A Three Hour Tour

I have talked to many people who, well, dislike Gentoo Linux - to put it mildly.  For those who have never used it before, in Gentoo, nearly every package you install is built from source code.  This allows misguided speed freaks to micro-optimize their system by tweaking the compiler’s optimization settings.  And believe me, building OpenOffice isn’t exactly fun.

 But I don’t use Gentoo for the supposed speed boost.  I use it because I also use Windows.

 Huh?  How does that follow?

With Windows, you stick a CD in the drive (or in the case of Vista, a DVD), boot off of it, wait half an hour, and you’ve got a functional system.  With Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, or other distros, you get basically the same experience.  You stick the CD in the drive, give it some configuration options, hit install, wait, and you have a booting Linux install.  And since I received Windows Vista free through the UCLA School of Engineering, the cost to me would be the same.

With Gentoo, you boot off of a CD, partition your hard drive manually, configure and compile a kernel manually, install a bootloader and other essential system tools, and reboot.  In about forty-five minutes of work, you have a barebones system that can’t really do much.  Everything has to be installed and sometimes configured manually.  So you put a lot of effort into your computer, understand exactly how the darn thing works, and get exactly what you want and nothing more.

Granted, this assumes you already have a good understanding of how computers work.  I had that experience, but had no experience with Linux.  I’ve been dual-booting Windows and Gentoo for the past six months or so and have learned more about Linux than I thought possible.

So if you know how computers work, have a fairly fast machine, and want to learn more than you ever wanted to about Linux, I encourage you to try Gentoo.

So it seems there’s yet another scene in Gilligan’s Island filmed here at UCLA… the Third Season episode, The Pigeon, includes a brief scene filmed from the roof of a building somewhere on campus.  Royce Hall and Powell Library are visible in the background (from the Janss Steps side).  It’s too close to be, say, from the roof of Sproul hall; it looks more like the roof of the John Wooden center.

Yet another scene?  Does that mean there’s another one somewhere?  Yep… In the Rescue movie, there’s a scene where the two Russian spies are chasing after the Skipper and Gilligan on the IM (Intramural) field on campus.  Sproul hall, Reiber, and Dykstra are visible in the background.  A very old Wilson Plaza, with the Janss Steps area covered in shrubs, is also visible for a moment.

So is there supposed to be some meaning to this?  Why is this useful?  Short answer: it isn’t.

Anyone ever wondered what the spring constant of a slinky is? Me neither. But evidently it is 0.9267 N/m in the case of an original metal one.

Thus one of today’s most pressing physics questions has been answered. Now to work on the other: calculating the moment of inertia of a penguin.

So I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do here, but I wanted to put this on my new website… which if you have tried to see the thing is very much under development.  Any title suggestions?

So for now this is it; sometime when I have more time I’ll get around to making this better.