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            <p>A CMS is supposed to save you time in managing your website, unfortunately quite the opposite seems to be the case. I have never had much faith in PHP templating systems or by extension Content Management Systems. The more I look at the latter the more I am convinced that they should be labled content mismanagement systems.</p>
            <p>If you read this blog regularly you might have noticed that i have been looking at a few of these systems during the past weeks. Last week I decided to use drupal for one of my projects. Then I had a look through the documentation and it was&nbsp;appalling.</p>
            <p>As some others had commented in the drupal forum, the documentation is too modularized and too detailed, it's a tough ask figuring out which section of the documentation you need to read to dig up the information you need.</p>
            <p>While I am a great fan of RTFM, I don't believe in reading through a vast manual, most of which is aimed at newbies, or too generic. The drupal manual certainly does not need to teach me (or anyone) how to install php or postgres.&nbsp;Keep it short and sweet please.</p>
            <p>At the moment it looks like I am through with Content Management Systems or at least with drupal.</p>
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CMS should be CMMS

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            <p>My collection of backup CDs became obsolete, thanks to a <a href="666.html">corrupted svn revision file</a>. The sensible thing to do is to throw these CDs away and create a new set of CDs. Unfortunately the geek in me would not allow me to do that.</p>
            <p>Only some of the files on these CD are unusable, the geek (reddish in color, horns, pointed tail, cloven hooves) tells me that I should figure out how to delete/hide the unwanted files and replace them with new ones.</p>
            <p>I know this can be done on that operating system made by a persons whose description is also said to match the description above (no I am not talking of BSD). Curiosly the post about the subversion malformed file has an entry number of <a href="https://www.raditha.com/blog/archives/00">666</a>.</p>
            <p>It was with the greatest difficult that I first managed to burn CDs on linux. Since then I have stuck on <a href="http://k3b.sourceforge.net">K3B</a> and think it wonderfull. Unfortunately K3B does not let you delete files that have already been burnt - or at least version that is part of my Fedora Core installation (0.11.14-2) cannot . Now that's where libmad comes into the picture.</p>
            <p>I decided to update to the latest version of K3B using YUM. Unfortunately it refused to update this cd burner and complained about a missing libma. That's a nice name but no where as original as 'get ... witghoutusingsomanydamandglobals' that I encountered in mediawiki a few months ago.</p>
            <p>MAD as it turns out stands for MPEG Audio Decoder. Sounds interesting but I am not sure if i need it, for having given up with yum and RPM based installation, I resorted to the time honored configure, make and make install and it was painless.</p>
            <p>Afterwards, I found that the new version of k3b was not capable of deleting an existing file either but it could overwrite one, which was good enough for me.</p>
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libmad

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            <p><a href="590.html">Subversion is tricksy</a>. It waits until you have been lulled into a false sense of security to spring a surpise on you. When that suprise is sprung, google does not have any answers.</p>

            <p>Having used subversion for a while and made 400 commits, I decided the time was right to figure out if the subversion repository is in order. I have several backups but it always pays to be paranoid, and in this case i wasn't paranoid enough.</p>

            <p><code>svnadmin verify</code>; the command used to verify a repository was executed but it failed with the <em>svn: malformed file</em> error. Google didn't reveal anything too inpressive. I wasn't even thinking of worrying, I have at least five backups.</p>

            <p>The next step, I thought was to create a new repository and try to import from my backup. Sadly it turns out that when the offending revision (122) was dumped out, the dump command had in fact choked on it and halted. The result is that the dumps (backups) are useless. The fault here is partially mine, I shouldn't have made incremental dumps, but then again, if your repository is fairly large non incremental dumps could mean that you spend all your life's savings on CDs.</p>

            <p>So now, I have a corrupt repository, five useless backups and frayed nerves. I would happily delete the whole damn thing but since <a href="564.html">switching from CVS to subversion</a> I have come to rely on it heavily, too heavily. So it looks like it's going to be a whole lot tarballs for during the coming weeks.</p>



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Monthly Archives for 2005 02

CMS should be CMMS

libmad

svn: malformed file