Ye Olde Rad Blog II

I installed (apparently) the final version of the 3.xx series (v3.35) on 16.April.2007. See here > First Post with Movable Type v3.35. I also installed a bunch of cool plug-ins, as detailed here > Dialing In Movable Type.

I very much like v3.35, finding it sophisticated, elegant & powerful, especially after "upgrading" from v2.63 (v3.35 was actually a new installation), which I installed back in May 2003.

Heard rumblings that 6A has invested considerable developmental resources into v4.0, so I'm looking forward to checking it out .. tho my days of being an "early adopter" are long gone.

I'll probably migrate to v4.x after the 1st or 2nd update (4.01, or 4.02). Actually, I'll probably do another new installation, like I did with v3.35.

Word on the street is that 6A neglected Movable Type while working on the Enterprise version & TypePad, and have now come back (with a vengeance) to focus on making MT the best blogging platform (on the planet).

6A will need a strong showing from MT4 if they hope to stave off the WordPress phenomena.

Under heading, "Why now" listed here (half-way down page), 6A says MT4 is the > "culmination of more person-years of development than any other release."

The very next paragraph characterizes MT4 thusly > "the biggest development investment we've made in any version in Movable Type's history." So expectations are high.

Installed Norton Ghost 12 last night, and (successfully!) created my first Windows-based back-up image (which Symantec terms a Recovery Point) .. of my laptop's system drive .. to a 500-gig Seagate external USB drive (from Newegg).

If you've been Radified for any length of time, you know how we stress the importance of backing-up your hard drive with a cloning program, such as Ghost.

The Rad Community forums have become the de facto Ghost support forums on the Web, frequented by people smarter than me, who graciously lend their experience.

We even have one of the program's original developers stopping by (from New Zealand), sharing insights, along with other wizards, who all possess their particular niche of expertise.

I've been pooh-pooh'ing the notion of Windows-based back-up images ever since Ghost 9.0 first arrived on the scene (for reasons detailed > here),..

.. but figure it's time to join the 21st century, and gather some experience with these newfangled (Windows-based) imaging tools.

... which allows attackers to register with Administrator privileges by "setting the values of certain variables to contain certain characters." (Nice of them not to spell-out how to implement the hack.)

Attackers can then wreck all manner of ugliness.

I discovered the vulnerability last night, but couldn't implement the fix, cuz other mods I've installed had modified the original source code of the files I needed to patch (register.pl + profile.pl).

The patch searched for (some of) the flawed code, but couldn't find it, cuz it had been modified by another mod. Actually, the first 8 steps proceeded fine. Only the 9th and final step errored. But unless the entire fix can be implemented, the patch refuses to install.

At 11PM last night, I was tired and not thinking clearly, so I disabled the registration feature (to help mitagate the vulnerability) and went to bed.

We've stopped by the theater before today, but never gone with a specific movie in mind. Previous visits were merely intended to familiarize him with what it feels like to walk inside a (dark) movie theater .. so today (when it finally came) wouldn't be such a surprise.

We saw Surf's Up (dude). Strong reviews. A flick about penguins who surf. Pretty funny. Made me laugh out loud several times.

The bug is still small enough that he can sit on my lap. Before leaving the house I found the Surfs Up web site, and reviewed the main characters with him, so he'd be familiar with their names (Cody, Chicken Joe, Tank, Lani).