a pug in the system

I finally managed to reformat my computer. Due to a shiver in the power system my computer melted on me and I have been busy pulling out the hard disk parts and trying to reformat the system. The computer didnÂ?t go down quietly. It was a vicious hit, it not only hit my boot sector, it took out random bits in files leaving me with 2 MB in bad sectors spread around my disk like dust.



Quit like dust in fact. I put in Knoppix and tried doing a system check, and all seemed fine. But WinXP refused to boot and since I had previously configured my primary partition to just 4GB I decided to thrash the system and go for a new partition scheme. But first I had the job of backing up my music and video collection, some of which had bad sectors right in the middle. Whoops!



Thankfully most of the time I use a utility to download, so I knew which websites each song came from (crucify me RIAAA) so I wrote aPerll script that copied those songs which were corrupt into a new database.



I then reformatted the system and promptly lost my downloaded copy of dhaani by strings, including the music videos I had downloaded from the strings website and a few more mp3 files that contained a recording of my nieceÂ?s voice. Aarrgghhhh!


BTWtw, I am going to the next stringÂ?s concert which is within 300 kms of wherever I am. These guys are terribly nice.


I have reformatted my hard disk so I now have four partitions, two whopping 40 GB partitions for media, one 40 GB partition for downloads and a 20GB primary partition and a 20GB partition to play around with. I have got a 10GB Linux install which I am now using to play around with Asterisk and PUGS.


BTWBtw, I think PUGS is great. Whenever you wanted to write a new language it was mandatory to bootstrap it using C, which meant lex or yacc, which meant a lot of trouble, long build cycles and a lot of teeth gnashing before you could even solve simple problems. ItÂ?s great to see something as malleable as Haskell being used to develop Perl 6. You can quickly get your hands dirty restructure the language and very quickly prototype, prototype, prototype. It gives me a warm fuzzy glow.