Archive for November, 2006

poderosa

Poderosa: great terminal emulator

Nov 21st

Posted by Pradeep Padala in Uncategorized

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What would I do without a terminal emulator ? God, I probably would kill myself :-) Most part of my research is done on powerful machines in a data center, which is not usually physically accessible. Most of the machines don’t even have a console attached to them. So, the only way to work on them is to connect using a ssh client. Now, you need a good terminal emulator that provides a rich terminal to work with instead of boring black-and-white terminals. On Linux, there’s no dearth of these. You have Konsole for KDE and Gnome Terminal on Gnome. Both are very powerful with a host of features. The most important/useful feature for me is the tabbed terminals. It’s almost impossible to work without tabs as I would need a Gazillion windows otherwise.

Now, working on Windows, I obviously want a powerful terminal emulator that supports ssh and provides tabs. Gosh ! I used to use SSH.com’s client or the minimalist Putty. Both are good, but are not powerful enough. Then I found Poderosa, a very nice program. See what I can do with it.

They go beyond tabs and allow you to divide the screen vertically and horizontally. How cool is that ? It’s very similar to the split windows in VI, which are very useful while looking at multiple pieces of code.

I am always happy when an application does all the things I want it to do. Cheers to Poderosa !

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HTML for my fellow non-cs bloggers

Nov 20th

Posted by Pradeep Padala in Tips

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Ok folks, you guys (AB, K …) write some interesting stuff, but you need to learn a little bit of formatting to help people read it with out straining their eyes. No offense, just a few simple things to learn to beautify your posts.

First, you should start using the “Edit Html” tab in Blogger instead of the “Compose” tab. At worst, you don’t use any HTML and it will look exactly the same as you are used to seeing.

HTML is a markup language. Think of it as writing a blob of text and then marking it with different colors/styles. So you write some text and then use tags to mark it up. For example, to bold some text, you would use <b> your text </b> and it will look like your text. Note that every tag has an ending tag and it’s a good practice to end every tag even though some tags don’t have ending tags.

Some commonly used tags while blogging.

Paragraphs: <p> </p>
Line break: <br />
Style:
  bold: <b> </b>
  italic: <i> </i>
  underline: <u> </u>
  colors: <font color="red"> </font>
Preformatted text: Usually used for verbatim listing <pre> </pre>
Quoting: <blockquote> </blockquote> Try this one, it's nice.
Lists: these are slightly complicated, so use the menu available
in the compose button to create them.

If you are writing large amounts of text, you can create headings of different sizes with <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> For example, H3 size heading looks like

A heading

That’s all for now, Blog away !!!

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