Infinite State

What I hadn’t realized was that my old MovableType export included thousands of spam comments…now in this WP blog. I installed SpamKarma 2 but found it still awkward to work through them.

So thanks to Dreamhost’s excellent setup, I was able to fire up phpMyAdmin and connect directly to my blog db and fire off this bit of SQL:

delete FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_ID` > 43

Of course, you should figure out what ID is your last good comment. Or just wipe them all out.

Too depressing to go into, but yet again energy is required to deflect abuse of the net by spammers.

I’m trying out the Anti-spam plug-in from NIO, available here:

http://nio.infor96.com/archives/369

I wrote a bunch of posts over the years at a prior ISP, running MovableType. It turned out that MT was such a security hole, they had to shut it down. There were more pressing issues in my life, so I wasn’t blogging much and let it go. But when I landed here at Dreamhost and saw the easy install of WordPress, I was interested in bringing my old posts over. Well, it seemed like it should be easy, right? Just export, right? Except the server was no longer running…

So here’s my recipe for any folks who need to get their old stuff out, because it wasn’t as simple as it should have been. Could have been. If I’d had this list first:

(I’m running Win XP locally, and the MT files were in Berkeley DB files on my old ISP’s server, which I had SCP access to.)

1. Download and install Apache for Windows, not as a service.
2. Download and install Perl 5.6 (not 5.8) from ActiveState but make sure you set the install directory to be c:\usr, not c:\Perl (the default). This will simplify the cgi script executions.
3. Run the Perl package manager with “ppm -install db_file”.
4. Download and unpack the MovableType distribution into a folder. Rename the folder “mt” and move it under your Apache cgi-bin directory.
5. Touch up your httpd.conf file (I dropped threads to 10 but it’s not necessary).
6. Make sure to move the /mt-static/ folder under /htdocs, don’t leave it under /cgi-bin/mt/ or the scripts won’t work.
7. Follow the installation instructions for MT.

The trick is to get Apache invoking the .cgi files via Perl (you don’t need mod_perl for this) and I tried the registry approach but settled on the #!\usr\bin\perl trick.

Once you can run the /cgi-bin/mt-check.cgi, you’ll see that you’re covered (or not) and good to go. At that point, I was able to run the mt.cgi script, which wanted me to upgrade my DB files…uggh. That crashed the first time, but was able to complete the second, and then I was able to export my data.

WordPress happily ate it all up and they are now here, my past made accessible again. Too bad most of it’s not so relevant any more.

Anyway, it was better than doing the other things on my task list.

I’ve been using the Blue Ant headset for a few weeks now, and wanted to put down a few notes:

1. It looks really great and has nifty light sequences in blue and red.
2. It’s lightweight.
3. It’s reasonably priced (I paid about $40 in NYC at J&R).
4. It’s got a super-clever recharging setup via USB cable that also plugs into a wall-plug adapter.
5. The sound quality is not so great. It often sounds like I’m on a wireless home phone with a poor connection to the base.
6. The battery charge doesn’t seem to last long before there’s a degradation in voice (a day on standby? an hour of talking? hard to say).
7. In any kind of wind or noisy area, it’s almost useless.

I can only really compare it to my old Jabra BT200 which definitely sounded better but had its own problems. So overall, it’s useful but I’m not satisfied.