The Tweezer's Edge

Windows users are supposed to see a "Get Windows 10" app icon in the system tray (system notification area), which will alert them when they can upgrade to Windows 10. No matter what I did, I could not get the "Get Windows 10" app icon to appear on my Toshiba netbook, running Windows 7.

I ended up downloading and running a Windows 10 "Media Creation Tool", to create a Windows 10 USB installation media. Using the USB stick with the Windows 10 files on it, I was able to upgrade the Toshiba netbook from Windows 7 to Windows 10 without issue.

I took the plunge and upgraded my main Toshiba laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 a few days ago, just after it was released.

I had a difficult experience during and after the upgrade, due to the buggy AMD Radeon video graphics driver provided with and installed by Windows 10. The AMD driver would randomly and frequently crash Windows 10 with the Windows 10 equivalent of BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), listing the cause as "INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR".

'Nuff said!

Our car finally hit a magic mile marker a couple of months ago:

When we bought the car in 1992, it had almost 76,000 miles on it, so it only took us 13 years to put another 24 thousand miles on it.

The car has been good to us - not too many mechanical issues over the years. Hopefully the car will last us another 100,000 miles.

Plugins that I installed specifically for Movable Type 6, and plugins provided with Movable Type 6 that I disabled by removing them from the /plugins directory.

This post describes the list of plugins I had in my Movable Type 3 installation, and why I chose to include them in the Movable Type 6 installation by copying them to the /plugins subdirectory of my Movable Type 6 installation, or not include them, before I performed the actual upgrade to Movable Type 6.

Upgrade Type

• Parallel installation of MT6 to new subdomain mt6.tweezersedge.com.
• Upgrade on copy of MT3 MySQL database

If something went wrong during the upgrade, I could revert back to the original version, or recopy the database and try again. Plus, I will have the original installation as a reference point if I wanted to see how something was in the old installation, which I had not looked at in the past 10 years.

• Install MT files to single directory

My web host allows execution of .cgi scripts from any directory, so I did not need to install the MT files to a cgi-bin directory, nor did I need to install the mt-static files separate from the main MT files.

• Copy MySQL database

To copy the original database, I used phpMyAdmin in cPanel to create a new database, then exported and downloaded the MT 3.33 database to a file, then used phpMyAdmin again to upload the export file and import it into a new database.

To make things easier for me, I granted the MT 3.33 database user permissions on the MT 6 database (again, using phpMyAdmin), so the database user and password would be the same between the databases.

• Set the permissions on all .cgi scripts to 0755.

After almost a decade on hiatus, tweezersedge.com is back with new Movable Type software and a new look.

For the last 10 years, the blog was stuck on MT version 3.33. Movable Type has been upgraded to MT 6.1.2 - the most current release as of this date.

In future posts, I will describe my experience upgrading from MT 3.33.

Due to the increasing abuse of the master blacklist file on Jay Allen's server, culminating in its being hit 2.4 million times over a 4 day period, MT-Blacklist and the master blacklist are now dead and won't be coming back.

Thank you, Jay, for providing MT-Blacklist when it was needed most and putting everything you did into it to keep it working for as long as you did.

P.S. 2.4 million hits isn't a quarter of a billion, but it's still a helluva lot. ;)

The SpamLookup 'Keyword Filter' plugin provided with MT 3.2 works in a similar manner to MT-Blacklist (which SpamLookup hopes to make obsolete), but there are some differences in the way it works with keywords and regexes compared to MT-Blacklist. This post will explain some of those differences so you can understand how SpamLookup's 'Keyword Filter' uses the keywords and regexes when it is filtering spam, and perhaps experience a smoother transition when migrating from MT-Blacklist.