歌声よおこれ

歌声よおこれ
O Singing, Rise!

今僕等が誰かに望むのは
多分本当の事を話して欲しいだけ
愛しさなんて僕等が知らぬなら
誰か感動の歌を聴かせておくれよ
涙流れて雲の上
汚れきった僕は今から
あなたに逢いに行く

歌声よ響き合って言葉も越えて
にごった僕の罪を砕いてくれ
愛しさ知りたいだけなのさ
そして夜を越えてあなたと逢って
悲しみなんて今夜で終わらせて
歌声よ響け　今僕に

想い出なんて僕は捨てたハズなのに
なぜか思い出すのはズルく笑った自分
いまだにきっと僕は愛しさを知らぬ
だからきかせておくれよ本当の事を
涙溢れて君の影
走り去って時は後から
僕らを責め立てる

歌声よ響き出してウソをも抱いて
僕等の泣いた昨日を消してくれ
夜風に僕等は歌うのさ
そして夜を越えて二人になって
あなたのために声を震わせて
歌声よおこれ　この夜に

涙こらえて横顔冷たく光って
砕け散った夢は
それでもあなたと探しに行くよ

歌声よ響き合って僕等の罪よ
祈りとなって明日を変えてくれ
このまま僕等は歌うのさ
そして朝になって二人笑って
哀しく歌う世界を止めてくれ
歌声よおこれ　この胸に

What we desire from others these days
Is perhaps just for them to tell the truth.
If we know not of love
then someone let us hear a touching song!
Above the clouds with tears flowing,
my unclean self will now
go and meet you.

O singing, resonate, overcome words
smash the sins of my impure self.
Love, I just want to know what that is.
Pass through the night to meet you,
Whatever sadness, let it end tonight.
O singing, resonate now, to me.

Whatever memories, surely I have thrown them out.
Why is it that I remember my slyly smiling self?
Certainly I know not of love yet
So let me hear the true.
The sight of you running away with tears
from then on still torments us.

O singing, resonate, embrace even the lies
and erase yesterday's sorrows.
We will sing to the night breeze!
And so pass through the night, we are together.
For you, let my voice tremble.
O singing, rise! Into the night.

Fighting back tears with my profile lit coldly,
even if our dream is broken and scattered,
I will go look for it with you.

O singing, resonate, O our sins
turn to prayer, and let tomorrow be changed.
We will sing just like this.
And then morning comes, and we smile.
Let the sorrowfully singing world stop!
O singing, rise! Into this heart!

Kendo's Gruelling 8th Dan Test

This is perhaps the best video I've seen on YouTube.

This is what it's all about. The sweat, the tears, the things that drive men with frenzy, and to endure all to walk down the lonesome path.

Why reinvent the wheel

Not long ago I realized that my site won't scaling very well with the amount of content I want to add. Somewhere along the road my patchy PHP back-end just won't hack it anymore. The solution of course is to migrate it onto a more automatic content management system. 'No problem' I thought, nothing a little elbow grease won't fix. This was before the end of the summer.

I did manage to write up a framework of a simple CMS I called "uCMS" or "microCMS". I worked on it off and on during the work term, whenever I had no cases to work on. By the end of August, the back-end code was completed, and I left the code behind and went to Japan, gleefully thinking that all I need to do was to finish the front end UI.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I finally had some time to return to the project after exams, and was suddenly overwhelmed at how much I had to do. The Phrame framework that I based my code around was now looking tedious and clunky. The thought of redefining mappings multiple times inside the system just gave me a headache. Extremely unsatisfied with my previous design, I wanted to redo the whole system from the ground up. However the base frame was already working flawlessly, and I heeded the ominous words: "Never revamp unless absolutely needed". However, thinking the road ahead, I realized that there's a lot more to be done. I had no user management system, no gallery management, no search capability, not enough content type, no AJAX ( *grin* ), etc etc.

I decided that it's not worth the effort to develop my code any further. Instead, I turned to existing open source CMS for solution. I did use Joomla while at Autodesk to implement their support docs repository, so naturally I tried to adopt Joomla first. What an exercise in frustration. As sparky as Joomla's multiple awards are, I just found its organization to be awkward at best. Not to mention it's limited menu system that made category automation impossibly difficult. In short, I needed to do substantial amount of tinkering in the system for it to work for my site. A workload that's not unlike what I was trying to avoid at the very beginning. Certainly using the CMS for Autodesk took quite a long time too. Funny how I didn't seem to mind it that much when I was getting paid for it.

Looking elsewhere, I stumbled upon CMS Made Simple. Not the most catchy name to be sure, but it is the most intuitive Open Source CMS out there for me. The admin UI is simple and clean, and all the inner workings of the system are presented in an organized fashion and well documented. There are some areas that left something to be desired for sure, such as the inability to display sub-contents in a section out-of-the-box, and the fact that they save template and CSS code in the database, but the experience has been much better than Joomla.

I finished migrating my site into the new system in less than 10 hours. As I always say after each major overhauls, I sure hope this is the last time that I gotta do something like this.