External Brain

In an analysis of junk e-mails received over two days in mid-February, Sophos created a list of the dirty dozen spam-producing countries. Taking the undisputed helm on its list of spam-producing countries is the United States, which accounted for more than half of the world’s unsolicited e-mail at 56.7% during the period of study. Canada accounted for 6.8%; China, 6.2%; South Korea, 5.8%; and the Netherlands, 2.1%. The other top 12 countries were Brazil, German, France, United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico and Spain. However, those seven countries in total accounted for just more than 10% of all spam. All other countries in the world created an additional 12.2% of the globe’s spam

Three Engineering students from Simon Fraser University have developed a laptop alarm complete with remote pager that detects if your laptop is being moved and sounds an alarm

An interesting, elegant and extremely simple method of circumventing the annoying Symantec attempt to extort money from you repeatedly for the same piece of software you’ve already purchased.

Removing all instances of norton, antivirus, symantec, and liveupdate is a bit overkill, especially if you have other Norton/Symantec products installed, as I do. It’s really a lot simpler than that. All you have to do is uninstall LiveUpdate, delete the file Catalog.LiveSubscribe, which is found in \Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\LiveSubscribe in NT-based operating systems. It’s pretty primitive.

Symantec is generally a cool software company, relatively speaking, but this is one thing that really gets on my nerves. Once you install an antivirus package, it should continue working, with virus updates, for as long as the company you bought it from exists. Its function is too critical for it to just stop working and start wheedling you for more money. So, I don’t mind sharing this information.

MySQL has been installed at last. Hit a few bugs along the way, but managed to figure out what was creating the errors that crashed the Berkeley DB to MySQL conversion.

The first problem was a typo in the EntryList plugin. Fixed that and tried again.
It then hit a warning caused by MT-Blacklist, solved that by temporarily removing MT-Blacklist and reinstalling it after the conversion. Even though I got the warning, the conversion happily ran until it stalled on the comments.

This time it turned out to be MTThreadedComments causing the error, it was installed but never used so the new fields never made it into the database. I never would have found it if I used the patch instead of manually adding the plugin additions to MT myself.

Some helpful advice from the MovableType Support Forum was to temporarily remove any offending plugins and turn off auto-discovery before running the conversion script.

The last problem the template files not having the proper permissions (no idea how they magically swapped permissions in the first place, sneaky files) chmodded them to 777 and we had a successful build.

Worth noting that when mt-db2sql.cgi fails, the tables that were partially generated need to be dropped from the database before it can be run again. Fortunately I have a very helpful ISP (thank you, Paul) who loaded the appropriate perl modules I needed before the conversion and killed the tables for me every time I hit a block.

So now we’re in the land of the far more stable and robust MySQL database, which will hopefully prove more Red Wolf-proof than Berkeley DB. But if it does get corrupted, at least there are tools to fix MySQL. Guess I’ll see how it goes.