So, after yet *another* firewall HDD failure, I ended up with systemrescuecd booted from a USB stick on my firewall, because I just needed something to run an FS repair with.

Yeah I was silly, I should have gotten the debian-live rescue CD, and followed my own instructions to recover and just “gotten it on with”, but you know how these things go.

So, systemrescuecd didn’t really help in the end, and the fucking HDD was blown to shit as usual, so cue another reinstallation.

Except I thought “well, I’ve got this linux running now already, from sysrescuecd, lets install Debian, from Linux” right ? I mean… “_How_ hard can it be ?”

Well, I really liked my old debootstrap method, but sysrescuecd is Gentoo based, and thus I had to start fiddling with “emerge”.  Well, emerge sucks, and after half updating it’s cache, it had eaten all the ramdisk that was available on the live-cd, and thus everything from there was “FAIL”…

So I simply wget’ed the deboostrap package and moved on from there

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.26+squeeze1_all.deb
ar -x debootstrap_1.0.26+squeeze1_all.deb
tar xvfz data.tar.gz
DEBOOTSTRAP_DIR=./usr/share/debootstrap/ ./usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch amd64 squeeze /mnt http://debian.mirror.ac.za/debian


Then follow the rest of the instructions from my old instructions and get a shiny new debian, replacing “lenny” with “squeeze”, or whatever blows your hair back.

In alternative news, Anette Olzon and Pain together is awesome:

And, a pretty cool tale of aliens-drank-my-milk-whilst-I-was-sleeping-and-parked-their-ship-in-the-backyard :

The only thing I ever wanted, the only thing I ever needed
Is my own way – I gotta have it all

I don’t want your opinion, I don’t need your ideas
….

FrozByte posted a link to some really neat chip songs the other day. (Red Light is still my favorite)

In a fit of nostalgia, I was trawling my .mod collection and came across some really good old school chip songs.

1.) Global Trash 3 v2, by Jesper Kyd. 4 channel, 8 bit.

This is from the seminal Amiga demo called “Hardwired”

We used the same tune in “The Joint Hackers'”  first attempt at .demo as well. I think Wayne replaced some of the samples.

It’s quite clear from the raw talent in this simple track, as to why Jesper has become quite successful.

2.) KernKraft 400 by Zombie Nation

The video is awesomely terribly kitch, and the action in the song only starts at 0:48.

But this song was an instant floor killer. It also became the stadium song in the USA for many a football match. Check out http://www.kernkraft-400.zombie-nation.com/ for some of the many remixes.

Note, that in typical house techno style you will need serious bass to enjoy the chip generated sine waves.

This song is probably one of the few reasons why I would resort to tappetness, and apply an aftermarket sound system to my Mercedes.

A very scary privacy fact :

But it was only an early mile marker in Sweeney’s career; in 2000, she showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information: ZIP code, birthdate, and sex.

Latanya Sweeney’s (hard to find) draft research on the topic, seems to indicate 87% identifiable, however, Philippe Goll, revisted her study and was only able to reproduce 61-63% hit rate.

This is still a rather spectacular hit rate in my opinion.

I always thought data mining was boring.

This rings so true…

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.