NerdyRoom™ » DOS

WinXP Epic Fail or how a penguin made my day

stefan — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:01:20 +0000

Well, all work and no fun make Jack a dull boy. That’s why at my PC at home, there’s a Windows XP installed besides my usual Linux installation. With it I do the in my opinion only thing Windows is better in than Linux, gaming. One can have other opinions, but for now that’s not the point.

In my experience a Windows system needs just a little bit of time to get slower and slower and start behaving crazy which leads to getting unusable and to a reinstallation. I had to say I was a little bit proud of this special installation, because I had no real difficulties within the last 6 month. Maybe it is because I just installed a Firewall, a Software to detect viruses and the single game I usually play … or it just waited until I was unsuspecting. But today it greets me with a nice black screen and the following white letters on it:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Ok I do not exactly know what this file does (Managing Hardware access if I have to guess), but I’m sure I never touched her, seriously!

After th obligatory reboot a little bit of panic, anger and sadness followed. In the next second I started searching the web for a solution, or to get a copy of this hal.dll file. I read a bit in crappy forums and decided to find a file download with the dull feeling in my mind, that it can’t be a good idea to get a system-essential file from a source I don’t trust. In this moment a little penguin in my mind whispered “wine”… First I was confused, I more like beer but then I understand – WINE!

Excited typing began, for the hunt of hal.dll in my wine source directory. I smiled when I found it at the expected position. “Too easy to work!”, I thought… Next I mounted my NTFS partition and copied the file to where it whould be if my stupid Win*** didn’t lost it. Unmount, Reboot and crosses fingers followed. And what should I say? SUCCESS!

At the end I need to say, it is a nice job for (not) an emulator to fix the stuff it (not) emulates!

DOS #2: Vim Tips

ronny — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:24:25 +0000

I have been using vim for development for over half a year now and want to share my setup and some commands I use on a daily base. To understand the article you need basic knowledge of how vim works.

Overview:

Name:	Vim (Vi IMproved)
Version:	7.2
URL:	http://www.vim.org/

How to set default options:

In the .vimrc file, default options can be set. This file is located in your home directory. e.g. ./home/user/.vimrc. There also is a global vimrc: /etc/vim/vimrc.

Default Option Set:

Abandon vi compatibility. Needed to get all the extras of vim.
```
set nocompatible
```
Backspace is allowed to remove indentions, end of lines and starts.
```
set backspace=indent,eol,start
```
Do not create backup files.
```
set nobackup
```
Set the length of the history (accessed through arrow up and down, while typing a :-, /- or ?-command) to 400 entries.
```
set history=400
```
Show the current cursor position in the status line.
```
set ruler
```
Display incomplete commands in the status line.
```
set showcmd
```
Display the current mode in the status line.
```
set showmode
```
Visually jump to the matching opening bracket for a short time, when typing a closing bracket.
```
set showmatch
```
Show intermediate search results, while typing a search term.
```
set incsearch
```
Do not insert two spaces after a ‘.’, ‘?’ and ‘!’ with a join command.
```
set nojoinspaces
```
Disallow all keys to move to the next line. See :help whichwrap for more information.
```
set whichwrap=""
```
Use filetype-specific indention, if possible.
```
filetype plugin indent on
```
Enable syntax highlighting. Vim is able to highlight more than 200 distinct filetypes.
```
syntax enable
```
Highlight all search hits. Use :nohls to turn it off.
```
set hlsearch
```
Indent intelligently, automatically – My favourite indention mode.
```
set autoindent
```
Replace tabs with spaces.
```
set expandtab
```
How many spaces is a tab?
```
set tabstop=4
```
How many spaces is an indention.
```
set shiftwidth=4
```
Show line numbers.
```
set number
```
Always use the default color scheme.
```
colorscheme default
```
Highlight trailing spaces and @todos.
```
match Todo /\s\+$/
match Todo /@todo/
```

Jump to end of the file, if opening a log file.

:augroup somethinguseful
:au BufReadPost *.log normal G
:augroup END

Copy’n'Paste:

set nocompatible                    " deactivated compatibility to vi
set backspace=indent,eol,start      " what is the backspace allowed to delete
set nobackup                        " do not keep a backup files, use versions instead
set history=400                     " keep 400 lines of command line history
set ruler                           " show the cursor position all the time
set showcmd                         " display incomplete commands
set showmode                        " show in which mode we are in the status line
set showmatch                       " visually jumps the matching bracket when typing closing brackets
set incsearch                       " do incremental searching
set nojoinspaces                    " do not insert a space, when joining lines
set whichwrap=""                    " do not jump to the next line when deleting
filetype plugin indent on           " if there is an indention plugin matching the filetype, use it
syntax enable                       " syntax highlighting on
set hlsearch                        " highlight all search hits
set autoindent                      " indent intelligently automatically
set expandtab                       " expand tabs to spaces
set tabstop=4                       " how many spaces make one tab
set shiftwidth=4                    " how many spaces to indent, using < and >
set number                          " show line numbers
colorscheme default                                                                                   

match Todo /\s\+$/                  " highlight trailing white spaces
match Todo /@todo/                  " highlight doxygen todos        

:augroup somethinguseful
:au BufReadPost *.log normal G " jump to the end of the file if it is a logfile
:augroup END

Commands:

Since vim has a multitude of commands, having a cheat sheet is a must. Here is my favorite: Graphical Cheat Sheet.
Disclaimer: The following commands are likely to be more powerful than shown here.
This is only a narrow view on which commands and command combinations I use every day.

