The Mothership

I like to consider myself semi-competent at these newfangled computer-thingies, but I keep finding myself running into problems that are slightly beyond me.

Occasionally, while watching recorded shows in MythTV, my Linux box will just freeze up and has to be manually reset. It’s *probably* a problem with the Nvidia driver’s XvMC mode, since it never happened when I was using the plain non-Nvidia Xv display mode instead. Maybe. Or maybe I simply hadn’t used the old Xv mode long enough and didn’t see it occur by pure chance and the problem lies elsewhere. Maybe it’s overheating, or there’s memory corruption somewhere. Who knows…

While playing World of Warcraft, I’ll randomly get booted back to the login screen. Is it the server being flaky again? Could be, they’ve had a lot of trouble lately, except that it doesn’t happen to others at the same time. Something on my end then, perhaps. Video driver problems, maybe? They’ve been responsible for a lot of other problems, like the instability I was seeing in KotOR. Unfortunately it’s not clear, as I’m not getting the usual driver failure message in this case. Just a plain bug in the game then? Who knows…

And now the hard drive in the XP box is acting strangely. Now it’ll occasionally spin down for a second or so and then spin back up again, as if it had lost power for that second, and then Windows freezes up. Usually when I’m trying to log in to World of Warcraft, for some reason. A problem with the power supply, perhaps? Well, I’ve moved it around to a few different cables now and there’s no difference, and it’s a fairly-new power supply with plenty of spare wattage. Maybe Linux would give me more detailed errors — except that when I boot off of a Linux live CD, the drive behaves itself perfectly well. And after rebooting back into XP, it’s been continuing to behave for another day or so. Except that it occasionally makes piercing high-pitched whines, too. So, is my drive about to fail, or is the power at fault, or is it some Windows or WoW thing?

Who knows…

Despite having used ‘vi’ and its variants as my primary editor for quite a while now (ever since it was the only editor that ran well on the university’s old Sun 3s), I’ve never really bothered to learn many of the ‘advanced’ tips and tricks. Insert, delete, copy, and paste always seemed to be good enough.

I thus only just recently discovered how to indent and unindent without having to manually insert or delete spaces repeatedly. I really should have earlier since it comes up quite often while coding, but there’s always that short-term laziness…

Anyway, in ‘vim’ at least, the useful controls are:

“>>” – Indent the current line. Use a numeric prefix to apply it to a certain number of consecutive lines.
“<<” – Unindent the current line
“>%” – Indent the entire current code block. This is the really useful one, since quite often you’re cutting and pasting a block of code into a place at a different indentation level, and you want to shift the whole block. The cursor has to be positioned at the start or end of the block, like with the basic “%” command.
“<%” – Unindent the entire current coding block.

And you can also select a region with the mouse or Shift-V and use “>” and “<” alone to indent or unindent the selected block.

Somewhat related to this is the “=” command, which modifies the indentation to match up with how the current syntax mode would have indented it based on its own built-in rules and environment settings.

“==” – Automatically adjust the indentation of the current line.
“=%” – Automatically adjust the indentation of everything within the current code block, including other blocks within this one.

And again, selecting a region and using “=” alone will apply automatic indentation to the entire region.