I ask this from time to time and I love reading the answers…
When and how did you first hear about insignificantthoughts.com?
Please leave a comment at your earliest convenience.
Thanks!
Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, insignificantthoughts.com
After banging my stupid head against the wall like an idiot last night, I settled in, figured it out, and now it’s all working. Here’s how you do it:
Before you start, understand what these instructions are for:
These instructions assume you’re moving from Movable Type 3.34 to WordPress 2.1.2 or later AND that you have no customized WordPress content (why would you? You’re switching!). ON steps where I tell you to delete stuff, you can always download it and save it for a rainy day.
1. Inside Movable Type, go to Import / Export. Export your file and download it to your desktop. You should have a file called Import.txt. That file is all your entries, comments, pingbacks, trackbacks, and so on. Open that file in a quality text editor and save it as UTF-8 format. That will keep your special characters in place and save you a ton of problems later on. If you don’t do this, your quotes and such will be replaced with various cruft.
2. Delete your entire MT installation. You don’t need it anymore.
3. Install WordPress 1.5.2. Why, you ask? Because the instructions on the WordPress site are so hopelessly out of date that they don’t work with any of the newer versions, but they work just fine with 1.5.2.
4a. If you have server root access, edit PHP.ini to change the Script Memory. Assuming you have a large file of imports (bigger than 5 megs) change it to 100 megabytes. Restart Apache. Don’t forget to change this back after you’re all done!
4b. If you don’t have root access, split your file appropriately. The WordPress importer is smart enough to not overwrite entries it already imported, just make sure you keep your entries in the split files together.
5. Copy the file import-mt.php to your desktop. It’s in your installed folder under wp-admin/import. In the folder change the line that says define(’MTEXPORT’, ); to define(’MTEXPORT’, ‘import.txt’); where import.txt is the file name you chose for your entries file. Take that file and upload it into wp-admin.
6. Log into Wordpress (http://www.domainname.com/wp-login.php)
7. Go to http://www.domainname.com/wp-admin/import-mt.php
8. Click the link that says Let’s Go
9. On the next page, you’ll see an author mapping table. Map the authors from your file to the authors you have in WordPress appropriately.
10. Click Submit.
11. The system will start parsing the file. One by one you should see something like “Entry: Entry name, Comment Posted, Comment Posted, Comment posted, comment posted”. Let that roll. It’s gonna take awhile.
12. After a few minutes, you’ll see a link that says Have Fun. You’re not ready to have fun yet. You have some work to do, dammit!
13. Go into your installed WordPress folder and wipe out your WordPress installation. Erase every folder that was installed with WordPress and every file. I promise you don’t need them anymore.
14. Download WordPress 2.1.2. Change the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and edit it appropriately using the settings for your existing MySQL database. Now that you’ve done that, upload everything into the appropriate folders on your server.
15. Run http://www.domainname.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php
16. Verify that everything is working and that your entries have moved over.
17. Once everything is working, go into PHPMyAdmin and delete your MT database.
I understand that WordPress includes an importer in 2.0 and later, however, that importer is a pain in the butt and will choke on a MT import file bigger than 2 megabytes. I can’t imagine people having anything that small, but if you do, just use it. This method worked with my import file which was 17.5 megs. It’s a bit roundabout, but it does work as evidenced by the fact that I’m up and running today!
Happy hacking!
Technorati Tags: wordpress, movable type
I didn’t post last week’s podcast!
Slobokan and I took off from doing Information Salad last week, but I still did a Side Salad Saturday morning…
Then, of course, we did Information Salad last night…
And this morning another episode of Side Salad…
Have a listen and send some feedback!
Technorati Tags: podcast, podcasts, podcasting, ispnmedia, ispn, information salad, side salad
A science project launched by two teenage students in New Zealand has cost a huge multinational more than $180,000 and forced it to launch a nationwide ad campaign to correct claims about vitamin C in the popular Ribena blackcurrant drink.
“It goes to show that consumer action really can make a difference — we hope it inspires other consumers to hold companies to the promises they make,” Paula Rebstock, chair of New Zealand’s commerce commission, said in a release Tuesday.
WOW. My science projects were seriously less interesting. Glad I’m not in school these days.
Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo were 14-year-old students at Pakuranga College near Auckland in 2004 when they tested the vitamin C content of Ribena and other drinks for a science fair.
