kriener|org

Having used your computer for decades, your hard disk is full of personal data. And being a careful person you have a lot of backups, probably dating back till the eighties. What if somebody got a hold of them? Say by stealing your PC. Or maybe you have confidential data on your laptop, e.g. unanonymized data of a clinical trail Or maybe you sometimes enter your credit card number to order something in your browser which saves it on disk to help you entering that form the next time you want to order something. Either way you have to protect your data. That’s why you update your software and use a password for your user account. But that does not help you if somebody was to steal your hard disk. Unless of course you have encrypted it.

I have been using Drupal for at least five years now and I’m thinking highly of it. But even though Drupal is an amazing CMS with tons of possibilities, it lacks at least a few things. However, the list of things that annoyed me shrunk more and more with every new version of Drupal. So this list of things that annoyed me recently might be outdated with the next version of Drupal.

I’m currently working on migrating from a mephisto blog to a Drupal system. It’s not done yet, but so far it was quite easy. However, there was one problem. Exporting the content database table to CSV directly turned out to be not working at all. So I prepared a SQL statement to format the data in a way that can be read and used by the Node Import plugin when exported as CSV.

Ever tried to configure Zsh? Then you probably found yourself lost and confused after looking at all those man pages, examples and google results. So let me confuse you a little bit more. That is if you want to have SCM/VCS info embedded in your prompt and colors and configurability. If you are using Git, Mercurial, Bazaar or the like or even Subversion or, god beware, CVS you most likely want to know where you are now in your repository. Good old pwd might not be enough for that and the old prompt [foo@bar:~/src/project]% does not help either. What you need is a prompt that displays everything your old prompt did as well as the current branch you’re working on, the action that is currently done to your repository (e.g. rebase) and optionally if there are staged or unstaged changes in your working tree. Let me tell you how I did all this.