There is also a minimal Chrome extension called 'Video Speed Controller' that brings this functionality to all HTML5 videos with a bit more granularity. It's invaluable.
Wouldn't virtual machine basically do the same thing? I've taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured. Everything went smoothly.
However, Cloud9 is much more convenient since it runs entirely on browser but VM solution could work in case C9 discontinues its free tier.
>I've taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured.
My department tries this occasionally. It fails because students either have
a) cheap pieces of shit with unreasonably poor performance under virtualization (I'm talking multiple seconds to bring a different window to foreground under Ubuntu)
b) Retina MBPs, on which Linux has absolute garbage text rendering due to quarter-assed (half-assed is giving it too much credit) per-application support for high-DPI displays. Staring at code for hours is hard enough when the code isn't blurry.
The department runs a Linux lab in one of the libraries with professionally maintained Ubuntu installs that already have everything professors request for their courses, and provides SSH access to those machines.
An interesting side effect is that you either get good at configuring your environment for yourself (to use your own Mac or Linux machine) or you learn to work with just a terminal (use Emacs/Vim and Bash over SSH).
People forget the bit about poor performing machines. Developers with tech jobs often have high end machines provided to them. Many students do not, especially at public open-enrollment places. They come with whatever they have, despite recommendations from the program they enter.
This is also a reason that Cloud9 makes sense for us. The group I work with is focused on teaching programming to people who aren't traditionally represented in software development and sometimes they don't even have their own computers and have had to borrow a computer from a friend to do the work.
With Cloud9 they can develop on any computer they have access to, whether their's, a friend's, or even one at the public library. It is just one less barrier to being able to engage people.
I've run into the use case while traveling abroad where I don't have a computer (out of paranoia / lack of security).
Internet cafés are everywhere but setting up the perfect dev environment takes so long... so far it's made development fairly impractical, especially because they're often very old Windows machines. I've had good experiences with C9 so far, though I'd like to see how it pans out under that use case.
>setting up the perfect dev environment takes so long
It is a Not Unreasonable (TM) time investment to automate setting up your dev environment in the way you would a prod environment. emacs.d and other dotfiles in source control, masterless Puppet or Chef on your laptop, etc. If you're willing to go as far as installing Vagrant manually, the rest can be made pretty easy.
Those tech companies should also provide high end machines to developers. I'm glad the last two places I've worked provided high end MacBook pros but also allow devs to use their own machines so inevitably there are a couple of Linux and Windows folks.
Interesting that for me it was the startups that provided good machines while the enterprises provided 4 years old lenovo laptops with not so good batteries not the specs needed to use a VM effectively
Just got back from paternaty leave and got new MacBook pro. Not sure if got lucky or this will be common practice. I'm from the IBM corporation. So one should not generalize ;) P.S. I guess only people who get crappy HW complain and this creates the ilussion that all corporations give crappy HW.
I think that the future is having not one but many workspaces. If you review a MR? Start that workspace. Help someone with a question? Login to their workspace. In GitLab we want every issue and every commit to have an IDE button https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759
BTW congrats to the Cloud9 team. They made a great product and selling to Amazon will ensure it lives on.
Yes, we think this will be great with a container scheduler. The IDE, Review Apps, and Autoscaling CI runners are a great for a container scheduler. We're currently working on making GitLab run great on Mesosphere and RedHat OpenShift, and plan to add others after than.
Creating a C9 environment takes just a few seconds and once that's done I can work anywhere. It takes all of that setup away. I can create one at work to screw around with a Node module, go home and play with it more on my desktop, move to the couch and use my Macbook, go on the porch to smoke a cigarette and use my Chromebook... the only overhead is a browser tab.
Agreed. In a lot of my college courses, the professors provide a VM which is completely set up for development. That means that anyone who just wants to start programming can use the VM while everyone else who wants to setup their local environment can do that. I think it's a great solution.
I'm a lecturer myself and am curious: How do your lecturers deal with the situation that students have at least three different operating systems (LINUX, Mac, Windows)? Setting up a VM will make 2/3rds cringe in my experience - setting up three VMs is a lot of work.
