Tip

I recently had trouble with a MySQL installation in Ubuntu. For some reason or the other, during an upgrade to a newer version of mysql-server, the upgrade script had issues stopping the server and the script failed. This meant that apt could no longer function as it kept raising a red flag over the broken upgrade with the following instructions:

dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

I ran into a hitch while trying to install the latest version of TortoiseSVN on my XP 64-bit Windows installation. Apparently, the entire world has forgotten about the existence of this variety of Windows. There's absolutely no mention of it anywhere on TortoiseSVN's installer page. The MSI installer failed stating that the version of Windows Installer that I was using was dated and that I needed to update my version of XP (x86) to SP3 or some other drivel like that. TortoiseSVN has no manual install option either. I did the whole Windows Update thing as well, to no avail.

I'm trying to VNC into my Kubuntu box using Jump Desktop from my Android tablet. All works well and everything is quite peachy. Everything that is, except for typing with the keyboard. Typing anything results in letters being displayed in capitals. Using the SHIFT key in the Android keyboard does fuck all. However, when I connected a keyboard to the Kubuntu box and pressed the CAPS LOCK key, my Android keyboard started typing in smalls.

Just now while attempting to perform a substitution in GVim, I found that the regex was not working as expected. Apparently, instead of matching all non-whitespace characters denoted by the shorthand class \S, the engine was matching the letter S instead, which was odd. It turns out that, as usual, I was the one at fault. What I was doing wrong was attempting to use the character class within [] groups. Thinking about it further, it is reasonably redundant to nest one class within another and therefore, understandable.

Earlier today, I had to perform a substitution in Gvim within a 2GB file. Unfortunately, after a few thousand operations, Vim ran out of memory with the following error:

Out of memory!
Out of memory! (allocating XXX bytes)

Windows too complained about running out of virtual memory and my system slowed down to treacle-like response times.

In Linux, replacing all instances of a string with another string is easy thanks to sed. A simple example is as follows:

To replace the string foo with the string bar in all .txt files:

sed 's#foo#bar#g' *.txt

This will replace the strings. However, it won't actually save the changes and will instead output the modified text to the screen. To retain the changes or, in other words, to perform the replacements in place within the file, use the -i switch:

Attempting to update flashplugin on Ubuntu Precise resulted in an error. Removing the package and reinstalling it resulted in the following:

I ran into this issue a couple of days ago and cannot recall the exact error message. However, the problem was effectively that aptitude could not install the new kernel update because my partition had apparently run out of space. An interrupted update to Klipper is one thing and the Linux kernel a whole 'nother kettle of fishies. Thinking that I simply needed to free up some space on my partition, I checked the current status via df. I surprisingly had 30% of free space still left lying about (my /home is mounted on a different partition). So what ...

Since I keep forgetting this shortcut, here it is for posterity. Activating GNU Screen's scrollback feature can be done by pressing CTRL + a + [. This is especially handy when you are using Screen from within PuTTY.

While a number of sites provide additional Vim-esque shortcuts to navigate within the buffer, I've been able to get by fine with just the navigational arrow keys on my keyboard.

I got a new 3TB hard disk. While it's being detected in Windows 7, initializing it has proved to be impossible as I keep running into the following error:

The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error

After testing this one a couple of different systems and in Linux, I have arrived at the conclusion that the drive is screwed. Time to get it replaced.