Entries in Life

Real Estate agents tell us that most people just want to buy a house and move in. They don’t want a fixer-upper. They want to buy the house, move in their bed, and have a good night’s rest.

So, that’s even more evidence that I’m not part of the mainstream.

This past month, we closed on a lovely 130-year-old house. It needs work, but we’re doing slowly, but surely.

One of the most encouraging things is that much of the work that needed to be done on the floors is now complete. Rooms that previously smelled strongly of a poorly-trained housecat are now pleasing to sit in. The newly finished floor feels like satin beneath my bare feet. There is an enormous psycological effect, as well. I now want to spend my nights stripping wallpaper and preparing the living room for painting so that we can have at least one room somewhat in order before my parents visit this weekend.

As an example, here is a before and after picture of our living room floor.

(For any old hands out there: yes, we should have done the ceiling and walls before the floor. In this case, that wasn’t very feasible since the stale cat oder made it fairly unbearable.)

One of the easiest parts of fixing a house up is ripping it apart. You don’t have to worry about ruining things (too much) since that is exactly what you are trying to do. And, it can even be a little exciting, as well. While taking out a wall that had been put in about 85 years ago, we found old wall-paper and ceiling-paper dating from the late 19th or early 20th century. In the second photo, we can see where the wall builder marked up the ceiling with his pencil along with several layers of paper and, finally, paint that had been applied to the ceiling in subsequent years. We also found United States Gypsum Company patent information on the back of the walls which gave us the means of dating the wall.

A wall like that leaves a mark in the floor. And the sanders cleaned it up nicely.

Jeff has a great response to my half-arsed comments about Gentoo, I should point out that I wasn’t talking particularly about Gentoo (though some of the Gentoo users I’ve seen do show this tendency), but about obsession with speed.

He says Gentoo has three advantages (relative to other Linux Distributions): 1) Constant release schedule, 2) tailored compiles, and 3) easier distributions.

3) doesn’t really affect me. I use a majority platform (Intel P4) which is where most people target anyway.

Jeff attempts to tweak me on 2), though, telling me I could include LDAP in all the packages I want. (Jeff knows my obsession with directories — something he’s had to endure on our tiny server.) He’s got a point. But, I’m guessing that package maintainers have to make those options available. That is, even if a package has an option to compile in some “foo” goodness, the package maintainer still has to make his package responsive to the ” foo” flag. 3) may play a role here if it is truly easier to maintain all these packages and respond to bug reports from users who want you to make the package responsive to ” foo”. (btw, Jeff, Debian does have a mozilla-xft package…)

His other point, “constant release schedule” is something I’m not sure I’m too worried about. I’m not too worried about running the latest everything, just Emacs. I compile my own Debian package of Emacs from CVS. So, I could see a limited set of circumstances where I’d want such a thing. And from my experiennce running Debian’s Unstable, I’m not sure that I want to have updates the minute they happen. When I read one Gentoo user who had downloaded GCC 3.2.2 (and then subsequently had to re-compile everything that depended on libstdc ), I couldn’t see the advantage. If I don’t get the latest GCC until two months after it’s released, I don’t really care.

Now, I can see circumstances where it would matter, where I would care. And, I can see how all Gentoo users running the same code-base would create a more stable OS than Debian’s “Unstable”. And, I can see that Jeff is a happy Gentoo user. To be frank, my curiousity is piqued. But is it piqued enough for me to try it out? Probably not this month. We’re working on the house.

After watching Gentoo rise in popularity; after listening to people complain about how slow the &lquo;linux desktop&rquo; is; after spending a few days in with the former SysAdmin for the company for which I now work — I confess: I don’t get it.

People, you’ve got a ton of speed at your disposal and you still want to spend all day long compiling just so you can eek a few more cycles out of your machine? This is not my idea of fun.

I think that is just it. Some people think that externals (in the case of Gentoo, compiling the same code with different switches) is gonna speed up their system when they should be concentrating on the code itself. See, Gentoo users now have an personal investment in the software that runs on their system (“Of course it’s faster! I spent all day compiling it!), so they can’t be trusted to make a rational judgement about distribution. But, just like adding a spoiler to your Honda makes it go faster, so, too, compiling your system with a couple of different #IFDEFs makes it scream.

Personally, I prefer Gnome’s approach. Make it simple. Look, I use Emacs, I shared my big, honking .emacs file with Dave, and he can attest to the fact that I like to tweak. But I’m not the sort that likes to mess around with my XF86Config file forever. I’ve tried it, and it isn’t any fun. I’d rather get on with other trivial pursuits like ensuring that weblogger.el works with another syndication format.