We use VirtualBox in our courses since it's a single platform that runs on all 3 major operating systems. Chromebooks are still an issue, but few enough people have those that we can basically just classify them as unsupported. There's still some setup effort, especially on Windows machines that ship with hardware virtualization disabled at the BIOS level, but it's a much simpler way to get 1000+ students up and running quickly than trying to have everyone setup local dev environments.
I'd say that most students running Linux opt to install their own development environment so installing the VM for them really isn't an issue. Either way, it's much easier for the professor to spend a class showing people how to install VirtualBox, and then the class VM than showing them how to install an entire development environment locally.
Here's how it works: the professor prepares an Ubuntu VM with the entire development environment set up inside it, and then just provides the image link for the VM. The students can easily install VirtualBox, and then all they have to do is download the image and run off that.
unless I'm misunderstanding the question, I don't think this is going to be an issue.
I have VMs on an external hard drive that are accessible to me via Windows and Ubuntu (fairly sure I've accessed them on my MBP as well, not sure). I'm using VirtualBox, so I set up the initial connectivity stuff, point at the existing vhd, and then I'm running right along by launching the VM.
I like the vagrant-ish approach (just, not using Vagrant, shared folders are way finnicky in many different circumstances and it just really defeats the purpose of the tool if you aren't paying extra $$$ for the VMWare provider), personally. May not have been a classroom setting, but when I was training one of our new developers who had 0 Python or Linux experience (we're mostly a .Net shop, wasn't a hiring criteria) I had him install Fedora Server (CLI-only) in a VirtualBox VM. We then used the built-in deployment and remote execution / debug facilities in PyCharm Professional to test code inside a sane environment (because installing psycopg2 on Windows is not sane) while he was able to use his familiar desktop to actually do everything else, after setting deployment up it was pretty much transparent.
Where feasible, I think the "code locally, run remotely" concept works quite well, especially as most IDE's support at worst FTP upload.
Unless something has changed since last year, it is not truly "open source" if you're going by the Open Source Initiative's definition of "open source".
Evidently there are a number of restrictions placed on the source code that prevent this from being the case. There was a Reddit discussion about it at the time:
In my university we have been using remote VMs with a GUI (e.g. Windows) for more than 10 years. We need to this with several softwares due to license restrictions.
Looks really cool! Have you thought about adding multiplayer?
I really wish someone would do the same for Elma/Elastomania. I feel like it has much more funnier physics with it's elastic suspensions etc. Even the third party extension which added multiplayer support was amazing ten years back.
Btw, is this project still active? Last commit was nine months ago.
Yes of course I had multiplayer in mind the whole time. I even started a Rails application here for that purpose: https://github.com/michaelhoste/xmoto.io (it was more of a proof-of-concept)
But I'm afraid of the tweaking of the physics once the multiplayer game is started (and replays are created). Do I need to freeze them once-for-all and only work on supporting more levels or create an editor?
I still have plans for this project, but this is a side-project and like always, life happens and free time disappears...
EDIT : the work-in-progress is in fact in the "pixijs" branch, I almost finished the rendering engine switch to http://www.pixijs.com/ (higher level of abstraction, more cool 2D effects)
I don't get why updating your profile is associated to "looking for a job". For me it's good to have the profile in a good shape since it can create leads.
Yeah, I update my linkedin profile pretty constantly, as well as the resume on my website. I like to think this causes someone in HR conniptions on a regular basis.
This looks cool. I didn't try the examples but that receipt example is what I really need.
I keep track of how much money do I spend on what things by going through receipts collected over a month. While the information is useful it's too much manual work. I wish I could just scan or take a picture of my receipts and extract text for further processing.
You can try https://www.expensify.com/ .. they have a really nice App and they are nice people as well .. i read their startup story once and it was really interesting
HFCS article [0] on Wikipedia has a bit more detailed graph [0] about sugar usage in comparison with other sweeteners (high fructose corn syrup etc.) in the US.