Continue ArticleThey found Ribena did not contain the advertised level of vitamin C. GlaxoSmithKline didn’t reply when the students approached the firm with their findings, so they took their results to a TV show.
Then the commerce commission got involved, leading GlaxoSmithKline to plead guilty to 15 advertising-related charges on Tuesday.
The company agreed to pay $227,500 NZ fine (more than $180,000 Cdn.) and take out ads in newspapers saying that some kinds of Ribena have virtually no vitamin C, the commission said.
The two girls said they were pleased with the sentence, but thought the company should have been ordered to run TV ads as well, they told the New Zealand Herald.
Man that’s good stuff…
Technorati Tags: ribena, science, woops, consumerism
I love Consumerist and Ben is a friend of mine, but it’s kinda weird that they found this story worthy of a post…
This report shows in 24 out of 25 MSAs [Metropolitan Statistical Areas], urban areas that have dense populations have fewer bank branches — therefore fewer mainstream banking opportunities — than the less populated suburbs. Without the ability to build relationships with the regulated banking community, working class and minority neighborhoods are more likely to use “fringe” services, such as payday lenders and pawnshops, for small loans. They are also more likely to have their home loans originated with mortgage brokers and subprime lenders, which often led to foreclosures and unmanageable monthly payments.
Translation: Banks tend to exist in neighborhoods where people are most likely to use them and not be living paycheck to paycheck.
Can I get a DUH from the crowd?
One commenter took the “Duh” a huge step further:
Coming soon to a study near you:
“Dairy Processing Plants Target The Dairy Farming Industry, to the Detriment of Urban Dwellers”, “Setting the Record Straight: A Majority of Financial Advisors Live Outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming” and the shocking “More Ads for Feminine Products in Women’s Magazines than in Men’s Magazines”.
Indeed. And one more that caught my eye:
So the banks dont like poor neighborhoods and the people that live there, big suprise. Hell BofA actually paid the city where I work to relocate a bus station because they were going to put it near their downtown building. And you know what? I would do the same damn thing if I were them. Rich people have money poor people dont its common sense they’d go there. You dont see any ferrari dealerships in poor neighborhoods either, is that in the study?
My guess? No.
Technorati Tags: bank, banking, consumerist, obvious
When you’re a pirate, some dangers just come with the territory: scurvy, grog hangovers, a walk down the plank at sword point. But being kicked out of school for a day?
Bryan Killian doesn’t think that’s a fair reaction to his decision to come to North Buncombe High School wearing an eye patch and an inflatable cutlass.
“I feel like my First Amendment was violated,†Killian, 16, said. “Freedom of religion and freedom of expression. That’s what I tried to do, and I got shot down.â€
His “pirate regalia†is part of his faith — the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
His faith? Give me a fucking break. Anyway, one of the commenters hit the nail right on the head and did so with stunning precision:
When your entire “faith†was created purely to piss off Kansas conservatives, your legitimacy tends to take a hit. This is not so much freedom as it is freedom to be a smartass.
Comment by Aggie20x
I don’t think the kid deserved to be suspended, but enough of the high-minded bullshit. The kid is a smartass. Schools have dress codes, and I’m sure pirate regalia isn’t acceptable. Anyway, here are a few more commenters who agree that calling this religious discrimination is quite stupid:
Freedom of religion? Give me a break. You have the freedom to express your religion in PRIVATE and in public as long as it doesn’t offend others (ie why you’re not allowed to have school-sponsored prayers in class anymore) or cause a distraction (cutlass and eyepatch = distraction to others). I say the kid is just trying to get attention.
Comment by Kevin
And this one:
The boy needs to realize when being a smartass isn’t the best policy. And it looks like all he was doing was trying to be a smartass. That’s what school is for, learning those lessons of life that would otherwise get your butt canned.
Comment by gadlaw
I was initially aggravated by the connections of religion to suspension, but I’ve come around. It appears that not everyone is swallowing the pablum.
via Dvorak
Technorati Tags: religion, flying spaghetti monster, smartass
In a moment of sheer obviousness, Bridge Ratings managed to pull this surprising stat up. Out of 1000 XM subscribers, only 12% are likely to listen to Howard Stern if the merger goes through.
Duh.
Of course, Orbitcast is having none of this obvious media baiting:
Bridge doesn’t indicate a timeframe for when they polled the 1,000 XM subs, so it’s hard to say for sure (I would assume it’s a different set of respondents?). Either way, a whopping 88% of XM subscribers seem to care less about the ability to listen to Stern, which might explain why they subscribe to XM and not Sirius.
