On the other hand, I notice some people that develop a system for many years, on and off, but never release the source into the community (yeah, their pet project.. but still..) - A good example of this would be AWeb, an old amiga browser, whose source has recently been released. Now - since development on that browser had stopped 4-5 years ago, one cannot help but wonder why the author did not release it sooner. Perhaps he was still making money out of it? I doubt it, considering the state of the Amiga at the time..

And I also need a decent 'puter to run my programs into .. hm... argh... and switzerland is nice, but WHERE IS THE SEA?