Recent blog entries for halcy0n

Return to Gentoo

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.

 

Syndicated 2007-11-25 02:53:06 from Mark "Halcy0n" Loeser

New site

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…

Syndicated 2007-09-22 03:27:49 from Mark "Halcy0n" Loeser

Switching to another distro?

So, I've been thinking recently about switching to another distro so I can get involved with the development community again. The question is which should I try? I've been leaning towards Fedora since I've heard good things about the community over there, and Redhat was my first distro that I seriously used. The other option with a nice community that sticks out is Ubuntu. I don't know many people that use Ubuntu though, so I don't have much feedback on the community.

I'm downloading the Fedora CDs right now to install on an extra computer I have so I can play around with Yum and see how I like it. I may do the same with Ubuntu, but probably not if I like how Fedora works. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to try? Did I miss one that maybe I should look into?

Syndicated 2006-10-08 15:20:04 from Mark Halcy0n Loeser's Blog

My Gentoo Overlay

So, I got my overlay listed in Layman (thanks wrobel). I have some stuff in there for gcc, vim, and anything else I care about. If anyone is actually using the overlay, I'd love to know :) Also let me know if anything is broken, or of any bugs you find. If you want an ebuild for an app, and you think I might be interested in it as well, also let me know and maybe I'll write it up.

Syndicated 2006-09-12 17:53:31 (Updated 2006-09-12 17:57:11) from Mark Halcy0n Loeser's Blog

Its nice to see that Advogato is still around. Hopefully it will recognize me as a trusted user again soon so I can syndicate items from my blog (which I don't update nearly enough).

In recent news, I have graduated from Stevens Tech and now I'm working as a software developer at Vonage. Its a great place to work at and I've been learning a lot. My primary development work has been using Ruby on Rails, which is an absolute pleasure to work with.

Hopefully I'll have enough spare time soon to be able to work on some open source projects again. I haven't had nearly enough time to work on anything else except things for work. I'd love to work on some stuff for Ubuntu, or for some of the Ruby projects that I have been taking advantage of.

Well, since Advogato will be going offline, I'll be moving my journal back to http://blog.halcy0n.com. Thanks to Raph for all of the work on Advogato over the years.

This has been something I've been curious about for awhile now. How many people actually use an IDS? If you do, which do you use, and why? Do you actually go in and check all of the data it collects and react to it, or do you have an intrusion prevention system that handles it for you? If you don't use an IDS, why don't you?

I ask because I'd like to hear from people what they find lacking, or what they love, about existing IDS systems. IDMEF presents a very nice way to combine a whole bunch of different systems to make it into one nice big system, much like Prelude does now. Prelude is the only system of its type that I've been able to find though, and I'd love to know what some of the improvements people would like to see, since a project doing something similar to Prelude has been on the backburner of my mind for quite some time now.

If your journal is on Advogato or Planet Larry (which this journal is syndicated on now, thanks beandog), then I'll most likely see your response, but if you want, shoot me an email as well. My email can be found on my Advogato page.

It has been quite some time since I blogged last. I haven't been up to too much coding-wise since I left Gentoo. Work has been keeping me quite busy. I've been interning there over the summer and will most likely stay on part time over the upcoming semester at school. I'll be graduating with my BS in CS in December (finally, it feels like forever), and I have no idea what I'll be doing after that.

Since I still do use and love Gentoo, I feel like I should comment on how I would be handling the xorg 7.1 problem that currently seems to be a big issue. How I see it, it is pretty plain and simple...xorg-7.1 breaks packages that depend upon it, which breaks one of the rules that everyone should be following when marking a package stable. Sure, they are binary drivers, and we have no control over them, but if they are staying in the tree, then everyone should be supporting them the best that they can. There is no excuse to knowingly break users' systems. The open source drivers are not a replacement for the closed source ones since they do not offer the same features. I find it quite sad how some people don't seem to care that users are going to be running into major problems if they depend upon closed source drivers. I'm sure lots of people will comment on the fact that closed source drivers do not belong in an open source operating system, but some of us are not as strict in our beliefs and will use what gets the job done.

I got bored today, so I decided to try and find all of the cool and useful Firefox extensions that existed. This is what I ended up installing:

• Google Browser Sync - Store all of your settings and bookmarks so you can share them amongst multiple computers. They can track me all they want with this, I think it is cool as hell :)
• adblock with FilterSet.G - Has worked great for me for weeks now and I don't notice any ads most of the time :)
• customizegoogle - Lots of very cool tweaks for your Google searchs and all of the other offerings from Google
• dmextension - Some nice little tweaks for the download window (make it into its own tab, for example)
• easyGestures - A lot easier to use than any of the other attempts at mouse "gestures", imho.
• PDFdownload - Lets you tweak how you want to handle PDF files.
• Smoothwheel - Makes scrolling with the mouse wheel nice and smooth. Also makes it feel more accurate, in my opinion.
• Stop or Reload - Makes the stop and reload button into one button, since you can only really do one operation at a time :)
• Tab Mix Plus - Lots of tab options, like adding progress bars, locking, etc

I think they are all cool. I'll probably remove a few after they start to piss me off, but I think most of them are useful, or don't really make the browsing experience any worse. Anyone else have recommendations for some good extensions?

sejo: I completely agree with your reasons for leaving, as they were basically the same as my own. The entire situation of relations between devs really is atrocious at this point. It was kind of iffy to begin with, but has just went off the deep end as of late. It is quite sad since I also really enjoyed doing work for Gentoo.

I still do plan on contributing stuff back to Gentoo, but atleast as a user I can just ignore anyone that acts like an ass towards me. All of the developers that say, "Just ignore the devs that treat you like shit" are only hurting the project in the end. When everyone turns a blind eye to these people, they support their behaviour, and it will only continue to get worse. By ignoring them, you only hurt the project, and I hope those people that are doing the ignoring are coming to realize this.