Thrift sounds nice, but installing it is painful

Using Thrift to solve various cross language web services problems appeals to me. Basically you define your service interface in some very simple IDL, and then Thrift generates client and server stubs in various languages. To startup a server, you fire up a main() and use some canned multithreading libraries to build a robust server. Checkout the whitepaper for further details. Those crafty authors took the time to write a whitepaper in tex, just to give it the feel of quality research.

So, you're all ready to install Thrift on a Mac. It's a nuisance, but at least it's reasonably well documented.

But what's a killer is that the Java tutorial code is utterly busted--like it won't even compile for God's sake. To get it to work, you have to:

1. Download some logging junk from slf4j.org. Then add slf4j-simple.jar and slf4j-api.jar to the classpath of the build.xml.
2. Add the same two jars to the JavaServer and JavaClient shell script classpaths.
3. Edit the generated source files. Are you kidding? Edit the freakin' generated source? And this ain't no Java6 problem--this shit won't even compile:

thrift-HEAD/thrift/tutorial/java/src/JavaServer.java:66: duplicate case label
case Operation.DIVIDE:


thrift/tutorial/java/src/JavaServer.java:77: incompatible types
found : tutorial.Operation
required: int
io.what = work.op;

The fixes are straightforward: Remove the qualifying class from the switch statements, and assign some number (I used work.num2) to io.what.

Then things seem to work.

That's one sloppy tutorial. By making such high barriers to even running the tutorial, the Thrift team has really slashed their user base. It's too bad, because I suspect Thrift is really pretty awesome.

Knucklehead Insulation Strikes Again

Shortly after we bought our house, my dad poked around in our side attics and mumbled something about how the insulation was all messed up. At the time, my main priority was on the creature comforts of my 3 month old daughter, which had nothing to do with insulation. So ignored my dad's observation for a few years, until an unrelated roof leak called me up to the side attics. Sure enough, the insulation was a mess.

The top half of the roof is actually properly insulated, with rigid foam, a thermal barrier, and about a 1.5" air gap between the foam and the roof decking. The guys who installed that section knew what they were doing.

Some clowns did a far worse thing on the bottom half of the roof: R-11 insulation jammed all the way up to the roof decking. R-11? In the attic in New England? The attic in my region is supposed to be at least R-38, ideally more like R-60. Why not just hang up a bedsheet and call that insulation? These bozos also didn't know anything about insulation's tricky pal, ventilation. By blocking the airflow at the lowest part of the roof, the job effectively blocked ventilation through the entire roof, rendering the ridge vent worthless. Thus the roof bakes in the summer, which in turn raises the temperature of the top floor, which forces me to shell out way more money for air conditioning.

We have a few knee wall doors which also exhibit a 1980's "who gives a shit?" attitude in regards to heating costs. In the winter time, our precious heat goes right out the knee wall doors, into the side attic, through the R-11 faux insulation, and right up to a pitch change in the roof deck. Nice warm air hitting the lower portion of a roof in the winter is a recipe for something I hate more than the 1980's LA Lakers: ice dams. The escaping warm air contributes to uneven roof temperatures, which, to make a long story short, are the basic cause of ice dams. So the shoddy insulation job leads to more than just inefficient heating. It wears out the roof much faster than it should (hello, $8,000 roof job) and it causes ice dams which--in case you didn't know--lead to water trickling inside your house in ways you thought were impossible.

You can bet I'll be fixing this problem soon with air chutes, rigid foam insulation, and a thermal barrier.