Ever find yourself in vi(m) with a piece of code that needs some editing, but to preserve your paste buffer you keep limping around first deleting the first part and pasting it through the file, and later doing it again but now for the second block of code?
Let’s use an example. Imagine this very simple piece of html:

Now imagine we want to make it a bit more fancy, and want to add a hyperlink to a dictionary or something for all occurrences of the word ‘text’. Since we’re lazy, we only want to type the code for the link once.

Step by step:

• Add the link code on the first occurrence of the link, you’ll have to type it once anyway 😉
• We are going to use register ‘a’ for the first part of the link, the a href=”blabla” part. The end we put in buffer ‘e’. To yank the first bit into buffer a, yank as you always would, but start off by typing “a. So the total command could look like “ay/< to yank right from where your cursor is to the start of the next tag.
• Next, to make things fancy, we do the same with the end tag, except we yank to register b by using something like “b/< to yank.
• To make sure you yanked the correct stuff, type :reg to see the contents of your registers.
• Now paste the appropiate register at the right spots by using “ap and “bp. Isn’t that great? 😉

  So summarized:

  Show your what’s in vims buffers / registers:
  
:reg


  Delete a line into buffer ‘a’:
  
"add


  Paste buffer q:
  
"qp


  Some more advanced tricks:

  Add something to a buffer by using the capitalized register name. :
  
"Add


  Editing register a manually:
  
:let @a = "this text is now the new buffer content. Hihi."


  Search and destroy using a regexp to replace stuff with the contents of your register:
  
:%s/je moeder/\=@a/g


  Have fun 🙂

Windows and Ninite

So after the Adobe Cancer experience yesterday I still had to install a bunch of other things for the helpless windows user.
After I was done with most of that (of course, the good stuff always comes too late) I ran into this tool: Ninite.
They call it “The easiest way to get apps”. Well, from the screenshots it certainly looks that way. No cruft like toolbars and updaters and junk installed, just the application. (continue reading…)

They’ve managed to piss me off once more.
I had to do a windows reinstall (XP of course) for some idiots that fubar-ed their machine, so after the usual install, 5 million windows updates, service packs, reboots and firefox install I figured I should probably install flash for them.
How hard can it be to install Adobe Flash? (continue reading…)

How incredibly stupid can they possibly get… like a dumb user that keeps running virus infected “naked hot girls!!!” screensavers, they keep adding DRM.
And now we’ve reached the point where they expect you to stay connected constantly to play a single player game.
Aahahahaha. Bye bye Ubisoft, may the pirates laugh at you and dance on your grave.
Alas for Settlers 7.. could have been an interesting game.

However, I expect them to revert their plans when enough badmouthing hits the news and make them “only” half as bad as they currently are.
We’ll see.

So every once in a while you have to mess around a bit with new stuff. Window managers for example.
I’m quite happy with Fluxbox (been using it since I started with linux), but it’s nice to see something new once in a while. Especially since development on Fluxbox is kind of …. dead. Well, not completely, but there’s just not much to be added without totally changing the thing.
My brother mentioned Awesome a few weeks ago, and during HAR last year it was also mentioned as something that I might like.
Which means it’s time to check it out! 🙂 (continue reading…)

I can’t for the life of me begin to imagine why anyone would use cmake as an autoconf alternative. (continue reading…)

Yesterday Slackware64-current gave me Firefox 3.6. So far I’m happy to note that this broke more than half my addons, but that’s to be expected with that addon-hell.
Wonder when they clean up that act and start including required stuff like firebug. Anyway, a while ago I built google gears for firefox 3.5. Since Google is too incompetent to provide a 64 bit linux version, you have to do it yourself, which I did. However, with the Firefox 3.6 upgrade this addon also broke. (continue reading…)

After a few days of waiting on a reply on the forums I got tired of waiting. So my possible solutions: Either switch to a newer glibc (which probably comes down to upgrading to slackware 13, not in the mood for that) or move the teamspeak server to a new domU. Since it couldn’t possible *cough* be kernel related, I figured the problem had to be in glibc somewhere. (continue reading…)

A week or two ago I installed the latest teamspeak 3 beta on our server to check out how well it works these days.
I was impressed by how far they have come. Back when I still played WoW we always used Ventrilo version 2. We never ugpraded to the new 3 version (even though thats illegal according to them….) because version 3 had a 10 slot limitation on the free server version. Of course they don’t tell you how much a license for version 3 costs, unless you want to host more than 1000 slots. Paying for Ventrilo would be fine, but paying for 1000 slots? Ha. And yeah, there are hosts that specialize in that (and make you pay through the nose for it), but we wanted to host it ourselves.

Anyway, Teamspeak 3 has a much better view of the world. They offer a -free- personal (that means non commercial!) non-profit license. This means if you’re a guild you can obtain a license
from them for free over here which allows you to host your own Teamspeak 3 server with 10 virtual servers and 512 slots. That’s more like it!
And if you ARE commercial, their licenses are well defined and very affordable. For instance a 1 year license for 25 slots is only $25. Compare that to Ventrilo 2 providers that ask you E10,- per month. Ha.
Oh, did I mention that they DO have a linux client? And windows and mac of course…. including the 64 bit versions. Lovely 🙂

However, as it’s still in beta I run into some problems every now and then. Today I was asked to upgade the b12 server to the latest. So I tried.
Result:

2010-01-22 15:16:11.447045|INFO |ServerLibPriv | | Server Version: 3.0.0-beta16 [Build: 9929]
[ blabla ]
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'boost::exception_detail::clone_impl >'
what(): epoll: Function not implemented
Aborted

…. welcome back my friend…. BOOST …. always the fucking same with that piece of rubbish.
However, to be fair this could very well be a “learn to code” problem by teamspeak, but still… it’s always boost the brings the curses.
So what is it complaining now? I don’t have epoll? Seriously? Let’s see about that.

# uname -a
Linux blue 2.6.32.2-xenU #1 SMP Thu Dec 24 15:55:52 CET 2009 i686 athlon-4 i386 GNU/Linux
# zcat /proc/config.gz | grep -i epol
CONFIG_EPOLL=y

So that’s not it.
The forum has this thread suggesting it might be glibc that’s too old.
However, this particular slackware 11 server has glibc version 2.3.6, which should be old enough (according to that forum thread at least). Just in case it’s not I’ll try upgrading that later.
In the meanwhile I created a thread on this problem on the forums, let’s see what they suggest. I’ll put updates here.

Today I was scripting up some commandline tools and found myself in need of doing some MySQL commands on the commandline.
Or to be more specific: I wanted to create a database and grant some permissions. So I figured “Admin stuff… let’s try mysqladmin“. (continue reading…)