Technorati Tags: satellite radio, xm, sirius, howard stern, who the hell cares?
Yep… Back to WordPress…
Movable Type just wasn’t workin’ for me…
Posting resumes tomorrow!
The Rev. Jesse Jackson told my colleague Ryan Grim today that he’ll cast his vote for Barack Obama.
Grim emails:
Rev. Jesse Jackson, a two-time presidential candidate and influential Democrat, told The Politico today that he plans to vote for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in the Democratic primary.
“He’ll get my vote,” said Jackson, who has also warned Obama not to take the black vote for granted.
In January, he spoke highly of Obama in an interview with CNN but stopped short of an endorsement. “All of my heart leans toward Barack,” Jackson told the network. “He is a next-door neighbor literally. I think he’s an extension of our struggle to make this a more perfect union.”
“I will talk to all of them, but my inclinations are really toward Barack,” he added.
I swear… When I created the “obvious” category on this site, this is exactly the type of story I created it for.
You buy Quicken. It’s working for you perfectly. Your bank doesn’t change their online banking system. Suddenly, you’re alerted to the fact that your version of Quicken will stop working with your online banking unless you make an upgrade you don’t need or want. Listen to the call below.
I can’t come up with one logical defense for this.
Not one.
Interesting stuff…
In the last couple of weeks Barack Obama’s YouTube numbers have absolutely skyrocketed. With over 2,700,000 views of Obama’s channel as of this writing, he has almost 35 times the number of views as Hillary Clinton, who comes in second at over 78,000 (in the last couple of days Obama’s numbers seemed to stopped climbing completely — has YouTube capped the number of views?) and his number of views have risen by almost 2000% in the last week. While we know that Obama is enjoying more support online than any other candidate and expect higher numbers on YouTube, these numbers are all out of proportion. Either Obama has left Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the dust or YouTube’s new YouChoose channel, which they launched earlier this month and which we think is a terrific innovation, is getting pwned (Translation: beware of those channel stats until further notice).
Those disproportionate numbers are reason to ponder. Read the rest here.
LONDON (Reuters) - A man who filmed himself skiing down the longest escalator on London’s underground rail network was branded “dangerous, stupid and irresponsible” on Wednesday.
The man hurtled down nearly 200 feet (60 metres) at Angel tube station with a camera strapped to his head and posted the video on the YouTube Web site.
The 60-second film shows the man climb the escalator, clip on his skis at the top and begin his high-speed descent as onlookers shout out behind him.
London Underground condemned the stunt.
“This is a dangerous, stupid and irresponsible act that could have resulted in serious injury or death to not only the individual concerned but also other passengers,” it said in a statement.
Wow… Thanks for clearing up the danger of the stunt.
But you have to admit… It’s pretty cool… Video below…
I have to say… Thank God for this whole blog A-list “scandal.” I never would’ve found Loren (or maybe I would’ve, but I would’ve missed so much!).
Yes I’m pasting the whole thing in here because if you don’t read it, you suck.
McCain-Feingold: Five Years of Failure
by Ryan Sager
March 27, 2007Five years ago today, President Bush signed into law the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Today, American politics is so clean you could eat off it — except for the mud-slinging, back-scratching, favor-trading, influence-peddling, bald-faced lying, indictments, and convictions.
Nonetheless, the folks who brought us the bill known colloquially as McCain-Feingold will be taking a wildly undeserved victory lap this week. After all the big promises leading up to the passage of McCain-Feingold, one is tempted to resort to the phrase “moving the goal posts.” But, in truth, the more apt simile would be that the reformers’ arguments are like bumper bowling: So long as they roll the ball in the right direction and manage not to hit anyone in the face, they get to feel good about themselves.
Take as a prime example of the reformers’ boasting a statement put out yesterday by the Reform Institute, a non-profit group affiliated with Senator McCain of Arizona. The statement claims that BCRA has “succeeded in its objectives.” How so? It “significantly reduced the corrupting influence of campaign contributions and enhanced the participation of small donors in the process.”
Let’s take those two claims one at a time.
