When I woke up this morning, I noticed an email from this site, congratulating me on setting up a new blog. Wondering what the hell that was supposed to mean, I went to this site, only to be greeted with the WordPress install page (wp-admin/install.php), as if no blog existed.

I figured the MySQL on this server had crashed. I wasn’t too worried about it as I’d backed up all my data late last week anyway. I figured I’d give it an hour for the host to sort out and check back later.

By the time I got to work, the site was indeed back up. I logged into WordPress and immediately noticed that the blog title that usually runs the top of the dashboard was now some long URL with words like “casino” and “gambling in it. All my posts seemed to be there, so I poked around a bit and noticed that the admin email had been changed to a hotmail address.

I quickly fixed this and continued to snoop around, but didn’t find anything else out of the ordinary.

I’m figuring that early this morning, some bot attacked all or a few of the WordPress blogs on my server, ramming it with requests until MySQL bailed. Then, it used the install.php file to try and create a new blog and change the password/contact address. Of course, it failed for the most part, but still…

So, no harm done, but I’m definitely wiser. After an initial blog is created, there’s no reason to keep install.php in your files. I deleted that as well as put several restrictions in place. Much Better.

Here’s a decent list of things you can do to harden and lock down your WordPress install.

I’m highly amused by this video of Microsoft CEO and all around fucking demon from Hell and perennial shithead, Steve Ballmer getting eggs chucked at him while giving a talk at a university in Hungary. He actually ducks for cover and cowers behind the podium.

I’m just bummed that he managed to not get hit with any of the eggs.

Did you know you can make your Mac speak out loud whatever you want via command line? I didn’t.

Here’s how:

1. Open a terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal).
2. Type in say eat my balls (or whatever you want, just put “say” in front of it).
3. Sit back, listen, giggle and waste your entire day making your computer say really dirty things.
4. Know you are really, really cool.

You can also have your mac read entire text files by using this command:
say -f PATH/TO/FILE.TXT

Sweet! You may find that for some words, in order for your Mac to pronounce them correctly, you’ll need to spell them phonetically, but whatever…

Type the command man say for the manual on how to use this command and the various options and things you can do with it.

This is one the stupidest spam emails I’ve received in a good long while. So lazy, so completely ridiculous in it’s amount of fearless disregard for any kind of credibility, I just had to post it.

The Internet Website Service wish to inform you that we are having some problem with some Website Service Accounts,due to error code 334409.We have discorvered that in few days from now some account will not be able to access his or her E-mail account.

IN THAT REGARD,YOU ARE REQUIRED TO SEND YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS AND PASSWORD FOR UPGRADING YOUR ACCOUNT.

YOU ARE ADVISED TO IMMEDIATELY SEND US THE REQUIRED INFORMATION SO AS TO ENABLE US IMMEDIATELY UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT.

NOTE:You have to understand that the reason why we are not sending this message from our own private account it’s due to some technical problem we are having right now.Thanks for your understanding.

THE INFORMATION BELOW REQRUIRES AN ACCOUNT UPDATE

1)Full Email Address:
2)Password:
3)Country:
4)Date of birth:
5)First name/Last name:
6)Alternative Email

Best Regard,
Jerry.

Copyright © 2008 The Trustees of Webmail Service | Copyright Complaints

OH NOES!!! The Internet Website Service is getting an error code 334409!?!? My precious email! I must send them all my private information immediately to prevent a possible clog in my internet tube! Maybe I should send them my social security number and mother’s maiden name as well, just to make sure and play it safe.

Help me “Jerry”, you’re my only hope.

I’ve been looking for a decent way to convert FLAC files to MP3 under Linux for a while now. I’d been using SoundConverter, but I notice that there’s something not right with it. I’ll set my preference to VBR, highest quality (target rate is ~256), but I end up with files at around 150-192, which is not right.

So, I’ve done a bunch of searching around and have cobbled together this script, taking a little bit from here and a lot from there:

##START SCRIPT##
#!/bin/sh

for a in *.flac
do
OUTF=`echo "$a" | sed s/"\.flac$"/"\.mp3"/g`

ARTIST=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`
TITLE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`
ALBUM=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g`
GENRE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g`
TRACKNUMBER=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`
DATE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=DATE | sed s/.*=//g`

flac -c -d "$a" | lame -V 0 - "$OUTF"
id3v2 -t "$TITLE" -T "$TRACKNUMBER" -a "$ARTIST" -A "$ALBUM" -g "$GENRE" -y "$DATE" "$OUTF"
done

mkdir "$ARTIST" && mkdir "$ARTIST"/"$ALBUM"
mv *.mp3 "$ARTIST"/"$ALBUM"/.
## END SCRIPT##

It works beautifully.

if only i could aspire to this dude’s sheer rock:

[Link to video]

Nice. I just figured out how to eject my CD/DVD drive on my Linux desktop (Xubuntu) via command line!

First, display your fstab file to see what the drive is named: ’sudo cat /etc/fstab’

Then look for your disc drive. Mine was called ‘cdrom0′.

Once you’ve found it, type ‘eject [name of drive]‘ and watch the magic.

I mapped that command to my keyboard. Gnome, Xfce and KDE all have a an interface to help you map keyboard shortcuts in their system preferences, or you can just edit the config files manually with a little googling. I mapped ‘ALT-Shift-F12′ to run ‘eject cdrom0′. Easy.

Fucking awesome.

[Link to video]

This is what every craft-oriented, Doom Metal chick should be wearing:

Impress your friends! Be the coolest and creepiest chick on the scene!
Buy one today!

I’ve been using Firefox, Ubuntu and Thunderbird for years now and one thing that always irked me was the fact that the “Send Link” option in Firefox was totally non-operational. Ideally, I’d ALT-F - E and bang, a new email would open up in Thunderbird with the page title in the subject and the link in the body of the mail, but no go. Nothing.

This morning, I wanted to email a buddy of mine a link and got to feeling like there must be some fix out there for this, so I did some Googling and after hitting on the sweet search string, I found the answer.

To get Firefox to open a compose window via the “Send Link” option, do this:

1. Open firefox and in the address bar, type “about:config”
2. Right-click within the body of the page that opens and select “New” and then “String”
3. In the dialog box, where it says “Enter preference name”, paste: network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
4. In the next dialog box, enter your path to Thunderbird. Mine is /usr/bin/thunderbird.
5. Hit OK and restart Firefox. “Send Link” should now work with Thunderbird.

Sweet.