Thursday, November 28, 2013

For He's a Jolly Good Fellow


GNUplot Tutorial for beginners (on Linux)

GNUplot is a versatile graphing and plotting tool which is more than sufficient for all your graphing needs. Some of the impressive features that I appreciate are:
  • It provides great flexibility when you want a script to automate your graphing. I had to run several hundred simulations and plot the data for each and every one of them. Without GNUplot, i could not have done it.
  • It can produce graphs in many different formats (both in vector and raster formats)
  • It has nice curve-fitting tools
  • It is free!
Here is a very simple tutorial for beginners that should get you started. If you are looking at something that has a more exhaustive coverage, you can check this: duke.edu GNUplot tutorial  or go to official GNUplot site for help.
So, lets get started.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

A Hike to Gunung Panti


I was introduced to Couchsurfing.org quite sometime back by one of my friends. It sounded interesting, but I was not too keen to try it out then. However, recently I have been really interested in going out and exploring the possibilities. I decided to join in a group of people to hike Gunung Panti mountain in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The hike was organised by Philip from couchsurfing. Philip is a Filipino and is a regular hiker and had hiked Gunung panti 8 times before. The group seemed large, with 25 people in it. I made a choice based on my gut instinct and joined them on the hike last Sunday.
At Woodlands MRT
I prepared myself for the hike, packed a sling bag with essential items from a list made by Philip. Everything was being communicated to everyone in the group through a Whatsapp group created out of convenience. The estimated expense was 30-40 MYR or Ringgits. As I was staying up for long hours for quite a few days, i was finding it difficult to sleep early so that I can get up at 5 AM on the day of hike and get ready. Eventually, I went to bed at 2 AM and the excitement did not let me sleep properly.
Things that I packed

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Managing Multiple Terminal Windows in Ubuntu 12.04/Linux

If you are working on a big project with large directories containing several source files, then there is a good chance that you might need multiple files to be open at the same time. And if you use vim editor or rely more on terminal (CLI) in a linux environment to accomplish your work, then you definitely would have felt the need to manage the multiple terminal windows that lay scattered around all over the desktop. I tried other options like terminator etc., but my friend recently introduced me to Byobu, and I find it to be the best and straightforward option to manage multiple terminal windows.

To install Byobu:
// Install byobu
% sudo apt-get install byobu

To use it:
Open a terminal window (Cntl+Alt+t)

// just type byobu
% byobu

And, now use the following key-bindings to create new terminal window panes and navigate between them.


       F2 - Create a new window

       F3 - Move to previous window

       F4 - Move to next window

       F5 - Reload profile

       F6 - Detach from this session

For more key-bindings and info, go to: http://byobu.co/documentation.html

Here's a screen-shot of how i looks:






I hope this helps. :)