As to the first part, that corruption has been reduced, this is a simple assertion, with not a single piece of evidence to back it up. There’s a reason for that: There is no evidence. By what metric does one measure “corruption”? Mr. McCain and his crew couldn’t define it before they passed McCain-Feingold; they can’t define it now; and, thus, there’s no way to measure it. Anyone paying attention to politics in the last couple years, however, would be surprised to find out corruption has been “significantly reduced.” The names of three former Republican congressmen — Tom DeLay (departed from Congress under indictment), Duke Cunningham (in jail for accepting bribes), and Bob Ney (pleaded guilty to corruption charges) — jump to mind.
As for the enhanced participation of small donors in the political process, here’s a question: If Messrs. McCain and Feingold took credit for water running downhill, would that mean they could slap it on their resumes? Small donors are participating more in politics because politicians are learning how to harness the Internet. So, unless Mr. McCain invented the Internet — and not Al Gore as we all learned in our civics textbooks — no one ought to be attributing this development to BCRA.
But was reducing indefinable “corruption” and upping the number of small donors really all McCain-Feingold promised?
Goodness, no.
The former senator from Tennessee, Fred Thompson, who championed McCain-Feingold, promised that it would “help challengers reach a threshold of credibility when they want to challenge us in these races.” Putting aside the ludicrous notion that 535 incumbent politicians sat down and tried to write a piece of legislation that would make it harder to get reelected, five years later there’s no evidence electoral competition has increased. Sure, control of Congress turned over. But anyone who attributes the 2006 election to McCain-Feingold, as opposed to Bush-Cheney-Hastert-Frist, is delusional.
Some McCain-Feingold supporters promised that the bill would reduce the amount of money being raised and spent in elections. “This bill forces all of us,” Senator Cantwell of Washington said during the debate, “to play by the same rules and raise and spend money in lower amounts.” As the Sun’s Josh Gerstein reports today, that certainly hasn’t been the result. Candidates for both parties’ nominations will surely be shattering first-quarter fundraising records next month.
Then there was the claim that McCain-Feingold could restore trust in government. On this score, Mr. Thompson declared that “we are making headway to do something that will reduce the cynicism in this country and that will help this body, that will help us individually.” While, plenty of congressmen have helped themselves individually over the past five years (see: indictments and convictions and plea agreements, above), there is still enough cynicism around for Senator Obama of Illinois to make defeating it the main rationale for his presidential campaign.
Last but not least — and here we get to the real nub of campaign-finance regulation — McCain-Feingold supporters promised that the bill would curb the scourge of “negative” and “dirty” advertising. “It is about slowing political advertising,” Ms. Cantwell said during the debate. “Making sure the flow of negative ads by outside interest groups does not continue to permeate the airwaves.”
Of course, curbing and “slowing” speech critical of politicians by “outside interest groups” (a.k.a. “citizens”) is in no way a permissible goal under the First Amendment. But, ultimately, the politicians may have failed in this most nefarious goal. And it’s not just the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who showed the way around it.
While the Supreme Court has so far upheld the patently anti-Constitutional ban on advertising by citizens’ groups 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, the rise of Internet politics may eventually supercede this atrocity. Witness the anti-Hillary Clinton “1984″ ad that caused such a stir on YouTube just last week. Such ads, cheaper than dirt (it costs money to distribute dirt, YouTube’s free), will only be more important with every election cycle.
For this reason, look for Congress to start taking an interest in “unregulated” Internet speech any day now. Money has never been the issue. Cleansing our speech of impure thoughts about politicians is the real agenda.
Mr. Sager is online editor of The New York Sun. Email: rsager@nysun.com.
And articles like this are exactly why The New York Sun may be the best paper in the city. It’s shockingly independent, not entrenched politically, and brutally honest. All the things that the other papers here aren’t.
This is really interesting…
Laura Breeden bought a new Compaq Presario C304NR notebook in January. She bought it because she wanted to get rid of Windows and all the malware that surrounds it and move to Linux, and her old laptop lacked the memory and power to run Ubuntu Edgy. The salespeople assured her that the C304NR was “Linux ready.” But they didn’t tell her that running Linux would void her warranty.
Until recently, she’s been happy with it, and with Ubuntu Edgy. But a couple of weeks ago she began having keyboard problems. The keyboard is misbehaving when she begins to type quickly: keys are sticking and the space bar does not always respond when pressed.
When she called Compaq — the unit comes with a one-year warranty on the hardware — they asked what operating system she was running. When she told them Linux, they said, “Sorry, we do not honor our hardware warranty when you run Linux.” In order to get warranty service, she was told, she would have to remove Linux and reinstall the original OS.
