Bits by Ben » personal

Refocussing my responsibilities within Gentoo

Ben — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:19:24 +0000

Today I removed myself from most of the herds and projects within Gentoo that I was (more or less) involved in. I can’t pretend I am really an active maintainer in all those herds and lately I have been noticing I am spreading myself too thin. I regularly get “pinged” or mailed concerning packages that I only tangentially am interested in or know of. In an attempt to prevent burn-out and demotivation, I have decided to refocus my activities and responsibilities within Gentoo on those things I am really interested in: Qt and related non-KDE packages, and a few miscellaneous ones (most importantly openbox and poppler).

This also means I stepped down as lead developer of the LXDE project within Gentoo, and have appointed Victor Ostorga, who has been doing some excellent work, as my successor. I am happy to have brought this lightweight desktop to my favorite distro, and I’m sure Victor will manage just fine without me (hopefully with some help from others).

All in all I should have some time freed up to do a few other things. Once again I am trying to find a position as English language teacher in China, and I want to take some time to learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese. I’ve also been bitching about KDE bloat for long enough now, and complaining there is no lighter Qt4 alternative, so I want to see what I can do about that, taking the opportunity to delve deeper into programming.

Oh shiny!

Ben — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:17:25 +0000

So I finally took the time to move back to WordPress, with most of my content migrated—except for the comments made in my Habari install. I also took the opportunity to do a redesign. It’s sort of an evolution of the previous design, as I kept the general layout and a number of elements. I dropped the fancy fixed header, which caused a few (minor) nuisances. I hope you like the new minty color!

In other news, I have now made a definite decision to go to China. As preparation I plan to do a government accredited certification course in August and then start teaching English from September. Of course I’m pretty excited about these prospects, as it means I’m opening a new, exciting chapter in my life. It also means I will have less time to spend on Gentoo development. But hopefully there will be people to pick up where I leave off.

To twitter or not to twitter?

Ben — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:08:00 +0000

That’s the question.

I am an avid blog reader and IRC user (hello #gentoo-* !), and I dabble in my share of social media (Last.fm, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, YouTube), but not as serious. Now Twitter is all the rage, and so far I have not jumped on the bandwagon. But now I’m wondering if I’m missing anything. So to my readers that are using Twitter, and those that have tried it, I want to pose the question: is it worth it, or merely a huge waste of time? Is there anything to gain for someone like me, interested in free software, the blogosphere, and “alternative” music (mainly post-rock and prog-rock/metal currently)? Let me know your thoughts and experiences!

Doesn’t feel like spring

Ben — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 14:54:58 +0000

image by Nadya Peek

Three days ago spring started, in this part of the world. The weather here doesn’t seem to have noticed, treating us with a very rare White Easter. Also, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy the last few days, I hope I’m not getting the flu that’s been going around. At the same time my father turned 60, so we’ve had some celebrations. Which all accounts for the lack of updates on my blog. I do have the next post in the “Successful Gentoo User” series outlined, so I hope to flesh that out later today or otherwise tomorrow.