Remote Pair Programming

Posted by James Mead Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:48:22 GMT

A while ago, Chris mentioned that we’ve been trying out a few ideas for making remote pair-programming easier. We’ve been doing quite a bit more remote pairing recently. Most of the time we just use a combination of VNC (I’ve been using Vine Server) and voice over Skype (using a headset really helps).

But something else we’ve used successfully is multi-user GNU screen sessions. The advantage of this technique is that much less bandwidth is required and the terminal is much more responsive. I thought I’d post the magic incantation we’ve been using (on OSX), in case anyone else finds it useful…

  # on the server
  sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/screen

  # first user connects to server over ssh and runs the following
  screen -S <session_name>
  ctrl-A :multiuser on
  ctrl-A :acladd <client_username>

  # second user connects to server over ssh and runs the following
  screen -x <server_username>/<session_name>

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GMail Notifier - starred messages

Posted by James Mead Fri, 11 Aug 2006 07:03:00 GMT

Thanks to a tip from Paul and Chris, I’m using GMail to deal with messages from a number of high traffic mailing lists e.g. ruby-talk and ruby on rails.

I’m using the GMail Notifier on OSX to notify me of new messages. I have a number of filters set up to automatically star () potentially interesting posts and I wanted the Notifier to only tell me when I had new starred messages.

I found how to do this for labelled messages and tried it with the label name set to “starred”. Sure enough it works :-)

defaults write com.google.GmailNotifier Label -string "starred"

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