I’d heard about in the news a few weeks ago ago a woman in Iran that had been blinded by acid, thrown in her face by a jilted wannabe suiter. In the subsequent trial, she had pleaded that, as punishment, he should have acid dropped into his eyes and be blinded as well. An “eye for an eye”, literally.

Yesterday, I saw that a verdict in the trial had been reached, finding in favor of the woman and when handing down the sentence, the judge actually agreed with the woman and ordered the man to have a drop of acid placed in each eye and be blinded. Hot DAMN!

To quote:

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — An Iranian woman, blinded by a jilted stalker who threw acid in her face, has persuaded a court to sentence him to be blinded with acid himself under Islamic law demanding an eye for an eye.

Ameneh Bahrami refused to accept “blood money.” She insisted instead that her attacker suffer a fate similar to her own “so people like him would realize they do not have the right to throw acid in girls’ faces,” she told the Tehran Provincial Court.

Her attacker, a 27-year-old man identified in court papers as Majid, admitted throwing acid in her face in November 2004, blinding and disfiguring her. He said he loved her and insisted she loved him as well. [Full article]

A photo of the victim and douche who did the deed:

Do I see a slight physical resemblance to Richard Ramirez in the guy?

The thing I find the most ridiculous about this him is that:

Majid said he was still willing to marry Bahrami, but she ruled out the possibility and urged that he remain locked up.

Gee, thanks Majid. You’re a champ!

I can’t decide if this acid-blinding punishment is sick and fucked up or totally awesome.

On one end, it’s the fucking 21st century and a government is dropping acid into a man’s eyeball. Granted, he did some really bad shit, but still.

On the flip side, there’s a lot of acid throwing going on over there and often, the guy gets away with it completely. So, it’s nice to see someone drop the hammer on the guy in a way that’s getting some serious attention.

Right smack dab in the middle is the morbid fucker in me, that can’t stop thinking how cool it has to look. Strapping some guy down, immobilizing his head, retracting the eyelids and making that motherfucker scream. Quite the good mental picture.

I suppose it’s just a matter of time before there’s a Metal band out there with the name, “Acid Eye”.

Putzing around last Sunday, I decided to give MPD a try. I store all my MP3 files on my desktop computer, which runs Ubuntu and I’ve wanted to be able to control music playback on that machine from my laptop, wherever I happen to be lazing about at home.

I had a bit of a hard time getting MPD set up, working and compiling a database. The main issue was file permissions, but once I got that hammered out, installed MPC so I could run commands, it worked nicely.

However, I much prefer a GUI to manage music, so I hunted around for a front-end for MPD. I first tried gmpc, which worked fine. But, I need support for last.fm and to handle this with with gmpc, you have to compile a plugin, which was a huge bitch.

While trying to get through the plugin compile, I stumbled on Sonata, which seemed popular and well regarded and contains built-in support for last.fm. Also, it’s in the Ubuntu repositories, which is a big plus for me. So, I dropped gmpc and gave it a try.

Sonata works well, it displays album art and all that fun stuff, but doesn’t have the smart playlists that I’ve grown used to with Amarok and exaile, which were two programs I’ve loved and relied on in the past. Truth told, it’s low on features, but so are most MPD front-ends. It works, though. It handles last.fm and doesn’t look too fugly. I’m going to stick with it for a while and see how it goes, since I really like being able to run a central music server. But, if there’s a better front-end out there, I’d like to know about it.

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]