dis·am·big·u·ous·i·ty

I’ve really over-complicated my life at this point. I’ve turned my quaint little home into a freakin’ disorganized computer lab (in case my wife ever reads these posts, I should thank her for putting up with me). At the moment, I’m trying to get a handle on all the files all over the place.

I’ve gone down this road a million times before and never ended up tackling the problem sufficiently. However, I’m feeling inspired by a blog post I just found illustrating HOWTO rid yourself of the abhorrent “Documents and Settings” and “My Documents, My Music, My This and My That. ” I always thought my aversion to the Windows way of things was just because I was a command-line junkie, but I now realize their mess was part of the roadblock to organizing the various files on all these systems.

I’ve been hoping to use a source control solution like subversion (of course, after listening to Linus Torvalds at a Google Tech Talk, I’m thinking this is the perfect use case for a “distributed source control” solution). However, I’ve never wanted to go after bits and pieces at a time – I want the whole dang home directory synched – BOOM. I’ve never had the desire to play around with where to put various crap. Up until now, the best solution I could come up with was from one article I read which had a slick solution of checking in little set-up scripts for various environments. Still though, those scripts sound kind of ugly when Windows is all high maintenance.

Then comes the article: Derek Slager: Emulating Vista’s User Directory Structure on XP In a nutshell, instead of relying on the various scripts for the various environments to piece together your desired directory structure, just change the screwed up environment itself! If I can pull this off, then the change will also be able to be applied to the Home Directories of the wife and kids, which will be the proverbial grand slam of overly complicated home computing.

So, the plan is the following:

1. Implement the changes from the referenced blog on all my XP instances
2. Implement source control (some resources: http://toykeeper.net/tutorials/svnhome, http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/home_directory_synchronization, http://linuxjournal.com/article/5976)
3. Make the conflict resolution process drop-dead simple for even my wife (who is actually pretty savy at computing, but hasn’t seen a diff in her life)

Honestly though, this will only solve some of my problems. I would still much rather prefer being able to just “mount” certain network directories to certain places (specifically in dealing with our shared pictures, as the size of them is too big to “distribute” to all machines).

Alas, let’s see where this adventure takes us.