Legend

[] : optional argument
<> : mandatory argument
count : any number
movement : any movement command. e.g.: w,b,e,ge,arrows,^,$,…
{v} : being in visual mode
{i} : being in insertion mode

Movement

w, b : Move to the first character of the next/previous word.
e, ge : Move to the last character of the next/previous word.
//, ?? : Search the term forward/backward.
//, ?? : Repeat the last search.
*, # : Search the word under the cursor forward/backward.
n, N : Jump to the first letter of the next hit. I often use this in conjunction with the . command (The dot will be explained later on.)
:[no]hls : Switch off/on the highlight for the previous search. Use this when you are done with your search to not get distracted by the highlight.
% : Jump between matching starting and ending bracket.
^ : Jump to the first non-blank character of this line.
[count]G : Jump to line [count]. Jump to the start of the file if [count] is omitted.
gg : Jump to the end of the file.

Editing

i,a : Switch to insertion mode before/after the current position.
I,A : Switch to insertion mode at the begin/end of the line.
[count]r : Replace the [count] next characters with [count] s starting at the current cursor position.
R : Switch to replacement mode.
c[count] : Delete the next [count] s and switch to insertion mode. I very often use cw.
cc : Change the whole line and preserve the indention.
d[count] : Delete the next [count] s. I very often use dw.
dd : Remove the current line.
J : Join the current line with next.
:0,$ s///g : starting from line 0, ranging to the last line: Replace all appearances of with .
. : Repeat the last insertion command. This is a very powerful tool, when you have to change something similarly in multiple places!

Formatting

[linecount]>>, [linecount]<< : Indent the next [linecount] lines, starting with the current.
{v} [indentcount]>, [indentcount]< : Indent the selected lines by [indentcount] indents.
{v} = : Automatically indent the selected lines according to the filetype’s rules.

Copy’n'Paste

Vim has an automatically changing clipboard. It changes on every deletion/change of anything. E.g.: d,x,c,s,…

y[count] : yank/copy the next [count] . I very often use y[count]w to copy whole words.
yy : Yank the current line.
p, P : Paste after/before the current position.
{i} Alt+p : Paste before the current position and leave insertion mode.

Tabbing

vim -p [files] : Open vim opening one tab for each file specified.
:tabnew [file] : Open a new tab, loading file [file].
:tabdo : Execute command in each tab separately.
:tabmove [count] : Move this tab to position [count] or to the last position if no [count] is specified.
Ctrl+Page Up, Ctrl+Page Down : Switch between tabs.

Visual Mode

v : Switch to visual mode.
V : Switch to visual mode, selecting whole lines.
Ctrl+v : Switch to visual mode, selecting whole blocks. For example to comment out a block in c++, you just need: Ctr+v (select some lines vertically) I // Esc Esc. This puts // in each of the selected lines at the current column.
gv : Restore the last selection.

Miscellaneous

u, Ctrl+r : Undo, Redo
Ctrl+p, Ctrl+n : Word completion searching forward/backward. This command also searches through included header files in c/c++.
:mks[!] : Save the current session to file .
vim -S : Start vim using session .
:set [no]paste : Switch on/off auto indention. Use this when pasting already indented text into vim.

This is probably too much to remember at once, so I suggest you have a look at this once in a while and try to apply one feature at a time. If you got used to it, move on to next.
Happy Coding!

DOS – The Default Option Set Series: Front Page

bert — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:32:21 +0000

DOS – The Default Option Set Series #1: GNU grep

bert — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:32:17 +0000

With this post I will start an article series about default options for popular shell tools. And I would like to invite all of you to participate in this process to find a profound default option set for these tools. I will provide my current DOS as a discussion base and extend these by user comments.

In this first DOS its all about GNU grep.

Overview:

Some fundamental information about the considered tool.

Name:	GNU grep
Version:	2.5.3
URL:	http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/

How to set default options:

This section will describe how to set the Default Option Set. For grep its the environmental variable GREP_OPTIONS.

Default Option Set:

In this section comes a descriptive list of the options.

ignore binary files
```
--binary-files=without-match
```
use colored output in terminals
```
--color=auto
```
ignore special files like fifos, char and block devices
```
--devices=skip
```
exclude patch *.rej and *.orig files
```
--exclude='*.rej'
```
```
--exclude='*.orig'
```

exclude common scm directories

--exclude-dir=.git

--exclude-dir=.svn

--exclude-dir=CVS

--exclude-dir=patches

--exclude-dir=.pc

exclude build directories
```
--exclude-dir=.libs
```
```
--exclude-dir=.deps
```

Copy’n'Paste:

And here is a ready-to-use version of the option set.

export GREP_OPTIONS="--binary-files=without-match \
--color=auto \
--devices=skip \
--exclude='*.rej' \
--exclude='*.orig' \
--exclude-dir=.git \
--exclude-dir=.svn \
--exclude-dir=CVS \
--exclude-dir=patches \
--exclude-dir=.pc \
--exclude-dir=.libs \
--exclude-dir=.deps"