Laura is not a software engineer, but she failed to see how her choice of operating system could damage the keyboard.
Can you say ridiculous? I mean, it’s one thing if she called in and said she couldn’t get her trackpad to work a certain way under Ubuntu, but to wholesale ignore her issue (which is obviously hardware and not software related) just because she chose to run Linux boggles my mind. Apparently, a PR person at HP isn’t so convinced this makes sense either.
The PR rep told me, after wading through all the terms and conditions attached to the notebook’s warranty, that “it is impossible to anticipate every single issue that a customer can face, so the terms and conditions of warranties can’t list every possible scenario. Usually if a customer installs a different OS, it has a big impact on the PC and will void the warranty. However, since the OS couldn’t have been responsible for keys sticking on a notebook keyboard, I think this is an exception to the rule.” She also asserts that Compaq’s “warranty terms and conditions are in line with the rest of the industry.”
The warranty terms are definitely in line with the rest of the industry, but that certainly doesn’t make them right. The simple fact is that her keyboard failed. If she was running no OS whatsoever, her keyboard still failed, and someone at HP needs to help this woman out.
The author of this article also goes on some tirade about Microsoft and its tentacles being hooked into manufacturers in a profound way. The fact is that even when you want to change your laptop over from XP to Vista, manufacturers won’t help you if you don’t buy that MS OS from them (see this Consumerist post for an interesting story to that effect).
Either way, manufacturers need to stop sending their support to low-paid morons in India and start actually supporting their customers. Injecting common sense into the departments that deal with customers would be a good place to start.
Heh… Sean Bell, the saintly young man who was shot on his wedding night because he was black (if you believe him, his lawyers, every newspaper in New York and Al Sharpton) apparently (or should I say allegedly?) shot a drug dealer last year…
The legal ramifications over the claim that Sean Bell had shot a man last July are already being felt, according to experts and sources familiar with the case.
“Are you kidding? This will be in the jurors’ minds as soon as this hits the front page,” said veteran Queens defense lawyer Marvyn Kornberg. “You don’t forget something like this. For once, the pretrial publicity is going to help the defense.”
But once the trial starts, experts say, it could be difficult for defense attorneys representing the three cops charged in the Bell indictment to work it into their arguments.
“Legally, it can’t be used in the case unless the cops can show that they knew about it,” Kornberg said. “If the cop can show that he knew this guy was a shooter, that might have weighed into the decision of firing his gun.”
While this may be kept out of the trial altogether, and while the credibility of the drug dealer is definitely something we need to figure out, it is interesting that Sean Bell is not the saint everyone’s making him out to be. I have to wonder if anyone is ever going to really look into what happened that night, even during the trial, and not just hear about what a great man this guy was.
I sense a kangaroo court coming and there’s going to be some jury revenge for the Amadou Diallo verdict coming.
You just wait.
So since Vista launched, all we’ve heard from the fanboys is how Apple f’ed up and how Apple didn’t have iTunes and the iPod ready and Apple had Vista for months before launch and should’ve done better. It was an Apple-bashing fiesta from minute one! I have to admit my own puzzlement at how Apple could’ve done such a poor job with Vista support considering how damned long it took for it to become reality.
Recently, Apple released a patch for Vista users. While it didn’t fix all the issues, it mitigated a lot of them, but the critics were still not pleased with Apple because if for some reason they manually ejected their iPod using Vista itself and not iTunes, their library could get corrupted.
Well, as it turns out, that wasn’t an Apple issue. How do I know?
Because Microsoft fixed it today…
Microsoft released several patches for Windows Vista on Tuesday, including one designed to put the iPod and the new operating system back on speaking terms.
The software maker issued a patch that is designed to fix a problem that had left iPods vulnerable to being corrupted if Vista users select the operating system’s Safely Remove Hardware option to eject the music player.
Apple had resolved several Vista compatibility issues in iTunes, but has continued to warn users to only use the eject function within iTunes to remove an iPod in Vista.
What the hell? What the f’ing hell?
I wonder if the Microsoft fanboys will be as hard on Microsoft as they were on Apple? I mean, you would think that of all the hardware tested for the Vista launch, the digital media player that makes up 80% of the market would’ve been tested.
Then again, the Zune still isn’t compatible with Vista out of the box, so I don’t know why I would think that anyway…
