I used CVS for a while for keeping my desktop and laptop in sync, as well as for versioning all of my school stuff and programming web projects. While it worked fine, I did find that it wasn’t great for binary data (because of its basis on RCS) and the fuss involved in copying, moving and deleting was tiresome.

After reading this I decided to give subversion a try. It was pretty easy to set up, and it works insanely well with binary data, because it uses binary differencing on all files, making the distinction moot.

Before I got started with subversion though, I wanted to clear out all of the CVS administrative directories so I wasn’t versioning those as well. Well, since there is a CVS directory in every directory in the tree, I didn’t want to remove them all manually. Luckily, TLUG came to the rescue with this: find . -type d -name CVS | xargs rm -Rf. Very nice, and useful in a lot of ways. I’ll have to spend some time with man xargs though, because I think that I’ll be glad to know it better.

I changed hosts at the beginning of April, and it turned into an unmitigated disaster. The old host deleted my database before I had a chance to dump it, so I lost more than half my content. I wouldn’t even have that much if it wasn’t for Google’s cache. I’ll try to re-create it, but it may take some time. Also, partly because of massive ineptitude and partly because of thick-headed stupidity, it took more than two weeks to start receiving mail again, let alone putting the site back up.

I’ve got the site somewhat in place, but I am still working out bugs. Hopefully I’ll get that all sorted this weekend. If you see something wonky, let me know.

As is so often the case, I subscribed to the mutt-users list to fix a specific problem, and I have stayed on and asked questions and greatly improved and complicated the way that I use mutt. For the last four days I have heard not a peep from the list, and it was beginning to bug me. I am accustomed to reading or skimming the list every day, and so it is quite a disorienting experience. Finally, early this afternoon, I got my first message for a long time, and by the looks of the archiving groups, it is the first they have received as well. I hope the list comes back to full strength, because there are some great resources there.