10,797 Strong Baby!

It's been about six years since I first released SAFMQ to the weird world web (the internetz, that series of tubs tubes that moves teh bitzez).  Today I checked in and there's been about 10,797 downloads from the SAFMQ project.  That big spike in September of 2009 was when the 0.8 version came out.  0.8... so in case you ever wondered if I'm dense or just unimaginative, the leading zero indicates that it's still a development project.  Anybody remember Z-Term?  I think the last version I ever used was like 0.9 or something.  A work in progress.

For those of you who don't know.  SAFMQ's name is derived from the store and forward message queue (I must be unimaginative...).  Queue is a thing we use every day, only we typically call it a 'line' here in the USA.  Think about when you're waiting in line at the drive through, you're waiting in a queue.  Apparently, the Angols like to use this word, although it never caught on here, except in engineering practices and billiards.  A message, in a message queue, is like a car in that line of cars waiting in the drive through.  Each is a self-contained unit of information; like your in your car waiting for your shick-un-nug-eats.  The message queue is the line, and the girl in the drive through window is the message receiver, who's going to do some work for you when you arrive at her window, one-at-a-time, and in the order you showed up at MacDarrel's.  So imagine that once your placed your order, you could never get out of the line, you were always going to get the right order when you showed up at the window (I know it never actually happens, but stay with me).  That's what the store and forward part is about.  SAFMQ receives a message and holds it for the sender until the receiver is ready to receive the message.  It's kinda like email or facespace.

SAFMQ does a bunch more than just schlep a bunch data around, but that's the general idea.  Turns out that 40% of the world downloads SAFMQ 50% of the time.  The other 50% is downloaded by like 5% of the world.  The true number of downloads is closer to 11K (no that's not Kelvin, it's thousands/mil if your from an esp speaking region).  That's not alot.  Pidgin's been downloaded 24.8 million times.  But Pidgin lets you talk to your friends through IM sessions, where SAFMQ is used by programmers to build computer systems, so there's a totally different market.  Honestly, I wish it was more popular, and I could ride that wave into some sort of celebrity book tour, but someone will have to break in and steal SAFMQ's sex tape, and then I'd have to hire a publicist.  No one really wants to do that.