Mark “Halcy0n” Loeser

Its been quite some time since my last post.  I’ve been pretty busy with work, which is why I haven’t been contributing as much, but that is changing.

I committed a masked version of gcc-4.4.0 to the tree last night.  Feel free to unmask it and test.  If you run into anything, please file a bug and let us know.  It is by no means meant for general consumption yet, and I’ll be adding a use flag to enable graphite later on tonight.

Just thought I’d blog something so my website didn’t look so dead

So, I’m no longer using Ubuntu on any of my computers at home (okay, its still on one box, but I don’t really use that one and will reformat it when I get the chance).  It was fun while it lasted, but some things started to annoy me and I could not deal with it anymore.  So, what bothered me?  Here’s a short list:

• How bugs get fixed and pushed out.  So, what does this mean exactly?  Take for example this: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/psycopg2/+bug/108067.  This bug alone caused me great headaches at work since the package is completely useless on my 64bit installation.  Not a big deal for one package, but if that is how they are going to handle getting fixes out, I’m not going to be too happy.
• I like being on the bleeding edge.  There are lots of cool things in Ubuntu, and getting stuff to work is extremely easy (most of the time), but the turnaround time on getting new and exciting things is 6 months.
• The overall community.  Yes, Ubuntu is easy, so the community that you have is not as technical as I’m used to.  Yea yea, go ahead and say Gentoo is full of ricers (they are just a very very vocal minority), but there are certainly people that know more about how things work using Gentoo, so its a different atmosphere, and I like it.

Only a few things really, but I just got fed up and decided to switch back to what I know and am used to.

So, I’m back to using Gentoo now and slowly starting to look at bug reports again and trying to help where I can.  Am I going to try and become a developer again?  Who knows, I’m seeing how I like being involved again and take it from there.

So, I have set up my new website.  Its using Wordpress now, and it was pretty easy to get it all up and going how I wanted.  Since my last post I’ve switched over to Ubuntu and I’m loving it.  Setting everything up for how I want things is incredibly easy, and I haven’t really had to go and mess with things to make them work (they just do).  I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon and seeing how they have improved things.

Now that I’ve gotten used to the entire work thing, I’m starting to find time to involve myself in coding in my spare time.  I used to be absolutely spent after I got home from work, but I’m left wanting to do more constructive things after finishing whatever I have to do at work.  Hopefully in the near future I’ll have time to talk about some tools I’ve found to be incredibly useful and projects that I’m working on.  Until that time…